rowful,
that I shut myself in my study and began a little tribute to her, a
sketch which I called _The Wife of a Pioneer_. Into this I poured the
love I had felt but failed to express as fully as I should have done
while she was alive. To make this her memorial was my definite purpose.

As I went on I found myself deep in her life on the farm in Iowa, and
the cheerful heroism of her daily treadmill came back to me with such
appeal that I could scarcely see the words in which I was recording her
history. Visioning the long years of her drudgery, I recalled her early
rising, and suffered with her the never-ending round of dish-washing,
churning, sewing, and cooking, realizing more fully than ever before
that in all of this slavery she was but one of a million martyrs. All
our neighbors' wives walked the same round. On such as they rests the
heavier part of the home and city building in the West. The wives of the
farm are the unnamed, unrewarded heroines of the border.

For nearly a week I lingered upon this writing, and having completed it
I was moved to print it, in order that it might remind some other son of
his duty to his ageing parents sitting in the light of their lonely
hearth, and in doing this I again vaguely forecast the composition of an
autobiographic manuscript--one which should embody minutely and simply
the homely daily toil of my father's family, although I could not, at
the moment, define the precise form into which the story would fall.

The completion of the memorial to my mother eased my heart of its bitter
self-accusation, and a little later I returned to my accustomed routine,
realizing that in my wife now lay my present incentive and my future
support. She became the center of my world. In her rested my hope of
happiness. My mother was a memory.

To remain longer in the old home was painful, for to me everything
suggested the one for whom it had been established. The piano I had
bought for her, the chair in which she had loved to sit, her spectacles
on the stand--all these mute witnesses of her absence benumbed me as I
walked about her room. Only in my work-shop was I able to find even
momentary relief from my sense of irreparable and eternal loss.

Father, as though bewildered by the sudden change in his life, turned to
Zulime with a pathetic weakness which she met with a daughter's tender
patience and a woman's intuitive understanding. He talked to her of his
first meeting with "Belle" and hi