By a startling coincidence this Memory Gem was selected at random from a generous supply -- there was no particular significance in mind, it was just something that would do. But it was less than half an hour later as I sat here at my desk on routine work that put an end to all that had happened in a life of over 80 years, my husband's mother.

Our family has been singularly free from tragedy, and this, though it is a shock, is not a tragedy; it is just nature. What came between birth and death for this individual was an active and productive life, and she had lived some 20 years longer than any of her immediate family. Of late years her interests had been gradually narrowing, and for a year and a half she had had a full time nurse and was able to do little more than eat and sleep. Tonight she was put to bed as usual, after a day not much different than customary, and after a while just stopped breathing.

In many ways she had unusual good fortune in her life. She had two children, a boy and a girl, and they both lived near enough to see her every day. She had five grandchildren who all grew up here -- I used to think how nice it was that our children had one grandmother to see every day, and one to visit on trips. All the grandchildren are married but one, and she got to attend each wedding. All but Ruth were home at Christmas, and the youngest of the five great-grandchildren, a toddler, 1 year old, was just the right height to stand beside her couch and say, "Da da da" in a very solemn tone, and she was well enough to smile at him without moving her head and say, "Da da da to you!"

Sixty-two years she spent in the same home, all her married life, yet the last few months she kept asking to be taken "home." Whether she was thinking of her childhood home or a home to come no one could tell. She was buried on her 85th birthday.

It is not an easy blow for her 87-year-old husband but he has had a long time to prepare, and he knows the parting will not be long. Just a short time ago at a neighborhood funeral, as we stood outside the church when the casket was carried out, another neighbor, about his age, stepped up to him and said softly, "One more gone. You and I will be among the next," and grandpa answered, "Yes, that's right." They didn't know anyone was listening; there was no tone of fear or worry, just an acceptance of fact and a sort of quiet peace in their tones.

The four grandsons and two old friends were pallbearers.

It is odd, but in my 50-odd years of life this is nearest I have been to an actual scene of death; life had probably been gone a quarter of an hour when we arrived. And another odd fact occurs to me: For my youngest child, Joe, now 21, this will be a year he will never forget. Wtihin a few months he became of age, was best man at a friend's wedding, was pallbearer for his grandmother, and will enter the army.

It is three in the morning. The doctor has gone, and the undertaker. The children and relatives have been notified. Jim has gone to stay at his father's to soften the loneliness of the first night without her, and it is time everyone was abed.

Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.

Content thee, whosoe'er, whose days are done:
There lies not any troublous things before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.

-- Hope.

One of today's letters mentions a family bulletin board as being a help. Our family concurs in the idea. Each family can adapt the board to its own special needs. Ours is just a blackboard hung in the back hall right near the telephone and the back door.

On it we not only leave messages for one another but the feed man, relatives and friends who may drop by, telephone messages, record of callers, the daily egg record, or comments on farm work -- all these find a place from time to time.

Maybe I'll scribble "Ask me about oysters," or "News about Duke," and when Jim comes in to dinner, there'll be a reminder to tell him some joke or bit of gossip or news that he should know about but which I might have forgotten to mention. Or Jim will make a more or less cryptic report on some repair he has been asked to make, like "Some people aren't very mechanical. Thermostat needed a quarter-turn." Of course there are lots of "don't forgets" posted on the board, to catch the eye of the appropriate persons as they enter or leave.

For us, blackboard and chalk serves the purpose. Some places you might prefer a cork board for thumb-tacking notices, clippings, pictures. Ruth likes that kind. Familes with children of various ages find innumerable uses for a bulletin board. One child has to be out at Scout meeting, another at 4-H, one at high school band practice, mother shopping perhaps, dad in the field, -- but a bulletin board will keep them all posted about everybody's whereabouts, and about letters received, news of neighbors, plans for activities.

You all ought to try the system and see how much reminding and repeating it saves. -- Hope.

In reorganizing furniture and moving Jim's father to our house to live, we are coming across many an old letter and book and keepsake that sets us talking of years gone by. Often we refer to the printed geneology of the family to trace references to past generations.

One letter that held our attention today ws written nearly a hundred years ago by Jim's grandfather. He and a brother had come to Illinois in 1849, but Grandfather James had gone back to New Jersey in 1854 when called by the death of his father. This letter was explaining to Brother Joe the family plans. Instead of having a sale, or "vendue," they had decided to run the farm one more year, making a home for the mother. They told of the acreage of corn and oats and winter wheat they would have, mentioned buying another yoke of oxen, quoted the opinion of Aunt Sidney and Aunt Rebecca (they didn't approve) and so on. As it turned out, they did stay one more year in the east, then the whole family came out to Illinois in 1855 and have been here ever since.

But from details of the family we got to talking of farming methods and how much more work it would take to put in and harvest the grain in those days, and from that we went on to the development of machinery for small grain, from the cradle of old to the combine of today. Wonder how many of the readers will remember some of the machines Grandfather told us of, or who knows of others.

He doesn't remember the cradle except by hearing talk of it. He thinks one man cradled and another raked out enough grain for a bundle and tied it. But he does remember the Foye reaper, a sort of sickle and reel, with a man on a platform to rake off a bundle. The Foye was pulled by two horses, and a boy rode one horse and guided the team, as there was no place on the machine for the driver. Next came the dropper, on which you could mechanically trip a bundle, or whatever amount you thought would be enough for a bundle. Along about this time they used to "bundle by stations." Men would be put around the field at correct intervals, and the machine would trip or drop a bundle at each station as it came along. Then came the self-rake, and after that the March harvester, where the grain was cut and elevated something as it is on a binder, with a platform at the side and a man at each end. First one, then the other, would pull off enough grain for a bundle, put it on a table and tie. (Grandfather James invented a bundle carrier for this machine, so that several bundles could be carried along and then dumped in windrows.)

And then came that marvelous advance, the self-binder, which lasted many years as the standard harvesting machine for wheat, oats, rye, barley, clover for seed, soybeans, and so on -- with refinements and improvements added from time to time. It is still used some places but in our neighborhood it is practically eliminated by the combine. But Granfather says, "If you ask me, nothing can beat that self-binder. Sure, your combine saves some operations, and is very quick and easy, but you had better oats with the self-binder!"

