ght of the sky and
the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of
the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way
enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed
home.

Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring,
much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way.
My duties and my pleasures were those of the boys around me. In all
essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was
counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the
same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or
stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure
democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all
who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in
all the social affairs of the township we fully shared.

Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive
transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea
of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return
to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects
whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by,
lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary
feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into
the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone
quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cow-bell's
steady clang tells of the homecoming herd.

Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred
light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, we still could fall
a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky.

CHAPTER XVI

We Move to Town

One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home
from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with
the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to
become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do
it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being
completed in Osage," he said.

The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an
end not merely to our further pioneering but, (as the plan developed)
promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a
town world where circuse