ace as I peer back into
those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She
seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a
handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype
of the time am I able to correct this childish impression.

Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little
valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western
Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which
crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge
to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to
the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their
hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on
their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading
point.

Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking--but then
we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor,
and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother
often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks)
and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed
very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and
lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same
matter-of-fact fashion.

Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched Frank and me
bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between
themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head
and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work--good!" and we
were very proud of the old man's praise.

CHAPTER II

The McClintocks

The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home
during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental
pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65. Their names
were familiar--were, indeed, like bits of old-fashioned song. "Richard"
was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah"
and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested something alien as well
as poetic.

They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the
east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in
that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored
distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I