Wonder if the youngsters who can't remember back of the combine and think of the self-binder as an antique will agree with him? I dare say, they think the oats we get now are plenty good enough. -- Hope.

It seems to me there is entirely too much frivolous talk among men about the frailties of women; for instance, about their propensity to move the furniture around without notice. Many irrefutable arguments could be advanced in favor of these frequent changes -- such as, good for the furniture, good for the floor, good for the rugs and paint, good for the morale -- but it is useless to contend with the illogical minds of men. Here is just one example of what a woman encounters when she tries to brighten encounters [sic] slightest deviation from routine.

When it became necessary to move grandfather's furniture to our house, there had to be some changes made. He has a big desk, and he has to have it conveniently located, since he is still active in insurance work, farmer's elevator and other affairs. But our office is not large enough for three desks. One had to be put into the dining room, and on account of location, lighting and such considerations, it was decided we'd better move Jim's to the new place and put grandfather's in the office. So far, so good. That was a man's plan, carried out by the men, hence incontrovertibly reasonable and logical.

Now before we go farther, let me impress upon you one fact: For 15 years or more Jim's desk had been left in the same location to the inch. After every housecleaning it was restored to its exact place. My own desk, at the other end of the room, had been shifted a bit here and there, and back again, and arrangement of correlated accessories had undergone trivial, if frequent, alterations. But Jim's desk had known this one transfer, and this one alone, as I say, for more than 15 years. Yet -- can you believe it? -- a few days later I happened to remark, half to myself, while we were doing the supper dishes, that I believed when housecleaning time arrived I would move my own desk and its miscelany of files and supplies to the dining room and his back, to leave the office entirely to the men. Jim's mouth fell open in utter astonsishment, and he nearly dropped my favorite cut-glass jelly dish.

"Move it?" he expostulated. "Move it? For heaven's sake, why? Eternal change!"

Isn't that just like a man? -- Hope.

Memory Gem

Some folks dream of becoming something; others stay awake and are something.

It will be 21 years this April since our "little sister" arrived but due to some mistake somewhere along the line had to be hastily rechristened "Joseph Sidney." Now it has happened again! Our oldest son's wife has another boy. The doctor had confidently predicted a girl and she was to be named Margaret Lynn. He had also predicted she wouldn't arrive for another week. In fact, he was right in only one prediction, it was not twins. And with all the boys' names there are, we are all too much surprised and bewildered to select enough for this husky babe.

The world is certainly going to the dogs. Six grandchildren and only the first one a girl. What kind of a law of averages is that? Write to your congressmen -- this must be amended! -- Hope.

Vanity plagues the feminine contingent at an early age. Our only grand-daughter, Caroline, now 10, has broken her wrist; hardly a break, either, but enough injury to require an X-ray and a day's hospitalization. They put her to bed, took her temperature every three hours, gave her pills and shots and then an anesthetic while the bone was set, and even made her ride downstairs to the taxi in a wheel chair. "I dont' get it!" she told the taxi driver. "All I had was a broken arm." She has been home from school all week, going to the doctor every other day and lying around the house with the arm elevated much of the time in between.

When it was finally decided she needed the day in the hospital, she really enjoyed the experience which was her first of the kind. She got quite a kick out of all the hospital routine, and made friends with the other girls in the ward -- one had an operation on both eyes, another surgery on her throat which had been cut when she swallowed something sharp, etc.

But one thing really got her down and seemed the greatest indignity she had ever had thrust upon her. At bedtime that night she murmured, "I knew I'd have to have the hypo and all those other things, but why did I have to wear that horrible hospital gown!" -- Hope.

According to the latest national statistics, women for the first time in our country's history outnumber men. This sober statement reminds me of a parody my father used to sing: "Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long; 'tis not with me exactly so, but 'tis so in the song."

We might paraphrase and say that women may outnumber men nationally, but without grandchildren 'tis not exactly so. When Timothy Allen arrived a fortnight ago, we called your attention to the disparity in our ratio -- only one granddaughter to five grandsons. Today we can announce that our second son and his wife are doing their best to conform to national statistics and to bring our family into better balance. As of 2:45 this morning (we were called by long-distance at 3:30 a.m.) they are the parents of a daughter, Karen Christine. (This child was supposed to be a boy, who would have been called Eric. But that's the way it goes.)

To summarize, our score stands thus: Seven grandchildren, two girls and five boys. Ruth and Phil have Caroline Lucile, Richard Stevenson and Mark Alden. Wilbert and Betty have Dennis Jobe, James Michael and Timothy Alan. Ernie and Inez have Karen Christine. Some of those names are typical of modern America, the melting pot of the world. We borrow names from all nationalities. Here we have quite a tinge of Irish and Scandinavian, two strains that don't happen to be in the family, actually, at all.

I'm thinking of those mothers with lapfuls of babies when "Hope took the helm," whose families grew up in the same era as ours, who used to write, "Our Jean is Ruth's age, we have two boys just as close together as Wilbert and Ernie, our Sam is only a year older (or younger) than Joe." How are all those youngsters now? And how many grandchildren have arrived? How does our score compare with yours?

To have a new grandchild is wonderful; to have two within a month is notable. But more than that would be an anti-climax. You will be relieved to know that no more are imminent.

Like all the others, the two new ones are bonny babies. Emerson said, "The difference between the wise and the unwise is that the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at what is usual." The never-ending miracle of babies is that they are practically all perfect. When you think what infinite ways their complicated little mechanisms could go wrong, you are terrified, and you are humble with awe that so seldom anything does. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

I can't understand why they call money "dough." Dough is something that sticks to your fingers.

