Was the mighty power of love, in that dying mother’s heart, a spiritual force, conveying her image to the mind of her child, as electricity transmits the telegram?  Love photographs very vividly on the memory; when intensely concentrated, may it not perceive scenes and images unknown to the bodily eye, and, like the sunshine, under favorable circumstances, make the pictures visible?  Who can answer such questions?  Mysterious beyond comprehension are the laws of our complex being.  The mother saw her distant son, and the son beheld his long-forgotten mother.  How it was, neither of them knew or thought; but on the soul of each, in their separate spheres of existence, the vision was photographed.

In the desolated dwelling on the prairie, they were all unconscious of this magnetic transmission of intelligence between the dying mother and her far-off child.  As she lay in her coffin, they spoke soothingly to each other, that she had passed away without suffering, dreaming pleasantly of Willie and the little Indian girl.  Their memories were excited to fresh activity, and the sayings and doings of Willie and the pappoose were recounted for the thousandth time.  Emma had no recollection of her lost brother, and the story of his adventure with Moppet always amused her young imagination.  But such reminiscences never brought a smile to Charley’s face.  When he heard the clods fall on his mother’s coffin, heavier and more dismally fell on his heart the remembrance of his broken promise, which had so dried up the fountains of her life.  Four times had the flowers bloomed above that mother’s grave, and still, for her dear sake, all the memorials of her absent darling remained as she had liked to have them.  The trundle-bed was never removed, the Indian basket remained under the glass in the bedroom, where his own little hands had put it, and his chair retained its place at the table.  Out of the family he was nearly forgotten; but parents now and then continued to frighten truant boys by telling them of Willie Wharton, who was carried off by Indians and never heard of after.

The landscape had greatly changed since Mr. Wharton and his brother-in-law built their cabins in the wilderness.  Those cabins were now sheds and kitchens appended to larger and more commodious dwellings.  A village had grown up around them.  On the spire of a new meeting-house a gilded fish sailed round from north to south, to the great admiration of children in the opposite schoolhouse.  The wild-flowers of the prairie were supplanted by luxuriant fields of wheat and rye, forever undulating in wave-like motion, as if Nature loved the rhythm of the sea, and breathed it to the inland grasses.  Neat little Bessie was a married woman now, and presided over the young Squire’s establishment, in a large white house with green blinds.  Charley had taken to himself a wife, and had a little Willie in the cradle, in whose infant features grandfather fondly traced some likeness to the lost one.