ling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged
with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the corn
husking. I sat again before her parlour organ, fumbling the scales with
my stiff, red fingers, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for the
huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady for a visitor, I set out
for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding
my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not
until I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me.
She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become
black with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey.
When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once
and I did not see her again until the next morning.

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she
considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figure
with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
have left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or their
health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled
the callow fancy of my uncle, Howard Carpenter, then an idle, shiftless
boy of twenty-one. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
followed her, and the upshot of this infatuation was that she eloped with
him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her
friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of
course, had no money, took up a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty
miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their land
themselves, driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which
they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting its revolutions.
They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings
whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they
got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty
years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
bo