“Let me be,” she said. “You can’t make me over now . . . it’s too late. I’ll just keep on using plenty of soap and water. I like to see you girls look so nice. But there are too many things to do, to fuss with myself so much.”

That summer the old settlers held a big picnic down on the Chautauqua grounds near Stove Creek. It was a gala occasion. Youth must be served,—but not on the day of an old settlers’ reunion. Every one knew every one else. On all sides one heard the same type of comment: “Well . . . well . . . if it ain’t Mamie Balderman. I’d never have known you. Heavier, ain’t you?”

“That’s Anne Jorden. I declare I believe she’s carrying the same brown parasol.”

“Yes, that parasol’s as old as the schoolhouse.”

“Your daughter, Lizzie? No . . . not granddaughter . . . you don’t mean it? Why, it seems only a few years ago I was at your wedding.”

Most of the old folks, who were there, had come into the country as young married people. Some of them were bent and gnarled and weather-beaten. Others looked sturdy and clear-eyed. Many of the babies who had been wrapped in old shawls in covered wagons or born later in the soddies were there,—-now farmers and attorneys, doctors, preachers and bankers. By some peculiar thrust of Fate, that wag who plays jokes on us all, it seemed that those who had been poorest in the early days, were now the wealthiest,—those who had been of least importance, now the most prominent. Some call it the law of compensation—others, luck. It is, of course, neither one.

Standing about in twos or knots, they were all talking in reminiscent mood. One heard snatches of life stories on all sides,—a whole drama in every detached phrase:

“Yes, sir, when I got into Omaha, . . . I had ten cents. Two men had just been drowned in the old Missouri, and I made the coffins, . . . got ten dollars for them.”

“When the Mormon train went by, women and children were pulling carts. A child was crying . . . its foot painin’ from a loose laced shoe. Ma said she used to have a kind of nightmare afterwards . . . ’n’ in her sleep she would always be tryin’ to find that child cryin’ . . . in a long train of ox-carts that kept goin’ by ’n’ goin’ by.”

“Shucks, we made our syrup by boilin’ down watermelon juice. . . . Sure, it took an awful lot!”

“Yes, Uncle Zim’s gone. He and Aunt Mandy used to say if they ever saved a thousand dollars, they’d take it and get back East as fast as they could go. Finally they made it, but thought it would be lots nicer to have two thousand, so they saved and accumulated and then set the amount to four thousand. Never went back at all. Died four years ago, a few months apart. Left several large farms and bank stock besides ten thousand dollars to each of their seven grandchildren.”