still able to walk about, was
spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk
concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to
our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said
sadly--then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord
will bring us all together again."

We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me
what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered,
"except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."

"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away.
I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."

This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in
a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time--scarcely of my country.
He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when
the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure
and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of
"the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."

He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His
valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my
ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,--notions which came
down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character
had lost something of its mellow charm--but it had gained in dramatic
significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish
world.

I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on
the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had
idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my
boyhood--"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful
they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed
criticism.

The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled"
community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred
miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were
the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering
before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all
seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in
my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my
boyish memories.

I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a