"Well," Mr. Farnshaw replied, careful not to look in his wife's direction, "I was for goin' at first, but I've listened t' you folks an' I've come t' th' conclusion that you ain't goin' t' better yourselves any. If you go East, You'll have t' come back here in th' spring, or live on day's work there--an'--an' I'll take my chances right here. It's a long lane that has no turn. Grasshoppers can't stay always." "What'll you do if all them eggs hatch out an' eat th' crops in th' spring?" the new neighbour asked, determined to look on all sides of the question before he decided to give up his recently purchased farm, and glad of this opportunity to get the opinions of his fellow sufferers on that particular phase of his unexpected calamity. "What'll you do with all that bunch of cattle, anyhow?" he added. "I'll share what I've got with th' stuff, an' if part of it dies I'll drag it out on th' hill t' rot; th' rest I'll stay by," was the stubborn reply. "As for them eggs a-hatchin', they'll be good ones if they can stand a Kansas winter; they'll do a blamed sight better'n any eggs Mrs. Farnshaw gethers in. They'd better go south." This raised a laugh. The grim humour of anything, that could get away, spending a winter in Kansas, appealed to these grizzly pioneers, who struggled with the question of fuel in a country where there was little natural timber, and coal must be paid for before it was burned. But all their arguments would not turn him from his course. "Your wife's turrible set on goin', Farnshaw," one of the men said to him as they went to the stable for their horses when the meeting broke up. "Women's always wantin' things," was the indifferent reply. "Say, you've got a stack of wheat straw. What'll you take for it?" In the house the sympathetic daughter helped her mother prepare for bed. "I thought sure to-night we'd get to go," the child said. "If you could get back East you might get to stay; and then you wouldn't have to cry so much," she added as she picked up the abandoned clothing her mother had left lying on the floor. Mrs. Farnshaw, who was turning the same matter over disconsolately as she sat on the side of the bed, shook her head with the bitter certainty that her fate would pursue her, and replied hopelessly: "It wouldn't make no difference, I guess, Lizzie. He'd be there, an' it'd be just the same." And the girl, who was naturally reflective, carried with her to the loft overhead that night a new idea: that it was not the place, but the manner in which lives were lived, which mattered.