ed for him--a Nancyville perhaps or a Linkhorn
County. She knew about Daniel Boone, for her grandfather Hanks had been
with him.... And there had been other dreams, older dreams, dating far
back to the days when she was a little girl with eyes like a brown owl.
Someone had told her fairy-tales about princesses and knights,
strange beings which she never quite understood, but of which she made
marvellous pictures in her head She had learned to read in order to
follow up the doings of those queer bright folk, but she had never
tracked them down again. But one book she had got called The
Pilgrim's Progress, printed by missionaries in a far-away city called
Philadelphia, which told of things as marvellous, and had pictures,
too--one especially of a young man covered with tin, which she supposed
was what they called armour. And there was another called The Arabian
Knights, a close-printed thing difficult to read by the winter fire,
full of wilder doings than any she could imagine for herself; but
beautiful, too, and delicious to muse over, though Tom, when she read a
chapter to him, had condemned it as a pack of lies.... Clearly there
was a world somewhere, perhaps outside America altogether, far more
wonderful than even the magnificence of Colonel Hardin. Once she had
hoped to find it herself; then that her children should find it. And
the end was this shack in the wilderness, a few acres of rotting crops,
bitter starving winters, summers of fever, the deeps of poverty, a
penniless futureless family, and for herself a coffin of green lumber
and a yard or two of stony soil.

She saw everything now with the clear unrelenting eyes of childhood.
The films she had woven for selfprotection were blown aside. She was
dying--she had often wondered how she should feel when dying--humble and
trustful, she had hoped, for she was religious after a fashion, and had
dreamed herself into an affection for a kind fatherly God. But now all
that had gone. She was bitter, like one defrauded She had been promised
something, and had struggled on in the assurance of it. And the result
was nothing--nothing. Tragic tears filled her eyes. She had been so
hungry' and there was to be no satisfying that hunger this side the
grave or beyond it. She was going the same way as Betsy Sparrow, a death
like a cow's, with nothing to show for life, nothing to leave. Betsy had
been a poor crushed creature, and had looked for no more. But she was
different. She ha