to live--there comes the reality av the words your Aunt Candace
taught us years ago in the little school:

"'Though I walk through the valley av the shadow av death, I will fear
no evil.'

"I called for you, Phil, in my misery, as' I know'd somehow you'd hear
me. An' you did come."

His thin hand closed over mine, and we sat long in silence--two boys
whom the hand of Providence was leading into strange, hard lines,
shaping us each for the work the years of our manhood were waiting to
bring to us.

CHAPTER XI

GOLDEN DAYS

There are days that are kind
As a mother to man, showing pathways that wind
Out and in, like a dream, by some stream of delight;
Never hinting of aught that they hold to affright;
Only luring us on, since the way must be trod,
Over meadows of green with their velvety sod,
To the steeps, that are harder to climb, far before.
There are nights so enchanting, they seem to restore
The original beauty of Eden; so tender,
They woo every soul to a willing surrender
Of feverish longing; so holy withal,
That a broad benediction seems sweetly to fall
On the world.

We were a busy folk in those years that followed the close of the war.
The prairies were boundless, and the constant line of movers' wagons
reaching out endlessly on the old trail, with fathers and mothers and
children, children, children, like the ghosts of Banquo's lineal issue
to King Macbeth, seemed numerous enough to people the world and put to
the plough every foot of the virgin soil of the beautiful Plains. With
the downfall of slavery the strife for commercial supremacy began in
earnest here, and there are no idle days in Kansas.

When I returned home after two years' schooling in Massachusetts, I
found many changes. I had beaten my bars like a caged thing all those
two years. Rockport, where I made my home and spent much of my time,
was so unlike Springvale, so wofully and pridefully ignorant of all
Kansas, so unable to get any notion of my beautiful prairies and of the
free-spirited, cultured folk I knew there, that I suffered out my time
there and was let off a little early for good behavior. Only one person
did I know who had any real interest in my West, a tall, dark-eyed,
haughty young lady, to whom I talked of Kansas by the hour. Her mother,
who was officiously courteous to me, didn't approve of that subject, but
the daughter listened eagerly.

When I left Rockport, Rachel--that was her n