nce she lived with me, her poor
fool Jesse. To-day, I unlocked the door. The sunlight, glinting through
chinks in the boarded windows, fell in long dust-streaks on rat-eaten
furniture, gray cobweb, scattered ashes. There was the puppy piano,
green with mold, her work-basket, half eaten, her writing-table littered
with rat-gnawed paper. The pages are yellow, the ink is rusty brown, but
the past is alive in every line, the living past, the sunny
warm-scented land of memory, all full of love and glory and delight, and
agony which can not be taken from me.

If she were here with me in the old log cabin, she should not see me
mourning, or afraid to face the past, or dreading to set an end to our
book. She expected courage, and I will face it out, write the last
chapter in our Book of Life, then bury it all, lest any one should see.
I warm and burn my hands at the fires of memory, and if the fine sweet
pain were taken from me, what should I have left but cobweb, and ashes,
dust, and the smell of rats.

How wonderful it is to think that a great lady, and this ignorant
callous brute shown up in the rotted manuscript, should ever have been
man and wife together! When I think of what I was--illiterate, slovenly,
lazy, selfish, brutal, meanly jealous, ignorantly cruel, I see how it
was right that she should leave me. It has taken me bitter lonely years
to realize that I was unworthy to be her servant while she tamed me. So
much the greater mystery is the love which made amends for my
shortcomings, made her think me better than I was, a something for which
she sacrificed herself, and in self-sacrifice became like the great
angels which she saw in dreams.

Then came the letter from Polly herself, which sent me crazy, so that my
lady read every word of it, without being warned.

"Opium, Jesse, an overdose of opium did the trick, and paint to
make me look like a corpse, and blood from the butcher's shop
poured over my face as I laid there. You was no husband for such as
me with Brooke around, the man I'd kept. Shucks, did ye think I'd
be such a puke as to set, with yer dead-line round me, screaming if
men came near, with all Abilene grinning, and you drunk as Noah?
That was no way to treat a lady. That was no cinch for me as could
buy cow-boys, all I'd a mind to. Pshaw, it makes me sick at the
stummick to think I married you. I only done it for a joke.

"But you jest mark my words