dared to make their homes in the lowlands. Black Kettle in the sheltered
Washita Valley might never have fallen before General Custer had the
Cheyennes kept to the high places after the custom of their fathers. But
the early white settlers had firearms and skill in building
block-houses, so they took to the valleys near wood and water.

On the day that Kansas became a Territory, my father, John Baronet, with
all his household effects started from Rockport, Massachusetts, to begin
life anew in the wild unknown West. He was not a poor man, heaven bless
his memory! He never knew want except the pinch of pioneer life when
money is of no avail because the necessities are out of reach. In the
East he had been a successful lawyer and his success followed him. They
will tell you in Springvale to-day that "if Judge Baronet were alive and
on the bench things would go vastly better," and much more to like
effect.

My mother was young and beautiful, and to her the world was full of
beauty. Especially did she love the sea. All her life was spent beside
it, and it was ever her delight. It must have been from her that my own
love of nature came as a heritage to me, giving me capacity to take and
keep those prairie scenes of idyllic beauty that fill my memory now.

In the Summer of 1853 my father's maiden sister Candace had come to live
with us. Candace Baronet was the living refutation of all the unkind
criticism ever heaped upon old maids. She was a strong, comely,
unselfish woman who lived where the best thoughts grow.

One day in late October, a sudden squall drove landward, capsizing the
dory in which my mother was returning from a visit to old friends on an
island off the Rockport coast. She was in sight of home when that
furious gust of wind and rain swept across her path. The next morning
the little waves rippled musically against the beach whither they had
borne my dead mother and left her without one mark of cruel usage.
Neither was there any sign of terror on her face, white and peaceful
under her damp dark hair.

I know now that my father and his sister tried hard to suppress their
sorrow for my sake, but the curtains on the seaward side of the house
were always lowered now and my father's face looked more and more to the
westward. The sea became an unbearable thing to him. Yet he was a brave,
unselfish man and in all the years following that one Winter he lived
cheerfully and nobly--a sunshiny life.

In the early Sp