At home again, Abbie thought she could not endure the sight that met her eyes. Over the burlap floor-covering lay a soft inch-thick carpet of dirt. Over the curtains and the beds lay the same grimy substance. It floated on the water-pail and in the milk in the cupboard. There was nothing in the house in condition to eat and nothing that could be worn without washing. And so, once more, the young pioneer mother bent to the task of fighting the elements, to help make a home on the prairie.

Surprisingly, that year, crops were good. There was an indication of better times to come. Prices went up. Will and Abbie began talking and planning about the new house. No, that is not quite true,—Abbie began talking and planning about the new house. It is the woman’s prerogative. Mack was thirteen now, Margaret eleven, John eight, and Isabelle three. They were getting too old to be packed in like little chickens in a coop, Abbie said. Every moment that was free from the ever-present hard work, she sat with pencil and paper and drew plans for a house.

“Even if it’s just a few rooms at first,” she would say to Will, “they’ll be nice, and we’ll plan it so they can be added to as time goes on. Can you think of anything grander, Will, than a sitting-room, all with clean, new, white plaster, and a kitchen that’s built to be handy, and two upstairs bedrooms for the older children?”

“I’d like to do it for you, Abbie-girl. Maybe we can, if I do a lot of the work myself.”

That summer they stopped at the J. Sterling Morton’s as they had often done, on their way to Nebraska City, and the visit inspired them both to greater activity in making a better home. The Morton house seemed the last word in grandeur with its bay windows and real shingled roof, its fancy wall-paper and figured carpet, its tidies on the backs of all the chairs and splashers behind the wash-bowl and pitchers.

That fall and early winter, remarkable weather prevailed. It was unusually warm. Migrating songsters stayed on,—the robins and the bluebirds, the phœbes and the red birds. Even an occasional meadow-lark gave its June call in that wonderful Indian summer. There was in the air that haze which is found nowhere but in the midwest, and at no time but late fall when winter loiters on its way,—that glamorous haze which is not air, nor sunshine, nor smoke, but a little of all three,—air from over the wild, free prairies, smoke from a thousand burning weed-bends and brush fires, and sunshine filtered through the sifting, shifting smoke and air. There was bronze on the clumps of oaks along Stove Creek, red on the maples, yellow on the cottonwoods, green in the late pastures, white clouds dipping low, and over all, that haze, which is not smoke, nor air, nor sunshine, but a little of all three.