no intention at that
time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud
and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.

I sent "The Corn Husking" to the _New American Magazine_, and almost by
return mail the editor, William Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to
the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that
it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read
anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up
this article by others of the same nature."

It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon
other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them
gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly--but I did not blame him
for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.

It must have been about this time that I sold to _Harper's Weekly_ a
long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of
twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for
magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and
the _Memoirs of General Grant_ for my father, with intent to suitably
record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in
her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon
after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes
and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her
lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!

CHAPTER XXVIII

A Visit to the West

At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent
from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself
able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those
of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one
hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the
close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old
home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I
took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way
from buying a berth in a sleeping car.

To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply
and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for
familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level
lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest
treatment of t