When we get depressed by the moaning about the high cost of living and the demands of all sections of the economy for more money, it does us good to meditate on at one young couple we know. The unions cry, "We must have six days' pay for five days' work!" The very way they express their demands rubs us the wrong way. Why should anyone get something for nothing? If their work is worth more than they are getting, they should have more pay per hour, but never pay for hours they didn't work. They claim they can't make ends meet, they are being ground down by the capitalists who are making phenomenal profits. Probably it is true that some people are making more than their share. But the people who find it hard to get along might take a lesson from this young couple we speak of, who find inner resources of contentment and make themselves happy on whatever they have.

This niece of ours and her husband have been married about three years. He teaches history at the university and is working on his doctor's degree. Anybody familiar with that situation knows that he is not paid at the rate of a bricklayer or miner, yet we have never heard these youngsters make one remark about not being able to make ends meet. They don't have a car nor television nor lavish wardrobes nor a lot of furniture and expensive gadgets. They spend very little on movies and nothing at all on liquor and night clubs, tobacco and a lot of things that are essential to some familes. They love books and poetry and art and music, and any college campus is so rich in those items that they have all they want practically free. She doesn't work outside the home, though she is qualified to get a job that would bring in more cash, but instead, by choice, she just keeps house and makes a career of having a happy home. When they entertain, it is done so cheerfully, yet so simply, that there is no strain, financially or otherwise.

When a lot of relatives happened to gather in town at one time last summer, she entertained us all at tea. She had us in relays because we couldn't all get into her two-room apartment at once and anyway she didn't have enough cups to go around. She just washed up the cups between groups and re-set her pretty table and served just tea and some little anise-drop cookies which were made from a new recipe she had discovered. When she had us for dinner, she served braised oxtail, in such a happy manner that it tasted better than a four-dollar steak. She buys what is cheapest at the market and then hunts through her myriad cook books for a way to make it tasty. She buys her fresh vegetables at closing time Saturday night and gets bargains that way. When they run short of money, if they ever do, they don't borrow from her mother who lives near, or go into debt in any way, they just get along and enjoy what they have till pay day comes.

This campus on the prairies provides only the simplest natural recreation, no mountains to climb, no ski runs, no lakes for boating or swimming. They can go to the parks for picnics in the summer and go walking in the country in fall or winter or spring, till their cheeks glow and their blood bounds with health. Indoors they can make conversation with friends that surpasses the interest of a card game.

It is true that in some circumstances you have to maintain a car and have to have cash for transportation and pay more rent than these people and can't get to any sort of recreation without it costing. We have plenty of sympathy for anyone who is distracted by financial worry and the stress of modern living, but it is nice to know that there are still some families able to enjoy the blithe and gentle life of "plain living and high thinking" that was characteristic of our New England forebears, still some who make a science of living and an art of life. -- Hope.

I was amused at the moving of the desks at your house. I can imagine that the entire change in set-up is getting on Jim's nerves. In a case I know of, where a wife died, the husband moved in with his son, but in a small comfortable house in the same yard. He cooked his two meals daily and ate one big meal with them. That way they all lived the privacy of their own lives. It can be nerve-wracking to have that privacy disrupted. I'm sure your husband was only giving vent to pent-up emotions at the radical change of affairs, at an age when quiet means a good deal to a person.

We, too, have a brand new grandbaby, a March baby, if you please. Did you know March babies are supposedly smarter than any other month's? This new one is our oldest son's third little son. -- Betty Glad, Missouri.

March Babies Bright

Sure, March babies are bright! Didn't our Ernie become valedictorian at Illinois, top guy in a graduating class of about 1200? But of couse September, January and April babies are pretty smart, too, for Ruth, Wilbert and Joe did almost as well . . . they say February babies are likely to be the most renowned, and in our big family we didn't have ary a February child till the boys both married February girls, and now Tim is a February, too. I dare say he will be president or a second Longfellow, or something in due time!

That plan of a separate house would be excellent in many cases, especially where the widower was comparatively young and able bodied, and where the son had a family still at home or a wife with poor health. In our case it really works out very well. No, it wasn't nerves, he doesn't have them. It was just Jim's perennial habit of teasing me about the frailties of womankind. He and his father are very congenial and similar in temperament and habits. Grandfather is well for his age, but hardly well enough to "do" for himself, even two meals a day. The biggest drawback about living here is that he has to climb stairs, for we have no first-floor bedroom. With our children all away, there is no complication. With reasonable health and freedom from other anxieties, most any household with two generations, especially if adult can make a stab at harmony; but where three generations try to live under one roof, especially with one of them 'teen age, there is a chance for plenty of friction.

Hope's Family Story

As to my people, we lived in Urbana, Ill., when we children were growing up, though five of the six of us were born in Nebraska when the folks homesteaded out there in the '90's. After coming back to their home town, Neoga, Ill., for a few years, they moved to the university town, where there was plenty of building going on, as my father was a carpenter and contractor. It was not only a good location for his trade, but a good place for a family to live, and he could send all to college there cheaper than sending us away. All six of us are married now and there are about 20 grandchildren on that side and, let me see, seven great grandchildren.

My father passed away very suddenly from cerebral hemorrhage on the morning of June 17, 1940, the day France fell. It happened that I was on jury duty in Chicago at the time, and all day our group discussed the war situation and the tragedy of France, and it was not till the end of the day when I went back to the hotel that I learned of the other tragedy. It was dark by the time I reached home and until I walked up on to the front porch I was in a daze, but then in the dark of the summer evening I could feel or see the gentle motion of the big porch swing in the breeze, the swing he built, the swing he sat in so many pleasant hours, where we children and our children used to cuddle up to him and visit. That is when the realization swept over me that he was gone.

To this day, when I am there and hear that special squeak of the springs, or through the big window see the corner of the swing in gentle motion, there is a sharp pang at the knowledge that it is only the wind and not he, there just out of sight in the old familiar place. He was strong as an oak, a bulwark of strength to us all, so calm and dependable and gentle. None of us could believe that one so rugged couldn't outlive our small and dainty mother. She could believe it least of all, and never recovered from the shock. Three years later she, too, left us. The day word came that the end was near for her, I was at the far end of the state at Ruth's. It was mid-afternoon by the time the visiting nieces and I got started to Urbana. Shocked and anxious, we could talk of nothing but our mother and grandmother. After a few minutes silence fell, and then one of the girls said softly, "did you notice that we all suddenly began saying 'she was' instead of 'she is,' as though she is already dead?" and sure enough by the time we reached home, we found she must have died at just about that time.

