will be covered with
homes. Every quarter-section will hold a house, and there will be
chimneys in sight in every direction. Churches and better schools will
follow. The roads will be planted with trees. There will be fences about
the fields, and no Indians to thieve and kill. And this valley, the
'Jim,' or the Missouri, will not be the edge of civilization, for the
frontier will have moved far to the west.

"And yet, though I can see it all coming, I am not willing for you to
wait for it and spend your young womanhood here. One woman in a family
is enough to sacrifice to the suffering and drudgery of frontier life.
So I want you to go East, to go where the sweetest and best influences
can reach you. The prairie has given you health. It has never given you
happiness. Your life, like that of every other child on the plains, has
had few joys and many little tragedies. They say the city child ages
fast; but do they ever think of the wearing sameness and starving of
heart that puts years on the country child? Ah! those who are born and
bred on the edge of things give more than the work of their hands to the
country's building."

They sat in silence a long time, their hands clasped. Then the little
girl kissed her mother softly. "I want to go, mother," she said, with
shining eyes. "I want to go away to school, and you must go with me."

Her mother did not answer for a moment.

"'I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,'" she breathed at last. And
not till long afterward, when tears had worn the first keen edge from
her grief, did the little girl know the full meaning of the promise.

"Pull back the curtains from the eastern windows," said her mother; "I
want to see the sky. Is the night clear?"

"The stars are out, mother."

"Ah, I love the stars!"

"Are they the same ones that I'll see when--when--I'm away from here?"

"The very same, pet lamb."

"You and I will watch them and think of that, mother."

The neighbor woman turned on the lounge, and they fell into silence
again. The little girl remained standing at a window, her face pressed
close to the glass.

As she waited there, the whole east began gradually to spring into
flame. The sky blazed as ruddily as if a great fire were just beyond the
horizon and racing to leap it and sweep across upon the farm. A broad
fan of light, roseate at its pivot and radiating in shafts of yellow
and red, was rising and paling the stars with its shining edge. Wider
and w