The wish to be home was in all these letters like a sob. The men read them over carefully and gravely, and finally Anson would put them away in the Bible (bought on Flaxen's account) for safe-keeping. As the letters improved in form their exultation increased. "Say, Bert, don't you notice she writes better now? She makes big I's now in place o' little ones. Seems 's if she runs the sentence all together, though." "She'll come out all right. You see, she goes into the preparatory department, where they teach writin' an' spellin'. You'll see her hand improve right along now." And it did, and she ceased to wail for home and ceased to say that she hated her studies. "I am getting along splendid," she wrote some weeks after this. "I like my teacher; her name is Holt. She is just as nice as she can be. She is cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go to soshibles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant. I am feeling pretty good, but I wish you boys was here." She did not wish to be at home this time! Winter shut down on the broad land again with that implacable, remorseless brilliancy of fierce cold which characterises the northern plain, stopping work on the farm and bolting all doors. Hardly a day that the sun did not shine; but the light was hard, white, glittering, and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless. There was now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation almost as terrible as that of a ship wedged amid the ice-floes of the polar regions. Day after day rising to feed the cattle, night after night bending over the sooty stove listening to the ceaseless voice of the wind as it beat and brushed, whispered, moaned, and piped or screamed around the windows and eaves--this was their life, varied with an occasional visit to the store or the post-office, or by the call of a neighbour. It is easy to conceive that Flaxen's bright letters were like bursts of bird-song in their loneliness. Many of the young men, their neighbours, went back East to spend the winter--back to Michigan, Iowa, New York, or elsewhere. "Ans, why don't you go back an' visit your folks?" asked Bert, one day. "I'll take care o' things." "Wal, the fact is, I've be'n away so long they don't care whether I'm alive er dead. I ain't got no near relatives except a sister, an' she's got all the fam'ly she can 'tend to." "Same here. We ain't very affectionate, anyway; our fam'ly and I don't write. Still I'd like to go back, just to see how they all are." "Why not go?" "Well, I don't know. I guess I must one o' these days. I've kind o' be'n waitin' till we got into a little better shape. I hate to go back poor." "So do I. It's hard work f'r me to give up beat; I ain't goin' to do it yet awhile."