especial power to
my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight
of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs,
syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further
evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had
lavished upon it.

As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered
beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me
content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular
cottage growing into something fine and sweet and--our own!

There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out
upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose
sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my
subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as
we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple
bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle
to the west, my decision came.

"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be
the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"

"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.

"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here
for our Thanksgiving dinner."

Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a
date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were
we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a
dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and
McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I
let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.

The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very
unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very
truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the
beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous.
To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden
West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with
whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of
failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the
spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to
them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for
a boom.

Early in