o see how bad it was," he explained.

Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to
it till you find how it turns out."

Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him
rather better after this sign of weakness.

It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these
easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach,
even the copy of _Paradise Lost_ which my mother presented to me on my
fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable
joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me
and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such
vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the
plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was
glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator.

The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my
world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the
cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the
buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a
little less barren and ugly. And yet with all these growing signs of
prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of
the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating
ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes,
all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint
grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch.
Settlement was complete.

CHAPTER XVII

A Taste of Village Life

The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so
complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several
cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at
the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only
continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once
planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.
The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds
sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped
even in the city.

Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our
dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new
surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to
be able to go to the store