refused it.

Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to
permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized
a "tour." We booked a circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell,
two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as
this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day
Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove
away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moliere did in
his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired
buggies) later in the day.

That night we played with "artistic success"--that is to say, we lost
some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it
abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in
diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again
took part in a theatrical performance.

Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered
upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man
vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she
did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never
saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I
was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London.
Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with
what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she
was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes
shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness.

Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the
prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within
us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it
meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the
surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields.

It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they
were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There
were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate
in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon
the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting,
stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to
town to cheer us.

It would seem that our interest i