“Yes, ma’am.  Got ’em from the fairies,” Samson went on.  “They have all kinds o’ heads for little folks, an’ I guess they color ’em up with the blood o’ roses an’ the gold o’ buttercups an’ the blue o’ violets.  Here’s this wife o’ mine.  She’s richer’n I am.  She owns all of us.  We’re her slaves.”

“Looks as young as she did the day she was married—­nine years ago,” said the woman.

“Exactly!” Samson exclaimed.  “Straight as an arrow and proud!  I don’t blame her.  She’s got enough to make her proud I say.  I fall in love again every time I look into her big, brown eyes.”

The talk and laughter brought the dog into the house.

“There’s Sambo, our camp follower,” said Samson.  “He likes us, one and all, but he often feels sorry for us because we can not feel the joy that lies in buried bones and the smell of a liberty pole or a gate post.”

They had a joyous evening and a restful night with these old friends and resumed their journey soon after daylight.  They ferried across the lake at Burlington and fared away over the mountains and through the deep forest on the Chateaugay trail.

Since the Pilgrims landed between the measureless waters and the pathless wilderness they and their descendants had been surrounded by the lure of mysteries.  It filled the imagination of the young with gleams of golden promise.  The love of adventure, the desire to explore the dark, infested and beautiful forest, the dream of fruitful sunny lands cut with water courses, shored with silver and strewn with gold beyond it—­these were the only heritage of their sons and daughters save the strength and courage of the pioneer.  How true was this dream of theirs gathering detail and allurement as it passed from sire to son!  On distant plains to the west were lands more lovely and fruitful than any of their vision; in mountains far beyond was gold enough to gild the dome of the heavens, as the sun was wont to do at eventide, and silver enough to put a fairly respectable moon in it.  Yet for generations their eyes were not to see, their hands were not to touch these things.  They were only to push their frontier a little farther to the west and hold the dream and pass it on to their children.

Those early years of the nineteenth century held the first days of fulfillment.  Samson and Sarah Traylor had the old dream in their hearts when they first turned their faces to the West.  For years Sarah had resisted it, thinking of the hardships and perils in the way of the mover.  Samson, a man of twenty-nine when he set out from his old home, was said to be “always chasing the bird in the bush.”  He was never content with the thing in hand.  There were certain of their friends who promised to come and join them when, at last, they should have found the land of plenty.  But most of the group that bade them good-by thought it a foolish enterprise and spoke lightly of Samson when they were gone.  America has undervalued the brave souls who went west