She was my ideal of the perfect lady. I never knew her to do a selfish, unkind or discourteous thing, nor to shirk a duty. She ruled by kindness, and she was in the finest sense a queen. And as for brains and talents, she had them in near-genious quality, but all that was diverted into raising her family. Even when her children were through college and working on their master's degrees, they would call to her to spell or define a word, it was so much quicker than using the encyclopedia. Her definitions were more concise and lucid than the dictionary itself, and we would trust her spellings and her pronunciations against the world. Our brother, the only boy in the family of six, the best brother one could have, had passed away in California from coronary thrombosis just three weeks before our mother's death, a great shock. We never told her but she seemed to sense it, they said, just before she died.

We were all struck by the coincidence, a little later in going through some family snapshots, that these three, the first of our big family to go, were caught together in a curious unworldly scene on the shores of the Pacific when the folks visited him a year or two before. Just those three, with foreground and background misted out with spray, standing together and looking with quiet but unfathomable expression out into the distance, almost as though they had heard some strange melody and had turned together to see something out beyond our ordinary time and space. -- Hope.

Dear Mother: This is a lovely place to spend the summer! The children are having a marvelous time. This Lake Wissota is the nicest of the Wisconsin lakes we have seen, big, clear, sandy bottomed. We swim two or three times a day off our own dock. There's a very nice island out in "big Wissota" -- meaning the main part of the lake (we are on a little sort of "appendix" of the lake, so that we have that little bay one direction from the house and the "big lake" the other direction). We have the use of a lovely new Dunphy boat this summer, 14-footer, stable and roomy, so it will take the whole family for supper on the island. We have a nice shady front yard and all the swimming, fishing, sunbathing and picnics anyone could want. We like the island for picnics and beach fires, but we have had typical fisherman's luck so far -- every place we try the fishing was wonderful last year!

Mark is having a fine summer with his various zoological specimens. He loves any kind of animals, and this summer has developed an intense interest in skeletons and anatomy. We know almost no one so far but the family next door, and they are very friendly. The doctor treats the boys as though they were his grandsons, especially Mark, and Mark makes regular treks over there to study a skull which the doctor has. "I'm so glad I know a man with a skull," he told me one night. The doctor's daughter has a horse which Mark adores. Fluffy, the hamster, is still doing fine. And Mark has a painted turtle named Homer which the doctor found along the road and brought to him. Mark's first idea was to keep it in the bathtub but Phil thought up a more novel and much more satisfactory solution: he drilled a little hole in the shell where it extends beyond the tail, soldered a ring into it, and in that way tied Homer to one post of our dock, where he can swim and sun himself to his heart's content. Mark's collection also includes a huge tadpole which the doctor also presented to him. It has two legs "sprouted" and is a good three inches long -- must be a bullfrog tadpole. In addition Mark has a goldfish in a bowl, and a minnow drying out on the sun porch roof in the hope that he can preserve its skeleton.

There are many birds nesting around, orioles, flickers, robins and so on, and dozens of friendly little gray squirrels playing around the yard all the time. In fact, we have all sorts of wild life except the fish we've been trying to track down. The water is still too cold and too high, the old-timers say, for Wissota is supposed to be a good fishing lake.

Now I must help Caroline with a sewing project and Rickie with a model airplane he's building (machines are to him what animals are to Mark). -- Ruth.

Dear Hope: Words fascinate me. They have such tremendous possibilities either for good or for evil. Quite often I encounter a word which is new to me, and I've noticed that when this happens, it is not long before I see it in print; perhaps several times in succession. Someone has said that if you use a new word correctly three times, it has become a part of your vocabulary. I like to keep a dictionary at hand.

A Spelling Bee

I never hear of a spelling bee without remembering a story from my Grandmother Kate. She was such a dramatic story teller that her anecdotes are still prize specimens in the family, still demanded for retelling, along with Mother Goose and the fairy tales by her great-great-grandchildren.

This particular spelling bee may have occurred in Ohio or in southern Illinois -- I forget whether she was a scholar or a grown-up at the time. But anyway it was a common matter to invite a competing school in for a bee, and as some noble spellers had been developed, the contests would be long and exciting. On this occasion a charming young lady stranger happened to accompany the visiting delegation and the young man teacher in grandmother's school was immediately impressed. You know the old saying, that a man assumes  that his girl has all his mother's virtues in addition to all her other charms. Well, in this case he assumed that the girl was an intellectual giant as well as a  beauty, and he invited her to do the honors of pronouncing the words.

The two lines formed as usual, and the young lady began with the short simple words so that the little children could be in on the fun. The lines thinned out a little, but long before the contest got into the final heat, she pronounced a brand-new word that sounded like Edge-wipe-it. The stunned spellers made try after try, combining our 26 letters in the weirdest ways and still no one got it right. They went down one after another and the bee was over before it really had begun. Even the young man teacher was so stunned that he couldn't intervene until it was too late. In those days there was never any coaching by the audience, nor help from the master of ceremonies. It wasn't good sportsmanship to ask for definitions or explanations. You either knew the word or you didn't; you spelled it right or you sat down. It was only later that any one thought it good form to inquire about this strange word, and the dimpling little pronouncer wrote it on the blackboard for all to see. She was quite thrilled that little-old-she had given out a word that put down two whole schools! It was apparently her first and probably her last intellectual triumph. Such a simple word, too -- just five letters. Ee, gee, wye, pea, tee -- Edge-wipe-it, Egypt.

Oh well, it wasn't the first time that sparkling blue eyes and shining curls and pearly teeth and dimples had missed a man. That sort of thing goes back at least as far as Cleopatra of good old Edge-wipe-it itself. -- Hope.

One of those peaceful, somnolent late-summer Sunday afternoons we took a drive, my husband, his father and I, in a direction that we don't often have occasion to go. It was only 25 miles to the north and east of us, but it not only took us into unfamiliar country but into a sort of Memory Land.

