It may be,--there is such comfort in possibilities.

Will Saul come to-night? I am all alone on the Big Blue. There's not
another settled claim for miles away.

The August sun drank up the moisture from our corn-fields, took out the
blood of our prairie-grasses, and God sent no cooling rains. Why?

Skylight was charmful for a while. I had forgotten Saul's assertion that
he was a pale shadow of Waubeeneemah, as we forget a dream of our latest
sleep.

At my home Aunt Carter appeared one day, and said she had "come to spend
the afternoon and stay to tea"; and she seated her amplitude of being in
Saul's favorite chair, and began to count the stitches in the heel of
the twenty-fourth stocking that she assured me "she had knit every
stitch of since the night she saw my husband lift me down at the gate
just outside the window." Her blue eyes went down deeper and deeper
into the bluer yarn her fingers were threading; and after a long pause,
during which I had forgotten her presence, and was counting out the
hours on the face of the clock which the slow hands must travel over
before Saul would be at home, suddenly she looked up and began with,--

"Mrs. Monten!"

There was something startling in her voice. I knew it was the first drop
of a coming flood, and I fortified myself. She went on repeating,--

"Mrs. Monten! I've been thinking, for a great long while, that it isn't