and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes in to the town.

There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the the
potsherds.

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

(Written by Mr. White especially for this book.)

I was born in Emporia, Kansas, February 10, 1868, when Emporia was a
pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to
Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher
and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee
lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for
my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El
Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut,
a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and
spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the
large stone school house that "reared its awful form" on the hill above
the town before there were any two-story buildings in the place.

In 1884, I was graduated from the town high school, and went to the
College of Emporia for a year; worked a year as a printer's devil;
learned something