She was a girlish matron, with a face that made you think of a child-wife, but she was a woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old, and generous Heaven was about to send another. Her boarders numbered seven when I was made welcome; and to help her in the care of a crippled husband and the child and guests, she had a little maid of about fifteen, while, to add to the income from our board, she took in all our washing, and did it herself with no outside help. She may have been twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen, and every man of us stood straight before her and did her bidding thankfully. It was a proud moment, and one which made me feel more nearly on equal terms with the other men, when one evening she came to me and, “John, you mind the baby this time while I finish getting supper,” she said, as she put the child in my arms. On the sofa in the sitting-room we would lay the little wide-eyed, sunny creature whom we rarely heard cry, and who never showed fear at the touch of our rough hands, nor at the thundering laughter that answered to her smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech. The mother waited at the table, and joined freely in our talk. She had a way of saying “By gosh!” that fairly broke your heart, and at times she would stand still and swear softly, while her deep blue eyes widened in innocent surprise. They were haunting eyes, and they followed me far out on the rain-soaked roads of the valley of the Illinois. The walking was not bad at first. Over a rolling country the way wound past woodland and open fields, between banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but for the evident richness of soil, and the entire absence of rock, it might have been a New England valley with nothing to suggest the earlier monotony of undulating prairie. But the walking became steadily worse, until by nightfall each step was a painful pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late twilight a farm-house that stood close to the road. In his shirt-sleeves, and seated in a tilted chair on the porch, was a young farmer with a group of lightly clad children about him. He accepted the explanation that I found the walking too heavy to admit of my reaching Morris that evening, and, readily giving me leave to sleep on his hay-mow, asked me in to have something to eat. I was struck at first sight with a marked resemblance in him to my friend Fitz-Adams, the manager of the logging camp in Pennsylvania. All through our talk, while seated on the porch in the evening, there were reminders in his manner and turns of speech and ways of looking at things of that very efficient boss.