For two years my estrangement from the old Homestead was complete, but when one April day I found myself passing it on my way to St. Paul, I was constrained to stop off just to see how my father and the garden were coming on. This was late April, and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of the Homestead's loveliest associations came back to soften my mood, to regain my love. Wrought upon by the ever-returning youth of the world--a world to which my daughters were akin, I relented, "We will come back. Cruel as some of its memories are, this is home, I belong here, and so does Mary Isabel." The sunlight streaming into my mother's chamber lay like a fairy carpet on the floor, waiting for the dancing feet of her grandchildren. Her spirit filled the room, calling to me, consoling me, convincing me. All day I worked at trimming vines, and planting flowers while the robins chuckled from the lawn, and the maples expanded overhead. How spacious and wide and safe the yard appeared, a natural playground for the use of children. And so it came about that on June seventeenth, just before Constance's second birthday, Mary Isabel and I took the night train for West Salem, leaving Zulime and the nurse to follow next morning. Greatly excited at the prospect of going to sleep on the cars my daughter went to her bed. "I kick for joy," she said, her eyes shining with elfin delight. She loved the "little house" as she called her berth, and for an hour she lay peering out at the moon. "It follows us!" she cried out in pleased surprise. "Yes, it is a kindly moon. It will keep right along overhead all the way to West Salem. But you must go to sleep now. I shall call you early in the morning to meet Grandfather." She was a reasonable soul, entirely confident of my care, and so, putting her head on my arm, she went away to dreamland. At such times my literary ambitions and failures were of no account. [To wish myself back there with that tiny form beside me is folly--but I do--I do!] In the cool lusciousness of the June morning we met Grandpa, and as we entered the gate of the Homestead (which Mary Isabel only dimly remembered), I said, "This is your home, daughter, you belong here." "Can I pick the flowers? Can I walk on the grass?" she asked quickly. "Yes, pick all you want. You can _roll_ on the grass if you wish." Too excited to eat any breakfast, she ran from posy bed to posy bed, and from tree to tree, indefatigable as a bee or humming-bird. At five in the afternoon Zulime and Constance came. In the weeks which followed I renewed my childhood. To Mary Isabel as to me at her age, the cornfield was a vast mysterious forest, and the rainbow an overpowering miracle.