Through the gently rolling countryside we drove, almost the only object in motion, with the stubblefields resting in the golden sun and the tall, green corn in its full glory of growth, just before it began to show the tawny fading of maturity. It was a settled community of big, substantial homes, spacious lawns and generous barns and farmyards. If we hadn't already known, we could have told by the hamlet of Stavanger and the names on the mail boxes -- Halverson, Peterson, Olson, Nelson, Johnson -- whence these settlers came. Beyond Stavanger and across the county line into Grundy we came to a white, one-room school house in Nettle Creek township, and that was our destination, for that is where grandfather taught his first school 70 years. ago.

There it stood, much as it looked when he taught there, he said, freshly painted and well-maintained, quiet in its vacation-time repose. From the schoolyard he pointed out the homes of his three directors and the place where he roomed and boarded. The preceding spring he and a chum, in school at Morris, had taken the teachers' exams just for a lark and both passed. At the time they were not quite old enough to fulfill the legal requirements for teaching but, by avoiding direct questions on the subject, they secured schools in adjoining districts, and before the term was out they would be old enough. Their schools were two miles apart, and they boarded and roomed together halfway between.

Grandfather had a large school, all ages, the oldest pupils being two young men newly arrived from Norway. He went home only once during the school year, at Christmas. And he walked the whole 25 miles; it took him all day. He had hoped to pick up a ride, but the roads were in bad shape and the few farmers who were hauling wagon loads of corn to town didn't want to put any more load on their horses. School ended in April and he went home by train, to spend the work season helping his father on the farm. It was either that April or the one before, when he was in school at Morris, that there was the big snow on the ground when he got home.

We went to the place where one of his directors had lived and found that he had long since passed away and the farm was in the hands of a nephew and his wife. They were very friendly and knew enough of the old family names grandfather mentioned to tell us that only one of the people he had known in 1881 was still alive, the son of one of the directors, who had gone to school to him that term. We went to call on this gentleman and it was a queer and touching scene to watch those two lonely widowers in their late 80s, both a little frail with age, peer intently at one another. We saw two old men, but they saw or tried to see the teacher and the pupil of 70 years ago, the teacher, 17, and the pupil, 16, at the time. By the time their visit was over and we had driven home with reminiscences all the way, it seemed as though we had been on a long, long journey. So many, many things had happened, yet so much was still unchanged. And we had only been 25 miles from home. -- Hope.

One trifle leads to another, and by this casual process we happen on to many an anecdote of "the old days," now that grandfather lives with us. For instance, on one of the many humid mornings we had this summer, when all the shakers balked, we got out some old salt cellars and little spoons. One of these spoons happened to be a souvenir from the World's Fair at Chicago in 1893. The tip of the handle was carved in a likeness of the head of Christopher Columbus. "How slow can a person be?" was my exclamation. "As long as I can remember I have heard mention of the Columbian Exposition but never connected it with good old Chris?"

"Oh, yes," was grandfather's rejoiner. "That was the whole reason for the fair, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. It just so happened that they didn't get ready in 1892."

"Mother and I went to it," he continued, and went on to tell about that trip. They took three days, went up by train, walked from the Dearborn station to the lake front and took a boat down to 54th street, the site of the fair grounds. And on the boat an Italian band played a brand new tune, the prettiest thing, grandfather says, that he had ever heard. It was called "After the Ball." He never heard it afterward without remembering those melodious strains floating out over the water of Lake Michigan that day.

They took a good deal of food with them and stashed it at the Illinois building; then would go there and have their lunch whenever they wanted to. It was a big building and many people made use of it; ever so many of them doing just what our folks did, eating food they brought from home. They took lodgings with a friend of a friend who lived not far from the grounds. One of the evenings they went downtown to a theater.

It must have been a thrilling vacation, with all the showy and educational exhibits and wonders. And it cost a pretty penny, too. For two people, for three days, counting railroad and boat fare, the theater, lodgings, meals, souvenirs and everything (even though they cut costs a little by taking that food from home), they blew in the grand total of thirteen dollars.

In 1951 you could hardly take your best gal to South Pacific on that. -- Hope.

Maybe you would like to read a letter from a mother in another war, another draft. It was written by my husband's great grandmother Hannah in New Jersey to her daughter-in-law in Illinois, Comfort, wife of her son James. At that time Comfort and James were young marrieds in their 20s with three little children. Grandmother Hannah was a Quaker as you will see by her "thee" and "thy." Her hand is fine and even, the punctuation and spelling a little quaint by our standards, and occasionally an "s" is made in the old long way so that it looks to us almost like an "f." Here is what she said:

Independence, 8th Mo., 21st, '62.

Dear daughter -- For such I feel thee. At this time I will not, I can not, attempt to delineate the hopes and fears or the gloomy forebodings that are resting on me at this moment. I have no wish to heap my sorrows on others or to raise unnecessary anxiety on thy already heavy burdened mind. That some of my family might be drafted has been strongly impressed on my mind for some time but I did not suppose any of them would enlist. A letter from Elmira last night tells me I was mistaken. And James, I suppose, is still liable to a draft. If he should leave, too, thy situation would be lonely, but the trouble comparatively slight to some in the vicinity of the south.

John Hays, one of my old school mates, removed to Virginia some years ago and has recently returned with his wife and daughter, leaving everything behind except what they could stow in a wagon. He had been compelled to take the oath to the Confederacy, after which he fed some sixty Union horses. It became known to the Rebels, he was imprisoned, and two weeks his wife and daughter lay in a loft or some place where there was room for only one to enter at a time, prepared to defend the place of entrance but not knowing what moment fire might be set to the building. I have not seen them and do not know how he escaped. His son was conductor on a railroad. They got after him, he jumped off and made his escape.

There has been many war meetings around here for enlistments and many enlistments, but it is thought drafting will yet be resorted to before the number is filled.

Has Daniel had a likeness taken since he has been there? I regret that I could not have had one. It seems long since I have seen him. I may see him again but it will not do to expect it. Well, I will try to leave this unpleasant subject and give the next page to more pleasant matters.

