Transporting ourselves far from the beautiful valley of Wyoming, where the grief-stricken mother will wake never more to the consciousness of the loss of her sweet Frances, we stand on the prairies of Kansas. The time is 1856. One of the settlers who, with his wife, was seeking to build up a community in the turmoil, which then made that beautiful region such dangerous ground, has met his death at the hands of a rival faction. We enter the widow's desolated home. A shelter rather than a house, with but two wretched rooms, it stands alone upon the prairie. The darkness of a stormy winter's evening was gathering over the snow-clad slopes of the wide, bare prairie, as, in company with a sympathizing friend, we enter that lonely dwelling. In the scantily-furnished apartment into which we are shown, two or three women and as many children are crowding around a stove, for the night is bitter cold, and even the large wood-fire scarcely heated a space so thinly walled. Behind a heavy pine table, on which stands a flickering tallow-candle, and leaning against a half-curtained window on which the sleet and winter's blast beat drearily, sits a woman of some forty years of age, clad in a dress of dark, coarse stuff, resting her head on her hand, and seeming unmindful of all about her. She was the widow of Thomas W. Barber, one of the victims of the Kansas war. The attenuated hand supporting the aching head, and half shielding the tear-dimmed eyes, the silent drops trickling down the wasted cheeks, told but too well the sad story. "They have left me," she cried, "a poor, forsaken creature, to mourn all my days! Oh, my husband, my husband, they have taken from me all that I hold dear! one that I loved better than I loved my own life!" Thomas W. Barber was a careful and painstaking farmer, a kind neighbor, and an inoffensive, amiable man. His "untimely taking off" was indeed a sad loss to the community at large, but how much more to his wife! She had loved him with a love that amounted to idolatry. When he was returning from his daily toil she would go forth to meet him. When absent from home, if his stay was prolonged, she would pass the whole night in tears; and when ill, she would hang over his bed like a mother over her child. With a presentiment of evil, when he left his home for the last time, after exhausting every argument to prevent him from going, she had said to him, "Oh, Thomas! if you should be shot, I shall be left all alone, with no child and nothing in the wide world to fill your place!" This was their last parting.