She watched her own conversation to see that she did
not say "have went" and "those kind"; she became observant of the state of
her finger-nails; if she had to lace her shoes with twine string, she
blackened the string with soot from the under side of the stove lids, and
polished her shoes from the same source.

Mrs. Farnshaw, broken with the cold, the privations of the long winter,
and the growing disappointments of her domestic life, saw nothing but
overdressing and foolishness in her daughter's new attention to the
details of personal appearance. Burdened with her inability to furnish the
clothes the family needed, she complained monotonously over every evidence
of the young girl's desire to beautify herself. When the mother's
complaints became unendurable, the father usually growled out a stern,
"Let the child alone," but for the most part the growing girl lived a life
apart from her family, thought along different lines, and built about the
future a wall they could never climb, and over whose rim they would
rarely, if ever, catch a glimpse of the world within. No life, however
hard, could ever tame that spirit, or grind its owner into an alien groove
after that year of imaginative castle building.

CHAPTER II

BRUSHING UP TO GO TO TOPEKA

With the opening of spring and the coming of the young grass, the handful
of cattle that had not died of starvation began to look healthier. A
shipment of seed corn for planting, and even a stinted amount for feed,
had been sent from the East in March. But for that donation even the work
horses must have succumbed. Josiah Farnshaw had the best horses in the
country and was suspected of having had far more help than he had really
received. The two teams he had favoured all winter against the seeding
season were the envy of all. Some of the old neighbours, after a winter
spent with the wife's relatives in the East, had decided to return and
take the chances of the grasshopper-ridden Middle West, and had come with
horses able to drag the plow, but, worn from travel, most of them were
practically useless.

There was a lull after the small grain was in the ground. The menacing
eggs of the grasshoppers began to hatch as the sun warmed the earth. It
was a period of intense anxiety. So many months had been spent in
alternate intervals of hope and fear that now, since the test was actually
and immediately to be made, the tension was terrific. Men rose as soon as
the first ligh