It has been quite cool for some days past but is quite warm again. Fruit is very plenty, cherries, apples, pears, etc. Peaches where there are any trees but they are scarce through here. I have been thinking to write for some days to inquire if pennyroyal grows there. If not I will gather some seed, as I still look towards a home there. James must have his hands full and the house must lay unfinished. Uncle James was at Rahway last week and called on Aunt Sidney. All well. Our friends in Hunterdon also well a few days since. Grandmother still walks to Quakertown. It is admirable how her strength holds out.

Will Daniel write to me? If he writes to you please inform me where a letter may be directed when you ascertain his whereabouts.

Joseph requested me to send him my likeness. I got two taken on sheet iron. They were neither of them good. The best one I sent him and the other I intended to send Daniel or some of the rest of you. I would like those grandchildren, Emma particularly, to still retain some little remembrance of her grandmother's looks, and this will only be a faint resemblance. They tell me it looks ten years older than I do. I got one for Walter before he went west and supposed he would leave it when he came away but I suppose he thought I got it for him, he must keep it. I asked Uncle if he had anything to say. He said he was going to write soon himself, had intended to ere this. It is very dry here at present. Corn is suffering and grapes drying up. Still Aunt Elizabeth's flowers look very nice. Several colors of dahlias are in  bloom and a variety of nice flowers in the garden.

With much love to you and your little flock I am every your affectionate Mother.

P.S. -- 22nd in the the morning. Several little showers since daylight. Word came last evening that three townships are exempt from drafting, ours one, their number being filled.

Apparently it was Daniel who enlisted (he was 22 at the time). And all the way through you can see how the mother's heart aches for the one who is absent at war. He was one of nine children. Three of the boys had gone west, but that didn't seem to worry her so much. And how relieved she was that the ones at home would not be subject to the draft. These Quakers did not believe in fighting, but still they held to their duties as citizens very firmly and would have accepted the call when and if it came. -- Hope.

When my brother and my sisters and I were young, it was a great, wide, wonderful world to be sure, but nothing like as wide as it seems to be for our children. Though part of us were born in Nebraska when our parents homesteaded there, we all grew up together in central Illinois. When we girls married we scattered as far as Michigan and Ohio; our brother in World War I was stationed away off in Washington state, afterward taught in south Dakota and wound up in California. Ours was the typical experience of an average large family for that generation. We thought we were pretty well scattered. But the next generation, well, listen to this:

Among us we had 20 children. Two are still in high school and the tailender is in eigth grade. But of the others, one boy in world War II was stationed in Cairo, Egypt, dreamed of homesteading in Alaska but wound up, happily, on the home farm with his wife and children. Another got into Europe with the invasion army and saw France, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. One with the navy air corps got to Cuba. Another signed up with the navy in his senior year of high school and has been getting his college education mixed in with semi-annual cruises in the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Still another got overseas at the end of the war and spent three years with the army of occupation at Trieste. The day he landed in New York, homeward bound, a girl cousin left from the west coast with her engineer-husband for a two year job in Hawaii. Her first baby was born out there. After two years in the states, the boy from Trieste shipped out from San Francisco for the Orient (maybe Korea?), and that same week a girl-cousin set sail from New York for Nurenberg, Germany, where she is to be librarian for at least two years. A sister who went along to see her off got herself a job at one of the world's biggest banks and will live right there where they have the Easter parades, Fifth avenue, New York. One girl was an army cadet nurse and spent two years at an Indian hospital in Arizona and now is following her officer-candidate husband wherever he is sent. And today our Joe starts his career in the army, no telling where all he will be before he comes home again.

And it isn't only geographic scattering; these youngsters are most diverse in their tastes and abilities. One girl-cousin has a research scholarship in bacteriology at Los Angeles; a boy is connected with some hush-hush atomic research on a college campus; a petite blonde is nearly through her pre-medical course on the way to becoming a genuine doctor; a tall and graceful brunett teaches art and dancing at a private school; one, married and mother of three, has begun to sell her writing. One girl married a doctor and lives in Ohio; another married an inventor and lives in a northern state; another a history professor at a state university.

Among them they have produced a baker's dozen of children, wonder where all of them will scattter when they are grown? This has always been a pioneering nation and each generation has found new worlds to conquer. The census bureau has just pinpointed the center of population for 1950 at a place in southern Illinois. Twenty years from now, if they count Americans no matter where they may live, where will the center be? -- Hope.

Not long ago we shared with you the quaint letter of Civil War times written by Quaker Grandmother, Hannah in New Jersey to her daughter-in-law, Comfort, in Illinois. -- Comfort, wife of her son, James. That letter was written in 1862. Here is one still older, nearly a century old, written in 1854 by the father of Comfort, who was living here in Illinois, to his son-in-law, James, who had taken his family back to New Jersey at the time of his father's death -- Hope.

"Respected Son and Daughter: It is some time since I have had any correspondence with you, but having the opportunity of perusing one of your letters through the politeness of Joseph, recording your father's death, which from appearances is a hard stoke to him. But it is a debt we all have to pay sooner or later and happy are they who are prepared.

"This leaves us all enjoying reasonable health, hoping it may find you and your concerns all well. In respect to your business here, Joseph has collected and deposited with me four hundred and seventy-three dollars, which I took the responsibility to lift your deed with a part of it. I gave Mr. Murray four hundred and twenty dollars to make out the deed, I gave sixty-five cents for recording deed, two dollars and forty-eight cents for tax last fall. In Joseph's letter you wanted to get timber for the balance.

"Now concerning the times in this far west. Everything in the shape of horse is one hundred fifty dollars. Some few may be less. Kit is worth a hundred and I have been offered three hundred for Jody and Nance, one hundred for Charley. Cows are from twenty to twenty-five dollars, wheat one dollar per bushel, corn from thirty to forty cents per bushel. Land is on the rise all through this country. David Strawn wants to exchange one eighty west of yours for your east eighty. Garver thinks you ought to exchange. Timber is worth thirty dollars per acre on the creek, likely some could be got for less. Work is worth sixteen to eighteen dollars per month.

