ured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we
seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took
excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an
enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little
Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.

As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can
grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea.
We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from
the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste
themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my
face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class
in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of
sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in
the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to
the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am
lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at
the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see
Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber
voice....

It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under
gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury,
watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the
scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New
England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last
into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art,
of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my
people in the West.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a
Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the
picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to
cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not
appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a
song already sung.

When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a
hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea
reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the
_Wayside Inn_ of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich
with its memories of great men and noble women, had no dir