lure. My father caught him
despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
exulted.

Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and
so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
aching bones, and there I joined him.

"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
dreamed about a million times."

Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over
him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for
"hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."

That was a mystic hour--and yet how little I can recover of it! The
afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we
all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask
about the crops, the neighbors.--The sunlight passes. Mother leads the
way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his
arms.

He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into
my remembrance. He is my father--that I feel ringing through the dim
halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is
pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
the marches he had made.

The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much
of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my
infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the
fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to
linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most
fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
settlement.

The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of
warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am
quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and
fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate.

The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am
cradled in the lap