Delighted with civilization, and peopled with memories, and joyous with the divine plumage ever hovering around me, my life ran on. I watched Saul narrowly. He would often take up his hat, after hours of application to science, and rush out of the house, as if a mission lay before him. He would come back, and devote himself to me, as if he were conscious of some neglect in his absence. I planned short excursions all over the adjacent country. I became addicted to angling, because I saw Saul liked it. There were many righteous eyeballs that reproved me for wandering in places not fit for a woman, and Aunt Carter became exceedingly disturbed, even to the point of remonstrance.
"You're spoiling your husband," she would say,—"he'll not know but what you are a squaw," she said to me one day, in true distress.
However, I endured it delightfully for three years. Saul received in one week four letters, each containing the offer of a professor's chair in a desirable institution.
For many months I had seen the spell weaving around my good husband; I had seen it flash out of his eyes; I had heard its undertone in his voice; I had felt it in his whole manner, and I knew the hour of battle was near.
I was strong, and I came to the rescue. It was on this wise. Hearken! is he coming? No, it is only the wind coming up the Big Blue.
We sat in our Skylight door in an April evening,—unwise, perhaps,—but we were there. Saul had taken down that wild warble of Longfellow's, "Hiawatha." He read to me until the moon came up; then he threw down the book, and said, "Pshaw!"
"What is that for, Saul?" I asked, in some surprise.
"It is not for the book,—for myself, Lucy. I had better not have opened it Let us go and talk with the Doctor." And we went.
Saul had not answered his letters on the chair question, and I put up a petition.
"I think I never felt so well as when I was in Kansas," I said. "Really, Saul, I've felt a strong inclination to cough for some time, every morning. The climate of Kansas is wonderfully curative for pulmonary difficulties. I wish you would go out there now, and build a log cabin, plant a few miles of maize, gather it in, and then, when the season is over, come back and go to ——. You know they value you too highly not to wait your time."