The birth of a daughter opened the source of the deepest joy Stillwater had ever known. When Mrs. Bunker laid the infant swathed in new flannels in his arms, he was assailed by indescribable feelings, altogether new to him. She watched him curiously as he held the tiny bundle with the greatest timidity in his big brawny hands. Feeling her bright eyes on his face he flushed with embarrassment. Mrs. Bunker pushed back the flannel and showed him a wee fist, like a crumpled roseleaf, which she opened by force, clasping it again around Stillwater’s finger. As he felt that tiny and helpless clasp tears welled into his honest brown eyes. "There isn’t anything she shan’t have," he said. And these words held good through all the years that Indiana lived under his roof. In a spirit of patriotism, Stillwater named his daughter Indiana. "She was born right here in Indiana," he declared. "She’s a prairie flower, so we named her after the State." The birth of a daughter appealed to Stillwater as a most beautiful and wonderful thing. It awakened all the latent chivalry and tenderness of his character. As he remarked to his friend Masters, "A girl kinder brings out the soft spots in man’s nature." This feeling is a foreign one to the European who always longs for a son to perpetuate his name and possessions, and after all it is a natural egotism when there is a long and honorable line of ancestry, but in all ranks and conditions the cry is the same, "A son, oh Lord, give me a son!" After the boom which followed the discovery of oil-gushers on the land, and Stillwater looked steadily in the face, with that level head which no amount of success could turn, the enormous prospects of the future, he thought, "It’s just come in time for Indiana." His imagination pictured another Mary Bunker, another soft and clinging creature to nestle against his heart, another image of his wife to wind her arms about his neck and look up into his face with trusting love. Instead, he had a little whirlwind of a creature, a combination of tempests and sunshine, with eyes like the skies of Indiana, and hair the color of the ripe wheat, upon which his wife used to gaze as she sat on her porch sewing little garments, nothing as far as the eyes could strain but that harmony of golden color, joining the blue of the sky at the rim of the horizon. The peace and happiness of the Stillwater household fluctuated according to the moods of Indiana. These conditions commenced when she was a child, and grew as she developed. The family regarded her storms as inevitable, and nothing could be more beautiful than her serenity when they passed, nothing could equal the tenderness of her love for them all. Stillwater, under high pressure from his family, went to consult a noted New York medical authority; a gaunt, spare-looking man, who, after the usual preliminaries, leaned back in his chair and regarded Stillwater fixedly.