A PINE forest is nature’s expression of solemnity and solitude. Sunlight, rivers, cascades, people, music, laughter, or dancing could not make it gay. With its unceasing reverberations and its eternal shadows, it is as awful and as holy as a cathedral. Thirty good fellows working together by day and drinking together by night can keep […]

“GO West?” sighed Kate. “Why, yes! I’d like to go West.” She looked at the babies, who were playing on the floor with their father, and sighed again. “You’ve got to go somewhere, you know, Kate. It might as well be west as in any other direction. And this is such a chance! We can’t […]

IT was the year of the small-pox. The Pawnees had died in their cold tepees by the fifties, the soldiers lay dead in the trenches without the fort, and many a gay French voyageur, who had thought to go singing down the Missouri on his fur-laden raft in the springtime, would never again see the […]

AFTER being dead twenty years, he walked out into the sunshine. It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh. To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the worms creep […]

“WE must get married before time to put in crops,” he wrote. “We must make a success of the farm the first year, for luck. Could you manage to be ready to come out West by the last of February? After March opens there will be no let-up, and I do not see how I […]

THE equinoctial line itself is not more imaginary than the line which divided the estates of the three Johns. The herds of the three Johns roamed at will, and nibbled the short grass far and near without let or hindrance; and the three Johns themselves were utterly indifferent as to boundary lines. Each of them […]

IF Leroy Brainard had not had such a respect for literature, he would have written a book. As it was, he played at being an architect–and succeeded in being a charming fellow. My sister Jessica never lost an opportunity of laughing at his endeavors as an architect. “You can build an enchanting villa, but what […]