Each man of them--and each woman also--was in fixed principle and earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit--the ideal the pioneer must ever see--and holding the present and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light. From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight of La Mancha stripped of the mediæval and Spanish trapping of his prototype. His Dulcinea--an unexampled combination of idealism and practicality--his much-enduring wife, upon whose frame and anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life. Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. “I always compose my poems best,” said one of the haler of these dames whose verses piped from a corner of the University town’s morning journal, “on wash-day and over the tub.” These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old enthusiasm that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in Massachusetts Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and other oppressed peoples to our Southern coasts and on “over the mountains,” were kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the descendants of these many peoples--the uplifting that made way for and supported the act of the Fourth of July in 1776--rose anew. The flame of an idea was in the air heating and refining the grossest spirits--and the subtle forces of the Kansans’ vanguard were far from the grossest. Once in their new home these men and women lived under circumstances a people has almost never thriven under--circumstances which would prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and sober-mindedness, and possibly in the end deprive their folk of consideration for the past and its judgments. “Govern the Kansas of 1855 and ’56!” exclaimed Governor Shannon years after that time. “You might as well have attempted to govern the devil in hell.” “Shall the Sabbath never immigrate,” cried a Massachusetts woman in 1855 in a letter to friends at home, “and the commandments too?” Among this people was little presence of what men had wrought. As in the early settlements of our Atlantic seaboard, all was to be made, everything to be done, even to the hewing of logs for houses and digging of wells for water; and in Kansas pressure for energy and time was vastly increased over those earlier years by the seaboard. The draughting of laws for controlling a mixed population, with elements in it confessedly there for turbulence and bloodshed, was for a time secondary to shingle-making.