“Norman,” said his mother, “do go and find out where those emigrants are going.”
“O mother,” said Norman, “I would not ask them for anything.”
“I will go then,” replied his mother, as she opened the garden gate, and walked up to the last prairie wagon, in which a woman was seated with her four children.
She seemed pleased to hear the accents of a friendly voice, and soon told her simple story.
Eight years before she had been left a widow, with six children. The boys of twelve and fourteen did not wish to learn a trade, and farming was not very profitable in the part of Pennsylvania where she lived; so she had come to seek, in the fertile fields of Iowa, bread for her children. She had worked hard, and days of toil were still before her, but there was more hope in that virgin soil of securing a competence. The rich deep black loam of these prairies often, at its first sowing, bears a golden harvest, that gives back to the farmer the amount he has paid for the land, and the expense of its cultivation.
Mrs. Lester asked the emigrant, in whose patient face she had taken much interest, if she had any friends in the new and strange country to which she was going.
“O yes,” she replied; she had a married daughter there, and a church and Sunday school for her children. She was a Methodist, as were the two families with whom she was journeying; and she would have been unwilling to go where her children would be deprived of their religious privileges.
There were fifteen persons in the company. They had driven from Pennsylvania to Cleveland, where they had taken the cars for Chicago. The wagon was lifted on the car, the cover taken off, and the woman said she had had the pleasantest ride she had ever taken in her life, looking over the lake and the prairie from her elevated position. From Chicago they had journeyed on, sometimes sleeping in their wagons, and sometimes on the floor of some house opened for them. There were bright, black-eyed children peeping from the recesses of the covered wagon, as their mother was talking to Mrs. Lester, and one little girl sat intently reading. Mrs. Lester bade her goodspeed, and the woman, with brightened face, thanked her for her words of kindness and sympathy.
The last day of their stay in Dixon at length arrived, and with it came Aunt Clara, whom Norman had never seen before, but whom he very soon learned to love. She showed him his picture when a baby, which his mother had sent her, and she found it difficult to trace any resemblance to the tall boy before her.
Norman stayed with her and his uncle in the evening, while his mother went out with a gentleman and lady to take a drive on the prairies. The day had been very warm, but there was a cool breeze on those boundless meadows that undulated peacefully, in their rounded swells, to the far horizon. The corn was laughing in rich abundance, the wheat standing thick on the fields, after the sun had set, leaving its luminous track of light in wavy radiance; one huge cloud towered up in solitary grandeur, its bold outline gilded by those parting rays.