“What was the next thing, Rowena?”

“W’y, if it wouldn’t be kind o’ nice to have some one around, even if she wa’n’t very pretty, and was ignorant, if she was willin’ to learn, an’ would always be good to you, to have things kind o’ cheerful at night—­your supper ready; a light lit; dry boots warmed by the stove; your bed made up nice, and maybe warmed when it was cold:  even if she happened to be wearin’ an old apern like this—­if you knowed she was thinkin’ in her thankful heart of the bashful boy that give it to her back along the road when she was ragged and ashamed of herself every time a stranger looked at her!”

Dumbhead as I was I sat mute, and looked as blank as an idiot.  In all this description of hers I was struck by the resemblance between her vision and mine; but I was dreaming of some one else.  She looked at me a moment, and took her hand away.  She seemed hurt, and I thought I saw her wiping her eyes.  I could not believe that she was almost asking me to marry her, it seemed so beyond belief—­and I was joked so much about the girls, and about getting me a wife that it seemed this must be just banter, too.  And yet, there was something a little pitiful in it, especially when she spoke again about my little gift to her so long ago.

“I never looked your place over,” said she at last.  “That’s what I come over fur.  Show it to me, Jacob?”

This delighted me.  We looked first at the wheat, and the corn, and some of my cattle were near enough so that we went and looked at them, too.  I told her where I had got every one of them.  We looked at the chickens and the ducks; and the first brood of young turkeys I ever had.  I showed her all my elms, maples, basswoods, and other forest trees which I had brought from the timber, and even the two pines I had made live, then not over a foot high.

I just now came in from looking at them, and find them forty feet high as I write this, with their branches resting on the ground in a great brown ring carpeted with needles as they are in the pineries.

We sat down on the blue-grass under what is now the big cottonwood in front of the house.  I had stuck this in the sod a little twig not two feet long, and now it was ten or twelve feet high, and made a very little shade, to be sure, but wasn’t I proud of my own shade trees!  Oh, you can’t understand it; for you can not realize the beauty of shade on that great sun-bathed prairie, or the promise in the changing shadows under that little tree!

Rowena leaned back against the gray-green trunk, and patted the turf beside her for me to be seated.

Every circumstance of this strange day comes back to me as I think of it, and of what followed.  I remember just how the poor girl looked as she sat leaning against the tree, her cheeks flushed by the heat of the summer afternoon, that look of distress in her eyes as she looked around so brightly and with so gay an air over my little kingdom.  As she sat there she loosened her belt and took a long breath as if relieved in her weariness at the long ramble we had taken.