The gardens, the cottages, and cabins nearly all showed some external signs of the embellishing hand of woman. Entering one of these houses, we found the men and young women out gathering the harvest. An elderly woman acted as our hostess. She was maid of all-work, a chamber-maid, cook, dairy-woman, laundress, and children's nurse; and yet she found time to make us a cordial welcome. The house was only one year old, and rather open to the weather, but bore the marks of womanly thrift and even of refinement. The matron who entertained us displayed piety, restless activity, humanity, intelligence, and a youthfully warm heart, all of which marked her as a type of that large class of elderly housewives who are using the education which they acquired in their girlhood in the East to form new and model communities on these wide and rich plains. We asked her about her life and thus came to hear, without the least complaint on her part, of its many difficulties. And yet when her husband and sons and daughters returned home from the field, we could see that it was a joyous and happy home. The eldest daughter, Mrs. B------, then a widow of twenty-five or six, told us the story of her experience in border-life. She was born in Wisconsin, when as a territory it had a population of only three thousand. Soon after the removal of her father and mother to Kansas, and at the age of sixteen she had married one of the most adventurous of the race of young pioneers which drew their first breath upon the then frontier in Illinois. Their wedding tour was in a prairie schooner from Atchison to the semi-fertile region which borders on the desert belt which stretches through western Nebraska and Kansas to New Mexico. Here they made their first home. Life in that particular section must be a pastoral rather than an agricultural one: her husband accordingly devoted himself almost entirely to the raising of cattle. We hardly need say, that next to the hunter, the cattle-herder approximates most nearly to savage life; his wife must accordingly find her position under such circumstances, a peculiarly trying one. The house in which Mrs. B------ and her husband lived was a simple hut constructed by digging away the side of a hill which formed the earthen rear and side walls of their dwelling, the top and front being of logs also covered with earth. Their kitchen, sleeping-room, dining-room, and parlor were represented by a single apartment Three men with their wives were their companions in the enterprise, and all lived in similar houses.