e should be disloyal
to her father. To her disordered fancy the universe seemed to be a
wheel. The sun and the stars came up and went down over the monotonous
sea of grass with frightful regularity, and she could not tell whether
there was a God or not. When she thought of God at all, it was as a
relentless giant turning the crank that kept the sky going round. The
universe was an awful machine. The prayers her mother taught her in
infancy died upon her lips, and instead of praying to God she cried out
to her mother. Un-protestant as the sentiment is, I can not forbear
saying that this talking to the dead is one of the most natural things
in the world. To Emilia the dimly remembered love of her mother was all
of tenderness there was in the universe, the only revelation of God
that had come to her, except the other love, which was to her a
paradise lost. For the great hard fate that turned the prairie universe
round with a crank motion had also--so it seemed to her--snatched away
from her the object of her love. This disordered, faithless state was
all the fruit she tasted of the peculiar education so much vaunted by
her father. She had eaten the husks he gave her and was hungry.

I said she had no company. An old daguerreotype of her mother and a
carefully hidden photograph (marked on the back, in a rather immature
hand, "E. Brown") seemed to answer with looks of love and sympathy when
she wetted them with her tears. They were her rosary and her crucifix;
they were the gifts of a beclouded life, through which God shone in
dimly upon her.

This poor girl looked and longed so for the company of human kind that
she counted those red-letter days on which a half-breed voyageur
traveled over the trail in front of the house, and even a party of
begging and beggarly Sioux, hungry for all they could get to eat,
offering importunately to sell "hompoes" (moccasins) to her father,
were not wholly unwelcome. But the days of all days were those on which
Edwards, the tall, long-haired American trapper, fished in the Pomme de
Terre in sight of the Lindsley cabin. On such occasions the old man
Lindsley would leave his work and stay about the house, and watch
jealously and uneasily every movement of the trapper. On one or two
occasions when that picturesque individual, wearing a wolf-skin cap,
with the wolf's tail hanging down between his shoulders, presented
himself at the door of the cabin to crave some little courtesy,
Lindsley clos