," he said to me, one morning, "and I think
it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks."

"I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back
at all if I am needed here."

"Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening
for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is
here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that
she will insist on your going on with your work."

Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others.

The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless
farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already
calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age.
Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse
header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at
myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man."

I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the
majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not
conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister
and my aging mother.

"Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation,
father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no
protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the
house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie
lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to
'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and
McClintocks seem a madness?"

Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days
in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of
Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees.

"Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said.

But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still
resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will
surely bring a crop."

In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was
able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter
insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient
corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and
wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful
picture of bravery,