hile--to have Bob there, sending
back money for the company. I don't know what father would do if it
wasn't for the company--and John."

The daughter held her mother's hand, and after gasping down a sob,
promised, and then as the sob kept tilting back in her throat, she
cried: "But oh, mother, it's such a big world--so wide, and I am so
afraid--so afraid of something--I don't know what--only that I'm
afraid."

But the mother soothed her daughter, and they talked of other things
until she was quiet and drowsy.

But when she went to sleep, she dreamed a strange dream. The next day
she could not untangle it, save that with her for hours as she went
about her duties was the odour of lilacs, and the face of her lover,
now a young eager face in pain, and then, by the miracle of dreams,
grown old, bald at the temples and brow, but fine and strong and
clean--like a boy's face. The face soon left her, but the smell of
the lilacs was in her heart for days--they were her lilacs, from the
bushes in the garden. As days and weeks passed, the dream blurred into
the gray of her humdrum life and was gone. And so that day and that
night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the
millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the
wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as
they lay on their pillows and dreamed. For if our waking hours are
passed in worlds so wide apart, who shall know where we walk in
dreams?

It is thirty years and more now since John Barclay dreamed of himself
as the Wheat King of the Sycamore Valley, and in that thirty years he
had considerable time to reflect upon the reasons why pride always
goeth before destruction. And he figured it out that in his particular
case he was so deeply engrossed in the money he was going to make that
first year, that he did not study the simple problem of wheat-growing
as he should have studied it. In those days wheat-growing upon the
plains had not yet become the science it is to-day, and many Sycamore
Valley farmers planted their wheat in the fall, and failed to make it
pay, and many other Sycamore Valley farmers planted their wheat in the
spring, and failed, while many others succeeded. The land had not been
definitely staked off and set apart by experience as a winter wheat
country, and so the farmers operating under the Golden Belt Wheat
Company, in the spring of 1874, planted their wheat in March.

That was a beautiful seaso