"But we had each other and the vision to see all these things coming to us," Virginia said as she looked up into her husband's face with love-lighted eyes. "I wonder where Jim is." "Jim is present." Jim Shirley came in quietly from the side porch. "He prepared your wedding supper for you. He buried your first-born, and now he comes to give you a daughter, He's been first aid to the Aydelots all along the line, as he will hope to continue to be, world without end, and a little more." * * * * * The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian, has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power. And the father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a wilderness to beauty--these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second generation back to the kingdom whose scepter is the hoe. Not in vain did the scout of half a century ago drive back the savage Indian from the plains; not in vain did Funston and his "Fighting Twentieth" wade the Tulijan and swim the Marilao; not in vain did Chaffee's army burst the gates of Peking, nor Calvin Titus fling out Old Glory above its frowning walls. Behind the scout came a patient, brave-hearted band of settlers who, against loneliness and distances and drouth and prairie fire and plague and boom, slowly but gloriously won the wilderness. Into the jungles of Luzon will go the saw and spade and spelling book. Upon the Chinese republic has a new light shined. Not more to him who drives back the frontier than to him who follows after and wins that wilderness with sword re-shaped to a plowshare does the promise to Asher of old stand evermore secure! "_Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms._" THE END [Illustration: Sunflower] BOOKS BY MARGARET HILL MCCARTER WINNING THE WILDERNESS Illustrated by J. N. Marchand The latest book from Mrs. McCarter's pen is pronounced by critics the best work she has ever done. It is a tale of the soil, of winning the land from wilderness to fruitfulness. The author has written into it a great human story, an epic of the prairies. It is aptly called "The Sunflower Book," for this flower figures in the glowing romance running through its pages--the golden flower that Kansas chose as its emblem because its face is ever turned toward the light. A MASTER'S DEGREE