When I told her I couldn't she told me how. It was the old-fashioned salt-rising bread, the receipt for which she gave me; and when I asked her to write it down I found that she was even a poorer scribe than I was. We were two mighty ignorant young folks, but we got it down, and that night I set emptins[6] for the first time, and I kept trying, and advising with the women-folks, until I could make as good salt-rising bread as any one. When we had finished this her father was calling her to come, as they were starting on toward Negosha; and I gave Rowena money enough to buy her a calico dress pattern at the next settlement. She tried to resist, and her eyes filled with tears as she took the money and chokingly tried to thank me for it. She climbed into the wagon and rode on for a while, but got out and came back to me while old Tom went on in those mad rushes of his, and circling within a few yards of me she said, "You're right good," and darted off over the prairie at a wide angle to the road. [6] Our author resists firmly all arguments in favor of the generally accepted dictionary spelling, "emptyings." He says that the term can not possibly come from any such idea as things which are emptied, or emptied out. The editor is reconciled to this view in the light of James Russell Lowell's discussion of "emptins" in which he says: "Nor can I divine the original." Mr. Lowell surely must have considered "emptyings"--and rejected it.--G.v.d.M. I watched her with a buying eye, as she circled like a pointer pup and finally caught up with the wagon, a full mile on to the westward. I had wondered once if she had not deserted the Fewkes party forever. I had even, such is the imagination of boyhood, made plans and lived them through in my mind, which put Rowena on the nigh end of the spring seat, and made her a partner with me in opening up the new farm. But she waved her hand as she joined her family--or I thought so at least, and waved back--and was gone. The Gowdy outfit did not return until after I had about cured the lameness of my newly-acquired cows and set out on my way over the Old Ridge Road for the West. The spring was by this time broadening into the loveliest of all times on the prairies (when the weather is fine), the days of the full blowth of the upland bird's-foot violets. Some southern slopes were so blue with them that you could hardly tell the distant hill from the sky, except for the greening of the peeping grass. The possblummies were still blowing, but only the later ones. The others were aging into tassels of down.