"The spring had the appearance of opening very early but it keeps cold and dry. Last night it froze the ground quite hard. Spring wheat has been sown for some time past and some oats, though I think it won't do any good, it is so cold.

"I cannot think of all I would like to write but will content myself for the present by wishing you all the prosperity you need. Lucy sends Emma and Johnny a kiss apiece. Yours as ever, Samuel Milliken."

(Little Emma and Johnny, with their kiss apiece, were in their 60s when I first saw them, and both have been in their graves a quarter of a century or more. -- Hope.)

This fall when the merchants put away the Halloween stock and put out the Christmas wares, our first reaction was a sinking feeling, Oh, dear, is there nothing left of the old childhood magic? And when Santa Claus came to town right after Thanksgiving in broad daylight, rather garish and definitely masquerading, the depression got worse than ever. All the old charm and wonder seemed gone from the holiday. Then when a different Santa Claus appeared in every store, common as floorwalkers, and trees and wreaths and lights and tinsel appeared in most homes as well as stores, and everywhere you looked you were urged to buy this, buy that for Christmas - then surely  it seemed that the whole matter was commercialized beyond endurance and might best be ignored, except for the services on Christmas day.

Why, when we were little, we looked forward to Christmas in a thrilling imaginative way. The tree was never seen till it burst on us in all its glory Christmas morning (with some of our neighbors, on Christmas eve). And the gifts at our house were mostly small in money value, often home-made, but always surprises. Though I must admit that some of our playmates were awfully practical about the matter and pinned their parents down to promises in advance, one of them even boasting when he was 10 that he would get a bicycle for christmas when he was 12. It wasn't our custom to demand gifts -- we loved the unexpected. We wrote lettters to Santa Claus but we burned them ceremoniously in the fireplace, firmly believing that the wind carried the messages to the North Pole. So far as I remember our mother and father never infringed on the enchantment by reading what we wrote. It would have embarrassed us to have given our letters to a man dressed in a red suit and artificial white beard -- that would have seemed like begging and would have destroyed the marvel of it all. The first thing we did on Chritmas morning was to throw the windows open wide -- and it would be really early, with the air still dark blue with night and the stars still bright overhead -- and sing as lustily as we could, "Joy to the World." Then we would rush downstairs to the wonder of Christmas. Gifts were part of it, but I don't remember them as being the peak of interest at all -- it was the whole exciting wonder of the spirit of the day.

Maybe it is because we are getting older, but from Halloween to the middle of December the thought of Christmas was something of a disappointment and a burden. We went through the usual motions - the fruitcakes, the cookies, the candies, the lists, the sewing, the planning; just chores, just habit.

Then came a lift, when we heard that the soldier son would actually get home for the day. Maybe that was the catalyst needed -- or maybe it was a combination of items; A bit of snow, a chill in the air, a cloud pattern in the sky, the sun-bright gleam of wonder on a child's face, the unexpected strains of a favorite old carol. Whatever the cause, suddenly the elements fell into the right pattern, touched and fused and blazed into the ancient miracle, the same old unquenchable, flaming loving-kindness toward the whole world.

So has it ever been and so may it ever be. And happy is the home with children and grandchildren to renew the glory every time. May you all have the Christmas which is Hope, the spirit of Christmas which is Peace, and the heart of Christmas which is Love. -- Hope.

Christmas day, a most curious one so still and gently peaceful. Only two human beings in the house and one of them asleep. Being from a big family, I can't remember a time when there wasn't a crowd for Christmas. Later our children filled the house, and by the time the two older boys were away in service we had grandchildren to swell the party.

But this year! The plan had been for all of us to go to the second son's new home and help little Karen celebrate her first Christmas. Snow upon snow practically immobilized traffic for a week beforehand, and Christmas eve added eight more inches, but that wouldn't have daunted us. The trouble was that our Dad had flu and a distressing cough, and was not fit to travel or to be in a crowd. So at our urging the young folks went on as planned -- the oldest son, his wife and three boys and Joe the soldier-boy home on a week's leave.

Grandfather, not caring for the arduous seventy-five mile trip with the chance of being holed in somewhere indefinitely by road conditions, preferred a ten-mile trip to be with his daughter's family and celebrate with his latest great grandchild (our grand-niece), just three weeks old. That left just Jim and me at home. The traditional feast was modified to be appropriate for an invalid and served early so he could go to rest. So here I am alone.

Alone, but not lonely, for there are all the gifts and cards and letters to enjoy. It seemed that this year more people than common included personal notes with their greetings, many of them long heart-warming letters. Much as every one appreciates them, in all the Christmas rush there is seldom time to answer promptly. But for once here are several quiet hours on the holy day itself, when the mood is right and the heart is warm. It seems that ideas flow more freely and words fall into place more gently, "so hallowed and so gracious is the time."

Among the letters here must be a word or two to all you readers who have made the years so rich for me. It would be hard to find words abundant and tender enough to express all my appreciation and affection for you. Hundreds of letters, day after day, revealing so many admirable personalities, give a lift to life that no one can imagine who hasn't had the privilege of receiving such a wealth of mail. Truly, you are a goodly company. In the printed word the rest of you get just a semblance, though it is amazing how much personality comes through -- but to see all the handwritings besides is a superb experience. Every word you write finds a receptive reader here. Thank you all! Come often and refresh our hearts.

It is nearly dusk now. Even the snow can't reflect enough light for me to write much longer, yet it would be a sacrilege to turn on the lights at this witching hour. Before long the children will be home again, but meanwhile let's rest quietly in the glow of the fire, in the soft glitter of the ornaments on the Christmas tree and their reflections on the white Madonna on the mantel, in the invisible glow of memory and friendship.

By the time you read this the old year will have gone into history and the new year will have begun it's cycle, but perhaps it will still not be too late for this message to you all:

God bless thy year --
Thy coming in, thy going out,
Thy rest, thy traveling about,
The rough, the smooth,
The bright, the drear --
God bless thy year.

-- Hope.

