and keep going till we find you
a school."

"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've
played the grasshopper for a few weeks--from this time on I'm the busy
ant."

So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and
toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and
when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on
my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's
sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return
of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the
train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I
should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and
paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.

Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to
school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man
in the song, _Twenty Years Ago_--indeed I sang, "I've wandered through
the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first
night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor
of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the
little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained
unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone!
In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I
used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed
into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and
although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did
not speak.

Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills,
the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the
turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained,
the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious,
less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless,
and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue
shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.

Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill,
back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I
remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the
rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western
Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock,