Theo ended with a sigh of relief that the story was told. The mother looked at the child long and curiously. “Well, I declare!” she said. But that night she said to Theo’s papa: “We must send Theo to school. The child’s head is filled with all sorts of nonsense; it’s time she was taught something sensible; and, if I were in your place, I would turn that cornfield into pasture-land, and invest in more cattle.”
“I have been thinking of that myself,” he answered.
By and by the mother asked, “John, was that cornfield ever used by the Indians as a burial place, or anything?”
“I don’t know,” he answered musingly. “I used to plow up arrow-heads, and pipe-bowls of red sandstone, when I first broke the prairie sod. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just because,” she answered.
VII.
AT THE WAYSIDE CROSS.
There is a border land that lies just beyond this everyday life, but not within the bounds of dreamland. We call it, for want of a better name, “The land of fancy, or of waking dreams.”
A young mother lay in her white bed, and close in her arms nestled the little soul whose life journey was just beginning. It was twilight time, and the mother lay half asleep, half awake, close on the confines of that border land.
The rain beating on the window, the fire purring in the grate, played a soft accompaniment to her thoughts.