prospered. The men liked him, the dogs fawned upon him, the horses whinnied at his voice. And then, just as he told himself he couldn't possibly make room for another joy,—came Gwendolen.

Cyrus, when his eyes had cleared of the golden blur, drew a chair to the bed, put his two elbows on the rim, set his face upon his hands, and deliberately made acquaintance with his daughter. The miracle of his wife's love, the immortality of springing seed, the awe left over from his boyish dreams of heaven, all hid themselves in that small, pink frame, and looked out upon him through its feeble gaze.

He wished to name her "Susan," after his wife, and, as it happened, after his mother also. Mrs. Todd would not consider it. She desired her child to have a "pretty" name, something high-sounding, even sentimental, that would look well in a novel. Her thought whirred like a distracted magnet between three euphonious points,—"Gwendolen," "Guinevere," and "Theodora." At Guinevere Cyrus at once took an obstinate stand. It suggested to him guinea-hens.

"Then 'Theodora,' Cy. What is the matter with 'Theodora'?"

"It sounds like the tin tail to a fancy windmill. I can just see it spin!" declared the anxious father.

"But the sentiment! It means 'gift of God,'" pleaded Mrs. Todd, in the voice she usually kept for church.

"Shucks! She don't need a label, 'made in heaven,'" said Cy. "Nobody 'd take her as coming up from the other place. Why, if she dropped there now, she'd put out flames like a hand extinguisher,—the blessed cheraphim!"

"Well, 'Gwendolen,' then. Surely you can't find any such ridiculous objections to 'Gwendolen.'" The young wife now was plainly on the verge of tears.

"It's fancy and high-falutin' for my taste," said honest Cyrus, "but it's not so bad as those others. If you want it, have it! I can't stand out against you, darling. I can call her 'daughter' when I'm tired."

So Gwendolen she was christened, and in time Cyrus became not only reconciled, but actually proud of the pretty name, saying that it sounded yellow, like her hair.

In earlier years of struggle,—pleasant stress it had always been—Cyrus Todd, in the wide, lonely life of the prairie, had become a reader of books. His pious English mother had not died before transmitting to her boy her veneration for the great souls of the past. Among his very few possessions, brought originally from Pennsylvania, were three books;—Shakespeare, the Bible, and, strangely enough, a copy of Marco Polo. During the days of poverty these three formed his sole, incessant reading. Afterward he bought more books, generally bound garbage-heaps of literature, perpetrated in rich boards, and disseminated by strenuous agents who urged to purchase with a glibness unknown to any since Beelzebub. A few good books came to him, generally by a fortuitous mischance. Imitating his neighbors, he sent in subscriptions to the "Western Farmer's Evangel" and "The Horn of Plenty." He read everything, bad or good, keeping new words and phrases strictly out of his daily vocabulary. His time had not yet come for mental segregation.

Chiefly because of this modest simplicity of his speech, no one suspected him of the growing passion. Never was a figure less scholarly to view. His keen eyes of bluish green, with their trick of closing slightly from underneath when interested, seemed to look out toward horizons of actual experience, rather than along those shadowy vistas down which the pilgrim band of thinkers moves. His limbs, loosely hung, were made for striding over furrows. His mouth, thin-lipped and straight, sensitive at the corners to any hint of humor or of pathos, showed early lines of shrewdness and self-restraint. Never a great talker, he was, as a listener, an inspiration. His silences in conversation were not of the brooding, introspective kind in which one seems to be planning his own next remark, but of deep and intelligent interest in what his companion was saying. He was alert, practical, interested in many things, sympathetic with many views.

Within the badly printed pages of the "Farmer's Evangel" he found his first clue to the outer world. This was an illustrated article on rice culture,—in Japan. Before he had turned the first column he felt the threads of destiny pull.

"Them little chaps is all right, I guess," he remarked aloud, at the top of the second column.

"No red rust on Johnny Jap!" he murmured admiringly, at the third.

With the fourth and last strip of reading, mated to a pictured group of Chinese coolies flailing rye, he let the paper fall and his soul go straying.

The descriptions of Japanese method and result were bald enough and full of error. Beneath them, as through a tangled undergrowth, he saw reality. Joining this new knowledge to remembered tales of Marco Polo, an electric spark flashed out. Old Marco was not a mere romancer, then, fellow of Sinbad and Munchausen, but a speaker of truths! There existed still, somewhere on earth, those marvellous countries with old, old cultures stored for us with prophecy, and a crowded generation through which must still run the living sap. If one went west, always west, to the edge of a great water, beyond that water he would reach Japan,—as once Columbus cut the sands of Hispaniola. At that first moment came into Todd's mind, half dreamily, though not the less imperishable because of shimmering mist, a determination to travel, some day, to that Far East, and see for himself what Marco Polo must have seen.

Todd, after his marriage, continued to grow rich. The pretty cottage was abandoned for a great house near "town." It had hallways, a porte cochère, and a huge billiard-room which none but the cat ever visited. The town itself, in its spidery focus of busy railways, had not existed when Cyrus first came. He had often strolled, whistling, through future business blocks, and over smoking breweries.

The Todds "grew up," as they termed it, with the place, Cyrus specially clinging with tenacious loyalty to the state which had made the background of so much happiness. As Gwendolen passed from a golden childhood into a maidenhood no less bright, Mrs. Todd was heard to murmur reluctantly mild objurgations against the "rawness" of the West, its unconventionality, and lack of true culture.

At fourteen, Gwendolen was not only precocious in school-work and music, but her beauty promised to be of so unusual and unmistakable a type that Mrs. Todd took fond alarm, and declared that the child must go at once to New York, where she could be decently "finished." Gwendolen protested and wept. She had her father's happy heart, and thought that nothing could be quite so near perfection as their life at home. Mrs. Todd, secure in her conviction, proved inexorable. Cyrus was appealed to, and something in the dejected look of his face gave his wife a thrill of triumph. She soon prevailed, and Todd, in person, prepared to lead his one lamb to the sacrificial altar of "society."

He left her on the brown-stone doorstep in New York, his heart far heavier than her own. The gay metropolis had no attractions then. He took the next train home, tasting his first real sorrow since his mother's death. He felt cold and chill at the thought of the big home emptied now of his idol.

Mrs. Todd met him, not with the expected torrent of tears, but with a face red and twitching in excitement. The leading political party of his state had "split," and he, the farmer, Cyrus Todd, was to be run