ch time at hard
outdoor labor as she has done over the washtub, will certainly succeed.
Her reward will be in independence, enough to eat all the time, and a
home of her own in the end.

This homesteader with her power of literary expression has given us
vivid pictures of the possibilities in the cabin life of the new
country. Her claim lies sixty miles from a railroad. There is no rural
delivery of mails, no doctor, no preacher. To the west the Rocky
Mountains lift great gorge-scarred masses of rock and to the east
stretch bad lands and desert and interminable uninhabited space. Her
"community" includes all the ranches for fifty miles around. And how
interesting are those neighbors! So good, so queer, so like folks! She
has brought Christmas cheer into every camp of sheep-herders within
reach. She is nurse and doctor to every sick woman. She has been
guardian angel to the lone rancher, Zebulun, finding his friends for him
"back home," and to a pair of abused young lovers, for whom she gave a
wedding dinner, providing the elegance of drawn-work paper napkins and
inviting the guests to wash dishes--a compliment that they did not in
the least consider a breach of decorum. She is community companion to
her neighbors in hours of joy and in hours of sorrow. A missionary could
scarcely ask for a more needy, a more vital or a more responsive
"field."

In the circle of her ministrations was found a young girl whom she calls
Cora Belle. This little person, half child, half grown woman, so
unconsciously brave, so pathetically buoyant, asking little of Fate and
receiving so little from the hand of that close-fisted autocrat--forms
an appealing figure and may be thought of as the typical young Country
Girl in the realm of the ranch and the cabin.

Cora Belle lived with her grandparents, two useless old people who drank
up each other's medicines just to save them, and frightfully neglected
the poor little granddaughter. The description of the child brings her
vividly before us. "She was a stout, square-built little figure with
long flaxen braids, a pair of beautiful brown eyes, and the longest and
whitest lashes you ever saw, a straight nose, a short upper lip, a broad
full forehead,--the whole face, neither pretty nor ugly, plentifully
sown with the brownest freckles."

The child did all the housework for her rheumatic and ignorant
grandparents and took care of the stock. From the big sheep men that
passed their way, she begge