I just now came in from looking at them, and find them forty feet high as I write this, with their branches resting on the ground in a great brown ring carpeted with needles as they are in the pineries. We sat down on the blue-grass under what is now the big cottonwood in front of the house. I had stuck this in the sod a little twig not two feet long, and now it was ten or twelve feet high, and made a very little shade, to be sure, but wasn't I proud of my own shade trees! Oh, you can't understand it; for you can not realize the beauty of shade on that great sun-bathed prairie, or the promise in the changing shadows under that little tree! Rowena leaned back against the gray-green trunk, and patted the turf beside her for me to be seated. Every circumstance of this strange day comes back to me as I think of it, and of what followed. I remember just how the poor girl looked as she sat leaning against the tree, her cheeks flushed by the heat of the summer afternoon, that look of distress in her eyes as she looked around so brightly and with so gay an air over my little kingdom. As she sat there she loosened her belt and took a long breath as if relieved in her weariness at the long ramble we had taken. "I never have had a home," she said. "I never had no idee how folk that have got things lived--till I went over--over to that--that hell-hole there!" And she waved her hand over toward Blue-grass Manor. I was startled at her fierce manner and words. "Your folks come along here the other day," I said, to turn the subject, I guess. "Did they?" she asked, with a little gasp. "What did they say?" "They said they were headed for Pike's Peak." "The old story," she said. "Huntin' f'r the place where the hawgs run around ready baked, with knives an' forks stuck in 'em. I wish to God I was with 'em!" Here she stopped for a while and sat with her hands twisted together in her lap. Finally, "Did they say anything about me, Jacob?" "I thought," said I, "that they talked as if you'd had a fuss." "Yes," she said. "They're all I've got. They hain't much, I reckon, but they're as good as I be, I s'pose. Yes, a lot better. They're my father an' my mother, an' my brothers. In their way--in our way--they was always as good to me as they knowed how. I remember when ma used to kiss me, and pa held me on his lap. Do you remember he's got one finger off? I used to play with his fingers, an' try to build 'em up into a house, while he set an' told about new places he was goin' to to git rich. I wonder if the time'll ever come ag'in when I can set on any one's lap an' be kissed without any harm in it!"