“Manhattan?” exclaimed Charlie, eagerly. “Where is that place? We have asked a good many people, but nobody can tell us.”
“Good reason why; they’ve gone and changed the name. It used to be Boston, but the settlers around there were largely from Missouri. The company were Eastern men, and when they settled on the name of Boston, it got around that they were all abolitionists; and so they changed it to Manhattan. Why they didn’t call it New York, and be done with it, is more than I can tell. But it was Boston, and it is Manhattan; and that’s all I want to know about that place.”
Mr. Bryant was equally sure that he did not want to have anything to do with a place that had changed its name through fear of anybody or anything.
Next day there was a general changing of minds, however. It was Sunday, and the emigrants, a God-fearing and reverent lot of people, did not move out of camp. Others had come in during the night, for this was a famous camping-place, well known throughout all the region. Here were wood, water, and grass, the three requisites for campers, as they had already found. The country was undulating, interlaced with creeks; and groves of black-jack, oak, and cottonwood were here and there broken by open glades that would be smiling fields some day, but were now wild native grasses.
There was a preacher in the camp, a good man 59 from New England, who preached about the Pilgrim’s Progress through the world, and the trials he meets by the way. Oscar pulled his father’s sleeve, and asked why he did not ask the preacher to give out “The Kansas Emigrant’s Song” as a hymn. Mr. Bryant smiled, and whispered that it was hardly likely that the lines would be considered just the thing for a religious service. But after the preaching was over, and the little company was breaking up, he told the preacher what Oscar had said. The minister’s eyes sparkled, and he replied, “What? Have you that beautiful hymn? Let us have it now and here. Nothing could be better for this day and this time.”
Oscar, blushing with excitement and native modesty, was put up high on the stump of a tree, and, violin in hand, “raised the tune.” It was grand old “Dundee.” Almost everybody seemed to know the words of Whittier’s poem, and beneath the blue Kansas sky, amid the groves of Kansas trees, the sturdy, hardy men and the few pale women joyfully, almost tearfully, sang,––
“It was good to be there,” said Alexander Howell, his hand resting lovingly on Oscar’s shoulder, as they went back to camp. But Oscar’s father said never a word. His face was turned to the westward, where the sunlight was fading behind the hills of the far-off frontier of the Promised Land.
