"Your childhood shall be as happy as my powers will permit," I vowed once again as I looked into her uplifted face. "You shall have only pleasant memories of me," and in this spirit I gave her the best of myself. I taught her to read, I told her stories which linked her mind with that of her pioneer grandmother, filling her brain with traditions of the middle border. Dear little daughter, her daddy was veritably a nobleman, her mother a queen--in those days! My wife says that for ten years I was always either on the point of going somewhere, or just returning, and as I turn the pages of my diaries, I find this to be true, but also I find frequent mention of meetings with John Burroughs, Bacheller, Gilder, Alexander, Madame Modjeska, William Vaughn Moody and many others of my friends distinguished in the arts. All my publishing interests and most of my literary friends were in New York (my support came from there), hence my frequent coming and going. Whether this constant change, these sudden and violent contrasts in my way of life strengthened my fictional faculty or weakened it, I can not say, but I do know that as the head of a family I found concentrated effort increasingly difficult and at times very nearly impossible. Constance was ailing for a year, and was a source of care, of pain to me, as to her mother. At times, many times, her sufferings filled me with a passionate pity, a sense of rage, of helplessness. Indeed both children were subject to throat and lung disorders, especially when in the city. Oh, those cruel coughing spells, those nights of burning fever, those alarming hours of stupor or of terrifying delirium! "Can science find no check upon these recurrent forms of disease?" I demanded of our doctor. "Must humanity forever suffer the agonies of diphtheria and pneumonia? If so why bring children into the world?" We always knew when these disorders had set in, we knew all the signs but no medicine availed to stop their progress. Each attack ran its course in spite of nurse and drug whilst I raged helplessly and Zulime grew hollow-eyed with anxious midnight vigil. Death was a never-absent hovering shadow when those bitter winter winds were blowing, and realizing this I came to hate the great desolate city in which we lived, and to long with the most passionate ardor for the coming of April's sun. One of the first signs of spring (so far as Mary Isabel was concerned) was the opening of the "White City," a pleasure park near us, and the second event quite as conclusive and much more exciting was the coming of the circus. These were the red letter days in her vernal calendar, and were inescapable outings, for her memory was tenacious. Each May she demanded to be taken to the "Fite City" and later "the Kings and Queens" and "the fairies" of the circus claimed her worship. Together we saw these glorious sights, which filled her little soul with rapture.