On this visit she would help her grandmother with the morning’s work and then fly to the pencil and tablet which she kept hidden under the bench by the long double row of cedars. It was on a late June morning that the two were seated there under the big trees which, toy-size, the Deals had planted a half-century before. Laura took out her portfolio from the box under the bench, with, “Listen, Grandma . . . listen to this that I wrote this morning. It’s about you and Grandfather Deal:

“I know not if ’twas beating rain,

That lightly tapped the window pane,

Or if the dying embers flare

Shone softly on my old arm chair.

“But in the scent of dusky gloom,

That stole within my chamber room,

It seemed that from the shadowy wall

I dreamed I heard you softly call.

“Maybe it was only the book I’d read,

But I heard your voice,—you, who are dead.

You called me by a name most dear

And then I knew that you were near.”

There were tears in Abbie Deal’s eyes. “Why, Laura,—you didn’t do that yourself?”

“Yes, I did.”

“But how could you . . . a little girl like you . . . how could you have the feeling?”

“Well, I don’t know . . . I can’t quite tell you. But I get to thinking about a thing and it almost hurts me . . . kind-of in my throat or somewhere . . . and then when I work away and get it all written down, I feel sort of happy afterward. I don’t suppose you’d understand it.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” said old Abbie Deal. “I’d understand.”

“I like to read my things to you, Grandma.”

“And I like to have you, Laura. They seem splendid to me. I suppose they are not what critics call technically correct, but that can come with the years. It’s the feeling you show.”

For a long time they sat there in the morning sunshine under the cedars that had grown old. The flyer went through town, it’s thick black smoke writing spiral-shaped figures across the blue slate of the sky. To the east, the wide rolling prairie held on it’s breast the young corn and wheat and the grass of the pastures. The Reinmueller boys, grandsons of Christine, were plowing corn, with a new type cultivator. To the south and west, Cedartown with its comfortable homes and its paved streets overhung with elms and maples, sat astride the great highway that was once a buffalo trail. To the north, behind the curving arch of a wide graveled driveway lay the silent city of the dead,—on a knoll in the center, the monuments of the Deal and Lutz families.

“What are you thinking about, Grandma?”

“That your life is like a field-glass, Laura. When you look into the one end, the landscape is dwarfed and far away,—when you look into the other, it looms large as though it were near at hand. Things that happened seventy years ago seem like yesterday. But, when I was a girl, eighty years seemed too remote to contemplate. And now, it has passed. The story is written.”