I did not see her again for nearly four years, and my heart contracted with a sudden pain at sight of her. She was growing old. Her hair was gray, and as she spoke, her voice was weak and tremulous. She was again on the farm and working as of old—like one on a treadmill. My father, too, was old. He had not prospered. A drought had swept over the fair valley and men on all sides were dropping away into despair. Jessie was at home—the only one of all the children. The house was a little better than any my mother had owned before, but it was a poor, barren place for all that. Old as she was, and suffering constantly from pain in her feet and ankles, she was still mother to every one who suffered. Even while I was there she got up on two demands in the middle of the night and rode away across the plain in answer to some suffering woman’s call for help. She knew death intimately. She had closed the eyes of many a world-weary wife or suffering child, and more than once a poor outcast woman of the town, sick and alone, felt the pitying touch of her lips. I SAW with greater clearness than ever before the lack of beauty in her life. She had a few new things, but they were all cheap and poor. She now had one silk dress—which her son had sent her. All else was calico. But worse than all was the bleak, burning, wind-swept plain—treeless, scorched and silent save for the song of the prairie lark. I felt the monotony of her surroundings with greater keenness than ever before. I was living in Boston at that time, and having heard many of the great singers I was eager to test my mother’s voice with the added knowledge I had of such things. Even then, weakened as she was and without training or practice, she still possessed a compass of three octaves and one note, and was able to sing one complete octave above the ordinary soprano voice with every note sweet and musical. I have always believed that a great singer was lost to the world in this pioneer’s wife. One day as I sat writing in the sitting-room I heard a strange cry outside—a cry for help. I rushed out into the yard, and there just outside the door in the vivid sunlight stood my mother, unable to move—a look of fear and horror on her face. The black-winged angel had sent her his first warning. She was paralyzed in the lower limbs. I carried her to her bed with a feeling that her life was ended there on the lonely plain, and my heart was bitter and rebellious and my mind filled with self-accusations. If she died now—here—what would she know of the great world outside? Her life had been always on the border—she knew nothing of civilization’s splendor of song and story. She would go away from the feast without a crumb. All her toilsome, monotonous days rushed through my mind with a roar, like a file of gray birds in the night—how little—how tragically small her joys, and how black her sorrows, her toil, her tedium.