ader and a party of Dacotahs came to the
village, she had heard her father say, to sell their skins, bringing a
brown little boy with them; that the child fell sick with scarlet fever,
and they left him to the mercy of the village people, and never came
back for him, although they had said they would.

Did Luella give her boy away?--Never, I was convinced, and Saul
likewise.

Saul went back into his round of professional duties, and with much
heart for a while.

Delighted with civilization, and peopled with memories, and joyous with
the divine plumage ever hovering around me, my life ran on. I watched
Saul narrowly. He would often take up his hat, after hours of
application to science, and rush out of the house, as if a mission lay
before him. He would come back, and devote himself to me, as if he were
conscious of some neglect in his absence. I planned short excursions all
over the adjacent country. I became addicted to angling, because I saw
Saul liked it. There were many righteous eyeballs that reproved me
for wandering in places not fit for a woman, and Aunt Carter became
exceedingly disturbed, even to the point of remonstrance.

"You're spoiling your husband," she would say,--"he'll not know but what
you are a squaw," she said to me one day, in true distress.

However, I endured it delightfully for three years. Saul received in one
week four letters, each containing the offer of a professor's chair in a
desirable institution.

For many months I had seen the spell weaving around my good husband;
I had seen it flash out of his eyes; I had heard its undertone in his
voice; I had felt it in his whole manner, and I knew the hour of battle
was near.

I was strong, and I came to the rescue. It was on this wise. Hearken! is
he coming? No, it is only the wind coming up the Big Blue.

We sat in our Skylight door in an April evening,--unwise, perhaps,--but
we were there. Saul had taken down that wild warble of Longfellow's,
"Hiawatha." He read to me until the moon came up; then he threw down the
book, and said, "Pshaw!"

"What is that for, Saul?" I asked, in some surprise.

"It is not for the book,--for myself, Lucy. I had better not have opened
it Let us go and talk with the Doctor." And we went.

Saul had not answered his letters on the chair question, and I put up a
petition.

"I think I never felt so well as when I was in Kansas," I said. "Really,
Saul, I've felt a strong inclination to cough for some time,