That first night of my return to the valley was of such rich and tender beauty that all the suffering, the hardships of my exploration were forgotten. The moon was at its full, and while the crickets and the katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind, reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opulence of it all, was at rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all seemed events of another and more austere planet. On the day following the fair, just as I was stripping my coat and rolling my sleeves to help my father fence in a pasture for Ladrone, a neighbor came along bringing a package from the post office. It was a book, a copy of my _Life of Grant_, the first I had seen; and, as I opened it I laughed, for I bore little resemblance to a cloistered historian at the moment. My face was the color of a worn saddle; my fingers resembled hooks of bronze, and my feet carried huge, hob-nail shoes. "What would Dr. Brander Matthews, Colonel Church and Howells, who had warmly commended the book, think of me at this moment?" I asked myself. Father was interested, of course, but he was not one to permit a literary interest to interfere with a very important job. "Bring that spade," commanded he, and putting my history on top of a post, I set to work, digging another hole, rejoicing in my strength, for at that time I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. So much the trail had done for me. I had broadened my palms to the cinch and the axe--I had laid my breast to the rain. Nothing physical appalled me, and no labor really wearied me. Oh, the wealth of that day's sunlight, the opulence of those nearby fields--the beauty of those warmly-misted hills! In the evening, as I mounted Ladrone and rode him down the lane, I had no desire to share Burton's perilous journey down the Hotalinqua. As my mother's excitement over my return passed away, her condition was disturbing to me. She was walking less and less and I began at once to consider a course of treatment which might help her. At my aunt's suggestion I wrote to a physician in Madison whose sanitarium she had found helpful, and as my brother chanced to be playing in Milwaukee, I induced mother to go with me to visit him. She consented quite readily for she was eager to see him in a real theater and a real play. We took lodging in one of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid to her and that night she saw Franklin on the stage as one of "the three Dromios" in a farce called "Incog," a piece which made her laugh till she was almost breathless.