ng
creek, and there is what the grand lady at the piano thinks is a marvel
of beauty in the ornate home upon the hill. But the most beautiful thing
he sees as the old year winds the passing panorama of life for his eyes
is the sunshine and prairie grass. This comes to him of a Sunday when he
walks with Grant--brother Grant, out in the fields far away from South
Harvey--where the frosty breath of autumn has turned the grass to
lavender and pale heliotrope, and the hills roll away and away like
silent music and the clouds idling lazily over the hillsides afar off
cast dark shadows that drift in the lavender sea. Now the smoke that the
old year paints upon the blue prairie sky will fade as the year passes,
and the great smelters may crumble and men may plow over the ground
where they stand so proudly even to-day; but the music in the boy's
heart, put there by the passing year, and the glory of the sunshine and
the prairie grass with the meadow lark's sad evening song as it quivers
for a moment in the sunset air,--these have been caught in the child's
soul and have passed through the strange alchemy of God's great mystery
of human genius into an art that is the heritage of the race. For into
the mind of that child--that eyrie, large-eyed, wondering, silent,
lonely-seeming child--the signals of God were passing. When he grew into
his man's estate and could give them voice, the winds of the prairie,
low and gentle, the soft lisping of quiet waters, the moving passion of
the hurricane, the idle dalliance of the clouds whose purple shadows
combed the rolling hills, and all the ecstasy of the love cry of
solitary prairie birds, found meaning and the listening world heard,
through his music, God speaking to His children.

So the year moved quickly on. Its tasks were countless. It had another
child to teach another message. There was a little girl in the town--a
small girl with the bluest eyes in the world and tiny curls--yellow
curls that wound so softly around her mother's fingers that you would
think that they were not curls at all but golden dreams of curls that
had for the moment come true and would fade back into fairyland whence
they came. And the passing year had to prop the child at a window while
the dusk came creeping into the quiet house. There she sat waiting,
watching, hoping that the proud, handsome man who came at twilight down
the way leading to the threshold, would smile at her. She was not old
enough to hope he