"He died like a soldier," I said to the awed children, "and he shall have the funeral of a soldier. We will not mourn, and we will not whisper or walk tip-toe in the presence of his body." In this spirit we called his friends together. In place of flowers we covered his coffin with the folds of a flag, and when his few remaining comrades came to take a last look at him, my wife and I greeted them cordially in ordinary voice as if they had come to spend an evening with him and with us. My final look at him in the casket filled my mind with love and admiration. His snowy hair and beard, his fair skin and shapely features, as well as a certain firm sweetness in the line of his lips raised him to a grave dignity which made me proud of him. Representing an era in American settlement as he did I rejoiced that nothing but the noblest lines of his epic career were written on his face. This is my consolation. His last days were spent in calm content with his granddaughters to delight and comfort him. In their young lives his spirit is going forward. They remember and love him as the serene, white-haired veteran of many battles who taught them to revere the banner he so passionately adored. [Illustration: The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned (against my wish) after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter Constance who, at fourteen, signs herself C. Hamlin Garland, Artist.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- AFTERWORD ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: To Mary Isabel, who, as a girl of eighteen, still loves to impersonate the majesty of princesses, I entrust the future literary history of Neshonoc.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Afterword At this point I make an end of this chronicle, the story of two families whose wanderings and vicissitudes (as I conceive them) are typical of thousands of other families who took part in the upbuilding of the Middle Western States during that period which lies between the close of the Civil War and the Great War of Nineteen Fourteen. With the ending of the two principal life-lines which bind these pages together my book naturally closes. In these two volumes over which I have brooded for more than ten years, I have shadowed forth, imperfectly, yet with high intent, the experiences of Isabel McClintock and Richard Garland, and the lives of other settlers closely connected with them. For a full understanding of the drama--for it is a drama, a colossal and colorful drama--I must depend upon the memory or the imagination of my readers. No writer can record it all or even suggest the major part of it. At the end of four years of writing I go to press with reluctance, but realizing that my public, like myself, is growing gray, I have consented to publish my manuscript with its many imperfections and omissions.