You have faults, no doubt, but the only one I could not pardon would be your saying, “I repent!”

The instinct to conceal defeat and pain is so strong in me that I would have my heart cut out rather than own it ached.  Yet many women carry all before them by a little judicious whining and rebellion.

I never believe in your unfaith.  If you brought a wife and showed her to me I should be sorry for her, and still not believe in your unfaith.

Louis, I have been falling down flat and crawling the ground.  Now I am up again.  It didn’t hurt.

It is the old German fairy story.  Every day gold must be spun out of straw.  How big the pile of straw looks every morning, and how little the handful of gold every night!

This prairie in the Indiana Territory that I dreaded as a black gulf, is a grassy valley.

I love the garden; and I love to hoe the Indian corn.  It springs so clean from the sod, and is a miracle of growth.  After the stalks are around my knees, they are soon around my shoulders.  The broad leaves have a fragrance, and the silk is sweet as violets.

We wash our clothes in the river.  Women who hoe corn, dig in a garden, and wash clothes, earn the wholesome bread of life.

To-day Paul brought the first bluebells of spring, and put them in water for me.  They were buds; and when they bloomed out he said, “God has blessed these flowers.”

We have to nurse the sick.  The goodness of these pioneer women is unfailing.  It is like the great and kind friendship of the Du Chaumonts.  They help me take care of Cousin Philippe.

Paul meditated to-day, “I don’t want to hurt the Father’s feelings.  I don’t want to say He was greedy and made a better place for Himself in heaven than He made for us down here.  Is it nicer just because He is there?”

His prayer:  “God bless my father and mother and Ernestine.  God keep my father and mother and Ernestine.  And keep my mother with me day and night, dressed and undressed!  God keep together all that love each other.”

When he is a man I am going to tell him, and say:  “But I have built my house, not wrecked it, I have been yours, not love’s.”

He tells me such stories as this:  “Once upon a time there was such a loving angel came down.  And they ran a string through his stomach and hung him on the wall.  He never whined a bit.”

The people in this country, which is called free, are nearly all bound.  Those who lack money as we do cannot go where they please, or live as they would live.  Is that freedom?

* * * * *

On a cool autumn night, when the fire crackles, the ten children of the settlement, fighting or agreeing, come running from their houses like hens.  We sit on the floor in front of the hearth, and I suffer the often-repeated martyrdom of the “Fire Pig.”  This tale, invented once as fast as I could talk, I have been doomed to repeat until I dread the shades of evening.