I have made the briefest possible mention of the hapless condition our churches were in twenty years ago.  The picture is neither flattering nor cheering; but right royally are the churches now redeeming themselves from the reproach they were under then.  A pastor is now being settled in each church as fast as the pecuniary circumstances of the congregation will permit, and a grand enthusiasm in Sunday-school work, simplifying and illustrating all its details, has made it possible for the weakest and poorest church to keep itself alive.  Wherever there are children with their young enthusiasm—­and the children, like the poor, are always with us—­and wherever there are parents ready to lead their children in the way in which they should go, there the permanency of a church is assured.

And now, with many misgivings as touching our immediate future, but with an abiding hope of triumph in the end, I bid the reader farewell.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

REMINISCENCES.

BY MRS. ROSETTA B. HASTINGS.

When father went back to Illinois, after he was rafted, we visited for several weeks among the churches where he had preached.  Then we returned with him to Kansas, to visit my uncle, and to stay on our claim awhile, lest some person should jump it.  We left our goods at Mt.  Sterling, for father had promised to preach there that winter; but he told us that he had determined to move to Kansas sooner than he had first expected.  We ferried the Missouri River near Jefferson City, and crossed the Kansas River in the woods, where Kansas City, Kansas, now stands.  There was little of Kansas City then, except a few warehouses where freight was landed for Independence, which was the starting point of the Santa Fe trail.

Claims were being taken so rapidly that we remained to hold ours, while father returned to Illinois to preach.  Two families in one room made it rather crowded, but we had a comfortable cabin.  It contained a twelve-paned window—­the only one in the settlement; cabins usually had no windows, or very small ones.  Mr. May’s folks had oiled paper over a narrow opening, which they closed with a board shutter.  I asked their little girl why they did not have a larger window, and she said the Indians might get in.  But no Indians troubled us.

When father came home, April 30th, we all ran out to meet him.  But mother’s quick eye detected something wrong.  “Why, I look all right, don’t I?” he asked, smiling.  When we reached the house she again questioned him, and he sat down, rolled up his sleeve, and showed us his arm, brown with tar, and fuzzy with cotton.  Then he told us his story.  They had not tarred his face, except a spot on his forehead, where, he said, they had stuck a bunch of cotton as large as his two fists.  The road to Ocena, as our post-office was called, ran up the bluff now known to Atchison people as Sam Kingstown.  On the top of that ridge he had stopped, and pulled off his coat of tar and cotton, put on his clothes and come home.