ay she said it. She shot a quick glance at me, and then looked down at
her work again.

"Well, Rowena Fewkes!" exclaimed her mother, with her hands thrown up as
if in astonishment or protest. "In all my born days, I never expected to
hear a child of mine--"

Old Man Fewkes came in just then, and cut into the talk by his surprised
exclamation at seeing me there. He had supposed that I had gone out of
his ken forever. He had thought that one winter in this climate would be
all that a young man like me, free as I was to go and come as I pleased,
would stand. As he spoke about my being free, he looked at his wife and
sighed, combing his whiskers with his skinny bird's claws, and showing
the biggest freckles on the backs of his hands that I think I ever saw.
He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last;
and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see
that I had lost caste with him. He was pining for the open road.

"Negosha," he said, "is the place for a young man. You can be a baron
out there with ten thousan' head of rattle. But the place for me is
Texas. Trees is in constant varder!"

"But," said Ma Fewkes, repeating her speech of three years ago, "it's so
fur, Fewkes!"

"Fur!" he scornfully shouted, just as he had before. "Fur!" this time
letting his voice fall in contempt for the distance, for any one that
spoke of the distance, and for things in general in Iowa. "Why,
Lord-heavens, womern, it hain't more'n fifteen hundred mile!"

"Fewkes," she retorted, drawing her shoulders back almost as far as she
had had them forward a moment before, "I've been drailed around the
country, fifteen hundred miles here, and fifteen hundred miles there,
with old Tom takin' mad fits every little whip-stitch, about as much as
I'm a-going to!"

"I don't," said Rowena, "see why you've got so sot on goin' into your
hole here, an' pullin' the hole in after you. You hook up ol' Tom, pa,
an' me an' you'll go to Texas. I'll start to-morrow morning, pa!"

"I never seen sich a girl," said her mother; "to talk of movin' when
prospects is as good f'r you as they be now!"

"Wal, le's stop jourin' at each other," said Rowena, hastily, as if to
change the subject. "It ain't the way to treat company."

I discovered that Rowena was about to change her situation in the
Blue-grass Manor establishment. She was going into "the Big House" to
work under Mrs. Mobley, the wife of the superintendent, or a