“And this English father?”

“He married, and then Tim and I came to Black Log.”

“Like Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes?”

“Exactly; and we should have grown like them, but our father was a bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the books, he told us all about them.  He’d seen them all, so we got to know his country pretty well.  Once he took us to Harrisburg, and by multiplying everything we saw there, Tim and I were able to picture all the great cities of the world—­for instance, London is five hundred times Harrisburg.”

“But why didn’t you go to see the places yourself?”

“Why doesn’t everybody in Black Log go to Florida in winter or take the waters at Carlsbad?  We did plan a great trip—­father and mother and Tim and I—­we were going to England together when the farm showed a surplus.  We never saw that surplus.  I went to Philadelphia once.  It’s a grand place, but I had just enough of money to keep me there two days and bring me home.  Then the war came.  And now Tim thinks I’ve been around the world.  He’s jealous, for he has never been past Harrisburg; but I’ve really gone around a little circle.  I’ve seen just enough of flying fishes to hanker after Mandalay, just enough of Spaniards to long for a sight of Spain.  But they’ve shipped me home and here I am anchored.  Here I shall stay until that surplus materializes; and you know in our country we have neither coal nor oil nor iron.”

“But they tell me that you are to teach the school,” she said.

“For which I am grateful,” I answered.  “Twenty dollars a month is the salary, and school keeps for six months, so I shall earn the large sum of $120 a year.”

“But your pension?”

“With my pension I shall be a nabob in Six Stars.  Anywhere else I should cut a very poor figure.  But after all, this is the best place, for is there any place where the skies are bluer; is there any place where the grass is greener; is there any place where the storms are wilder than over our mountains?”

“Sometimes I would say in Kansas,” the girl answered.  “Here the world seems to end at the top of the mountain.  It is hard to picture anything beyond that.  Out there you raise yourself on tiptoe, and you see the world rolling away for miles and miles, and it seems to have no ending.”

“I suppose you will not be able to endure your imprisonment.  Some day you will go back to Kansas.”

“Some day—­perhaps,” she laughed.  “But now I am a true Black Logger.  Look at my gown.”

It was the gray Dunkard dress—­the concession to her uncle’s beliefs on worldliness.  It was the first time I had noticed it.

“That is not the garb of Black Log,” I said.  “It was designed long ago in Germany, after patterns from Heaven.”

“And designed by men,” said Mary, laughing; “forced by them on a sex which wears ribbons as naturally as a bird does feathers.”