r.
Then, when all was ready, he tiptoed through the sand to where she lay
under the spreading arms of a little desert juniper, such as are
occasionally found in the deserts, and where she had said the night
before she wished she could sleep forever. She looked so calm and
restful he hesitated to wake her; it seemed like robbery to take from
her one moment of the longed-for and hard-earned rest. Yet it was time
they were on their road, and the day was fine; so after a few minutes
he called, gently, "Mother, you're getting a nice rest, aren't you?"

She did not stir. He then stooped to kiss the languid lips--they were
cold. She was dead. They had been seeking a home by the shores of the
sunset sea; she had found the sunrise land.

It is a sad, solemn, and sacred thing to be with our dead, but to be
alone, hundreds of miles from the face of any friend, in such an hour,
is an experience few ever have to meet. Pioneer-like, the father scans
the horizon, locating all the prominent features of the landscape. He
makes a rude map, not forgetting the juniper. As best he can he
prepares the body for the burying. And such a burying! No lumber with
which to make even a rough box; nothing but their daily clothing and
nightly bedding was to be had. The unlined grave was more than usually
forbidding. The desert demon had trailed that brave body and was now
swallowing it up. They made the grave by the juniper where she last
slept, and, sorrowing, the father and the son went on, firm in the
resolve that the loved one should not always lie in a desert grave.

Forty years later a man past middle-age, riding a horse and leading
another, to whose packsaddle was fastened a box, went slowly along
that old trail in Southern Idaho, now almost obliterated by
many-footed Progress. He was scanning the hills and consulting a piece
of age-yellowed paper, broken at all its ancient creases. It was the
son obeying the dying request of the old father--going to find, if
possible, the spot where the tired mother went to sleep so long ago,
and bring all that remained to rest by his side.

It was no easy task. Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now
presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like
younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general
direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting
the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush--these all
conspired to make the task next to i