till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood
they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn
and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to
their fellows driving by high overhead. At times their cries halted the
flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix
indistinguishably with the captive birds.

The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their
pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had
happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their
fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their
freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on
the lakes of the far north.

Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Norwegians to assist in
clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak
a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the
granary but this did not prevent them from communicating to our
house-maid a virulent case of smallpox. Several days passed before my
mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified
her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in
Wisconsin, and knew its danger.

It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my
mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be
nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease and took to his
bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited
upon her more punishment than belonged to her, for to add the final
touch, in the midst of all her other afflictions she was expecting the
birth of another child.

I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the
neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend,
hardly an acquaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy.
Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge
here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into
our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their
horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate.

Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon
my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing
her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my
bed, realizing with childish,