"Did your mother get her new daughter?" "How long did she live to enjoy the peace of her Homestead?" "What became of David and Burton?" "Did your father live to see his grandchildren?" These and many other queries, literary as well as personal, are—I trust—satisfactorily answered in this book. Like the sequel to a novel, it attempts to account for its leading characters and to satisfy the persistent interest which my correspondents have so cordially expressed.

It remains to say that the tale is as true as my memory will permit—it is constructed only by leaving things out. If it reads, as some say, like fiction, that result is due not to invention but to the actual lives of the characters involved. Finally this closes my story of the Garlands and McClintocks and the part they took in a marvelous era in American settlement.

CONTENTS

BOOK I
CHAPTERPAGE
I.My First Winter in Chicago[1]
II.I Return to the Saddle[13]
III.In the Footsteps of General Grant[24]
IV.Red Men and Buffalo[38]
V.The Telegraph Trail[53]
VI.The Return of the Artist[70]
VII.London and Evening Dress[86]
VIII.The Choice of the New Daughter[97]
IX.A Judicial Wedding[122]
X.The New Daughter and Thanksgiving[140]
XI.My Father's Inheritance[153]
XII.We Tour the Oklahoma Prairie[171]
XIII.Standing Rock and Lake McDonald[184]
XIV.The Empty Room[204]
BOOK II
XV.A Summer in the High Country[219]
XVI.The White House Musicale[237]
XVII.Signs of Change[247]
XVIII.The Old Pioneer Takes the Back Trail[262]
XIX.New Life in the Old House[271]
XX.Mary Isabel's Chimney[289]
XXI.The Fairy World of Childhood[307]
XXII.The Old Soldier Gains a New Granddaughter[326]
XXIII."Cavanagh" and the "Winds of Destiny"[341]
XXIV.The Old Homestead Suffers Disaster[355]
XXV.Darkness Just Before the Dawn[369]
XXVI.A Spray of Wild Roses[381]
XXVII.A Soldier of the Union Mustered Out[389]
Afterword[400]

Illustrations

Isabel McClintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border
Zulime Taft: "The New Daughter"		[Frontispiece]
Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper for the colony[104]
At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife—lovely as a Madonna—out into the sunshine[286]
The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire[304]
Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonder-working giant, I paid tribute to her in song and story[322]
That night as my daughters, "dressed up" as princesses, danced like fairies in the light of our restored and broadened hearth, I forgot all the toil, all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me[368]
The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned (against my wish) after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter Constance[399]
To Mary Isabel, who, as a girl of eighteen, still loves to impersonate the majesty of princesses[401]

A Daughter of the Middle Border