we were passing a clump of wild roses, he asked me to
stop and cut some of them. "Your mother was fond of wild roses," he
said, "I'd like to put a handful on her grave."

The penetrating odor of those exquisite blooms brought to my mind vistas
of the glorious sunlit, odorous prairies of Iowa, and to gather and put
into his hand a spray of them, was like taking part in a poem--a
poignant threnody of age, for he received them in silence, and held them
with tender care, his mind far away in the past.

Silently we entered the gate of the burial ground, and slowly approached
the mound under which my mother's body rested, and as I studied the thin
form and bending head of my intrepid sire, I realized that he was in
very truth treading the edge of his own grave. My eyes grew dim with
tears and my throat ached with a sense of impending loss, and a pity for
him which I could conceal only by looking away at the hills.

Nevertheless, he was calmer than I. "Here is where I want to lie," he
said quietly and stooping, softly spread his sprays of roses above the
mound. "She loved all the prairie flowers," he said, "but she specially
liked wild roses. I always used to bring them to her from the fields. We
had oceans of them in Dakota in those days."

It was a commonplace little burial ground with a few trees and here and
there a bed of lilies or phlox, yet it had charm. It was a sunny and
friendly place, a silent acre whose name and history went back to the
beginning of the first white settlement in the valley. On its monuments
were chiseled the familiar names of pioneers, and it was characteristic
of the time and deeply characteristic of the McClintocks, to be told, by
my father, that in some way the exact location of my grandmother's grave
had been lost and that no stone marked the spot where my grandfather was
buried.

We wandered around among the graves for half an hour while Father spoke
of the men and women whose names were on the low and leaning stones.
"They were American," he said. "These German neighbors of ours are all
right in their way, but it isn't our way. They are good citizens as far
as they know how to be, but they don't think in our words. Soon there
won't be any of the old families left. My world is just about gone, and
so I don't mind going myself, only I want to go quick. I don't want to
be bedridden for months as Vance McKinley was. If I could have my wish,
I'd go out like a candle in a puff of wind,--and I b