`perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design--roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.' I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbours
lived in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our
white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the basement, stood
at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close
by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to
the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and
bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs,
at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty
willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came
directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little
pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie