For many months I had seen the spell weaving around my good husband; I had seen it flash out of his eyes; I had heard its undertone in his voice; I had felt it in his whole manner, and I knew the hour of battle was near.

I was strong, and I came to the rescue.  It was on this wise.  Hearken! is he coming?  No, it is only the wind coming up the Big Blue.

We sat in our Skylight door in an April evening,—­unwise, perhaps,—­but we were there.  Saul had taken down that wild warble of Longfellow’s, “Hiawatha.”  He read to me until the moon came up; then he threw down the book, and said, “Pshaw!”

“What is that for, Saul?” I asked, in some surprise.

“It is not for the book,—­for myself, Lucy.  I had better not have opened it Let us go and talk with the Doctor.”  And we went.

Saul had not answered his letters on the chair question, and I put up a petition.

“I think I never felt so well as when I was in Kansas,” I said.  “Really, Saul, I’ve felt a strong inclination to cough for some time, every morning.  The climate of Kansas is wonderfully curative for pulmonary difficulties.  I wish you would go out there now, and build a log cabin, plant a few miles of maize, gather it in, and then, when the season is over, come back and go to ——.  You know they value you too highly not to wait your time.”

I saw a slow kindling up in Saul’s eyes, but an instant later it had gone down, and he said, looking into mine,—­

“Do you really and truly wish this, Lucy?”

And Lucy answered,—­

“I really and truly wish it, Saul.”

We came hither with the violets and bluebirds.  My wigwam points to the sky.  We have roamed on the prairies, and wandered in the timber-lands.  Under the heavens of the Big Blue we have drunk “the wine of life all day,” and “been lighted off” to hemlock-boughs “by the jewels in the cup.”

Oh, this life that is passing, passing in unseen marches on to the Great Plains where we shall corral forever!  I’ve just opened my cabin-door to look for Saul; he’s been gone ten days.  The drought came; our maize withered and died.  Ten miles away, there is a town; two houses are there.  We left our vast-wilderness lodge to Nature in October, and turned our faces eastward.  Reaching the town, we found Azrael hovering there.  It was impossible to go on and leave such suffering, and we stayed.  While we waited, winter came along, tossing her white mail over the prairie, and we were prisoned.  Azrael folded his pinions, and carried in them two souls out of the town of two houses.  Afterward, Saul and I came back to our home.  I kindled the fire, and Saul went forth to earn our daily food.  Life began to grow painfully earnest.  The supply of wheaten flour waxed less and less, and I sometimes wished—­no, I did not wish that I was a widow, I only wished for flour.

I began to look for manna, and it came,—­not “small and white, about the size of coriander-seed,” but in the form of the flying life of yesterday.