well to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.
The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it.
I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I
heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future
was wide and wan.

From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand
wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the
hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on
grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small
feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these
hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in
response to some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out
for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small
wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while
these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye.

She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling
face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to
every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No
woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles
had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed
the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing,
bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of
the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the
sunny sweetness of her creed.

One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed
her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became
too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it--out into the
fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should
mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away
to a strange land?"

* * * * *

I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods,
for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to
be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like
pioneering.

Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter
of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had
said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask
nothing furt