t
voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to
grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother
and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave
but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of
fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play,"
they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy
days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter.

Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot
entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in
my mind. _Prue and I_ and _The Blithedale Romance_ were on an equal
footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens
were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted
beings found only in the East--in splendid cities. They were not folks,
they were demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down
benignantly on toiling common creatures like us.

It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance
meet an author, or even hear one lecture--although it was said that they
did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they
sometimes reached our county town.

I am told--I do not know that it is true--that I am one of the names on
a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that
small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular
pack!

The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices
were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on
grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the
men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own
stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had
planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd
moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season.
Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened
the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's
dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it
increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the
harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework
herself--cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from
time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain,
and I ha