"It sounds like this journey, like the Emigrant Trail."
"That's what I was thinking. The beautiful start gives you courage for the mountains. The memory of it carries you over the rough places, gives you life in your heart when you come to the desert where it's all parched and bare. And you and your companion go on, fighting against the hardships, bound closer and closer by the struggle. You learn to give up, to think of the other one, and then you say, 'This is what I was born for,' and you know you're getting near the truth. To have some one to go through the fight for, to do the hard work for—that's the reality after the vision and the dream."
The doctor, thinking of the vanished years of his married life, and his daughter, of the unknown ones coming, were not looking at the subject from the same points of view.
"I don't think you make it sound very pleasant," she said, from returning waves of melancholy. "It's nothing but hardships and danger."
"California's at the end of it, dearie, and they say that's the most beautiful country in the world."
"It will be a strange country," she said wistfully, not thinking alone of California.
"Not for long."
"Do you think we'll ever feel at home in it?"
The question came in a faint voice. Why did California, once the goal of her dreams, now seem an alien land in which she always would be a stranger?
"We're bringing our home with us—carrying some of it on our backs like snails and the rest in our hearts like all pioneers. Soon it will cease being strange, when there are children in it. Where there's a camp fire and a blanket and a child, that's home, Missy."