e toe-head. if i catch em right i will
fix their heads. They is one girl who i like she is from pipestone
she dont know no moren i do she says my dress is pritty--ol nig an
the drake all rite i wish i was home. ELGA.

The wish to be home was in all these letters like a sob. The men read
them over carefully and gravely, and finally Anson would put them away
in the Bible (bought on Flaxen's account) for safe-keeping.

As the letters improved in form their exultation increased.

"Say, Bert, don't you notice she writes better now? She makes big I's
now in place o' little ones. Seems 's if she runs the sentence all
together, though."

"She'll come out all right. You see, she goes into the preparatory
department, where they teach writin' an' spellin'. You'll see her hand
improve right along now."

And it did, and she ceased to wail for home and ceased to say that she
hated her studies.

"I am getting along splendid," she wrote some weeks after this. "I like
my teacher; her name is Holt. She is just as nice as she can be. She is
cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go
to soshibles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant. I am feeling
pretty good, but I wish you boys was here."

She did not wish to be at home this time!

Winter shut down on the broad land again with that implacable,
remorseless brilliancy of fierce cold which characterises the northern
plain, stopping work on the farm and bolting all doors. Hardly a day
that the sun did not shine; but the light was hard, white, glittering,
and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless. There was
now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest
storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation
almost as terrible as that of a ship wedged amid the ice-floes of the
polar regions.

Day after day rising to feed the cattle, night after night bending over
the sooty stove listening to the ceaseless voice of the wind as it beat
and brushed, whispered, moaned, and piped or screamed around the
windows and eaves--this was their life, varied with an occasional visit
to the store or the post-office, or by the call of a neighbour. It is
easy to conceive that Flaxen's bright letters were like bursts of
bird-song in their loneliness. Many of the young men, their neighbours,
went back East to spend the winter--back to Michigan, Iowa, New York,
or elsewhere.

"Ans, why don't you go bac