ring he gave up his law practice in Rockport.

"The place for me is on the frontier," he said to my Aunt Candace one
day. "I'm sick of the sight of that water. I want to try the prairies
and I want to be in the struggle that is beginning beyond the Missouri.
I want to do one man's part in the making of the West."

Aunt Candace looked steadily into her brother's face.

"I am sick of the sea, too, John," she said. "Will the prairies be
kinder to us, I wonder."

I did not know till long afterward, when the Kansas blue-grass had
covered both their graves, that the blue Atlantic had in its keeping the
form of the one love of my aunt's life. Rich am I, Philip Baronet, to
have had such a father and such a mother-hearted aunt. They made life
full and happy for me with never from that day any doleful grieving over
the portion Providence had given them. And the blessed prairie did bring
them peace. Its spell was like a benediction on their lives who lived to
bless many lives.

It was late June when our covered wagon and tired ox-team stopped on the
east bluff above the Neosho just outside of Springvale. The sun was
dropping behind the prairie far across the river valley when another
wagon and ox-team with pioneers like ourselves joined us. They were
Irving Whately and his wife and little daughter, Marjory. I was only
seven and I have forgotten many things of these later years, but I'll
never forget Marjie as I first saw her. She was stiff from long sitting
in the big covered wagon, and she stretched her pudgy little legs to get
the cramp out of them, as she took in the scene. Her pink sun-bonnet had
fallen back and she was holding it by both strings in one hand. Her
rough brown hair was all in little blowsy ringlets round her face and
the two braids hanging in front of her shoulders ended each in a big
blowsy curl. Her eyes were as brown as her hair. But what I noted then
and many a time afterward was the exceeding whiteness of her face. From
St. Louis I had seen nothing but dark-skinned Mexicans, tanned
Missourians, and Indian, Creole, and French Canadian, all coppery or
bronze brown, in this land of glaring sunshine. Marjie made me think of
Rockport and the pink-cheeked children of the country lanes about the
town. But most of all she called my mother back, white and beautiful as
she looked in her last peaceful sleep, the day the sea gave her to us
again. "Star Face," Jean Pahusca used to call Marjie, for even in the
Kansa