tions--all intensified our
interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some
degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie.

Our school-house did not change--except for the worse. No one thought of
adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard. Sun-smit, bare as a nose it
stood at the cross-roads, receiving us through its drab door-way as it
had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with
grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the
windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the
region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell"
and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The
plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the
wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the
effect of the bleak expanse.

My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in
our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen"
in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury--which is
pathetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room became suddenly and
happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag
carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw
to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-arranged the
furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved
shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure.

The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we
were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd
of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel
the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to
change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother
longed for a real "in-grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring
wagon. We got the wagon first.

That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment.
The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted sitting room with its two
chromos of _Wide Awake_ and _Fast Asleep_--its steel engraving of
General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner--all these come back
to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are
piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all
things political. It was not a hovel, it was