imself up to his full height and looked off to where the
new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with
light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the
morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read flashed
across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with dreamy
exultation:

"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.'"

_Cosmopolitan_, April 1900

_The Sentimentality of William Tavener_

It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the
West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. When people spoke of William
Tavener as the most prosperous farmer in McPherson County, they
usually added that his wife was a "good manager." She was an
executive woman, quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix. The
only reason her husband did not consult her about his business was
that she did not wait to be consulted.

It would have been quite impossible for one man, within the limited
sphere of human action, to follow all Hester's advice, but in the
end William usually acted upon some of her suggestions. When she
incessantly denounced the "shiftlessness" of letting a new threshing
machine stand unprotected in the open, he eventually built a shed
for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a
hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the
structure--merely to "show his temper," as she put it--but in the
end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to
complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs
rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to
facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the
story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at
the dinner table, and William's gravity never relaxed for an
instant. Silence, indeed, was William's refuge and his strength.

William set his boys a wholesome example to respect their mother.
People who knew him very well suspected that he even admired her. He
was a hard man towards his neighbors, and even towards his sons;
grasping, determined and ambitious.

There was an occasional blue day about the house when William went
over the store bills, but he never objected to items relating to his
wife's gowns or bonnets. So it came about that many of the foolish,
unnecessary little things that Hester bought for boys, she had
charge