a tree that would grow so swiftly that the wind
could have no effect upon it. He had planted slim switches of one kind
after another and the wind had blown each to leaflessness, until now
there stood a slim row of cottonwoods that he had tried as a last
resort, but the same thing would happen to them, perhaps. He had lost
faith in trees. But he would not say yet that he had lost faith in
God.

He watched the same train trailing so far away as to seem a toy train
and longed as she had done to take it and go back home.

At last he understood the look in her eyes as she watched it and the
thoughts that enthralled her.

Sometimes when we strive for a thing and set our hearts on it, it
holds itself aloof from us. When we cease to strive, it comes.

But that is among the many strange ways of Providence which seems to
rule us blindly, but which is not so blind, perhaps, after all, as it
seems.

Another of its ways most incomprehensible is to bring us what we have
longed for a little too late sometimes.

But this is the story of Seth, and this is the way of its happening:

It was early in a mild and beautiful spring when the corn was young.
It stood shoulder high, lusty and strong and green. What with the
unwonted mildness of the weather and the absence of the usual storms
and the proneness of the clouds to deposit themselves about in gentle
showers, the crop promised fair to rival any crop that Seth had ever
raised on the Kansas prairies.

He hoed and toiled and smiled and listened to the rustling of the
corn, for he had made up his mind.

When the harvest was at an end he would sell the crop and the place
for what it would bring, and go back home. He would go back to his
wife and home!

The rustling of the corn was music in his ears. It was more. It was
like the glad hand of young Love; for with the crops so fine and the
harvest so rich, when he went back home to her, he would not go
empty-handed and unwelcome.

He was going back once more to his Kentucky home.

No hills seemed so green as those Kentucky hills and no skies so blue
as those skies that vaulted above the green, green hills of his native
land.

It had been longer than he cared to count since he had seen the blue
grass waving about in the wind there, not such wind as swept the
Kansas prairies, but gentle zephyrs almost breathless that rustled
softly and musically through the little blades of grass just as the
wind was rustling through the stalks