Memory Gem

Whatever else be lost amid the years,
Let us keep Christmas--its meaning never ends.
Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears,
Let us hold close this day, remembering friends.

Thy own wish wish we Thee in every place,
The Christmas joy, the song, the cheer,
Thine be the light of love in every face
That looks on Thee, to bless Thy coming year.

When Li'l Joe the soldier got home for Christmas he was lugging on his back a great big load, not a Santa Claus pack but one of these big army laundry bags, a sturdy green cylinder about four feet high and two feet across, packed with GI garments and a goodly portion of Kentucky. They had been out on bivouac for a rainy week and had no time or opportunity to get their outfits cleaned before starting their leaves, and not wanting to let them lie dirty so long, he just fetched them along. When he spread them out, coated an inch deep, it seemed, with that yellow-red sandy clay, his Pa remarked, "Well, at least they didn't waste any good farm land when they took that area for an army base." Don't be insulted, Kentuckians, we really have a soft spot in our hearts for that state because my father was born there, but up here in the Nawth nothing looks like good farm land to us unless it is black. I will say that the Kentucky dirt washed out a lot easier than some of our Illinois mud.

It was really rather nice to have some laundry brought in again. For years we were used to getting clothes boxes in the mail, until recently when the parcel post rates increased so much that Joe and his buddies turned to the helpy-selfy automatic machines near the campus (which system they like very well after they learned by experiment that it is best not to put the gaudy sox in with the white underwear). Just a few days ago one of our older boys remarked, quavering his voice in imitation of an old man, "Times is changed! In them good old days I got my laundry done for 18 cents a week, and got a bonus back in every batch, apples, cookies, chewing gum or candy."

But what I wanted to say was that you're never too old to learn. When sewing shoulder patches on for Joe after the clothes were all cleaned and pressed, I remarked that he didn't have enough patches, shouldn't there be one on each sleeve? Wilbert did. And Joe replied, "Sure, he did. But the only time you have a right to wear a patch on the right sleeve is after you have been overseas with that outfit."

That was news to me, and I pass along the nugget of information without charge in case you can find use for it. Also, you are supposed to set the patch just half-an-inch below the shoulder seam. Betcha you didn't know that, either. It would be nice to have a patch on both sleeves so you could see them from any direction you approach, but on the other hand it's nice that only one is necessary per garment when you are doing the sewing. They are the toughest things to stitch! -- Hope.

Memory Gem

The best way to knock the chip off a fellow's shoulder is to pat him on the back.

Probably all of us have fleeting memories, at times, of strange experiences in remote childhood, too transient to put into words. But I wish that some day our 2-year-old Mike could, and would, be able to explain to me his sensations of last night. It was just a trivial incident, but curious.

Wilbert and Betty, going out for the evening left the three boys here, the two littlest ones already pajama-clad for bed. Baby Tim only gave us a drowsy smile, then rolled over in his play pen and went to sleep. Seven-year-old Dennis occupied himself with crayons and busy-work till his regular bed time. But 2-year-old Mike was off schedule. Every time he was tucked up on the couch, he would soon slide off and come, bright-eyed and affectionate, to cuddle on my lap and watch his big brother. Thinking to induce him to settle down, we made three pallets on the floor, Mike's in the middle. Dennis went off to sleep as soon as the lights were out; Gram dozed off too, but in a little while came to with a start when she found the middle pallet empty. I called, "Mike! Where are you?" And almost instantly a roly-poly figure came from somewhere and slid back into place.

This happened half a dozen times or more, and it was impossible to tell where all he went. I never heard him leave, but once I could discern him by the fireplace, staring intently at the embers. Once he was silhouetted against the French doors. And once, when he didn't get back as quickly as before, and I was startled enough to get up and grope for a light switch, here he came paddling in from the hall, and when he gently collided with me, he wrapped his soft arms around my knees. Nobody knows how far abroad that tour had taken him, maybe through the kitchen and dining room.

All this time he never said a word nor made a sound. He didn't bump into anything or as much as rustle a paper. He wasn't romping or teasing, he was just savoring a novel adventure, exploring in the dark. He was as sure-footed and silent as a cat. The point is, did his eyes adjust so that he could actually see in the dark like a cat, or was he protected by a baby's boundless faith that nothing would hurt him, day or night?

Some day I wish he could, and would, tell me all about this experience, but of course he never will. Maybe when he is grown the fleeting memory will come back to him and give him the shadow of a thrill. But he will never tell any one. As the saying goes, words couldn't express it. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

The smartest person is not the one who is quickest to see through a thing but the one who is quickest to see a thing through.

We set out from San Francisco bright and early on the home stretch of our rather impromptu trip to California, and now we were to have no more time for visits, side trips or sightseeing for David was headed for home like a hungry horse at the end of a hard day, or to put it more poetically, "he was the sworn companion of the wind." What we saw would be observed strictly from the road as we sped along, filled out by the memory of what geography and history we could bring to mind. This time we crossed the Bay bridge and wound through Berkeley and other cities that fringe the eastern shore, then struck out northeast for Sacramento. That was about the last place we noticed much tropical vegetation. No more palms and eucalyptus, acacia and pepper trees, but as we said before, while it was wonderful to see those exotic things, it really seemed comfortable and nice to look once more on good old maples, oaks and evergreens.

It began to rain before we were far out of Sacramento, and then to snow. When we went through Donner Pass a thin blanket of white already lay over the mountains and the stormy aspect really made the passage more impressive, for we couldn't help but think back to those days of old when that brave little party of pioneers met their tragic end at this place, starving, freezing and betrayed. We wondered how they had the audacity to seek a way through the mountains. It was bleak enough for us, on that good smooth road, with humans and machines within call if we had trouble, with a heater in the car and food available whenever we wanted it. Such a far cry from the situation then. And still, with all our modern advantages, the weather can still be master, for right here only last year two crack trains were stalled for days in the snow.

By the time we got to Reno people really looked almost blue with cold and the gas man told us they expected a foot of snow by morning. The temperature had dropped suddenly just the day before. The rain would stop and start again, and from time to time it would be snow or sleet or hail; once in a while the sun came out. We went over plains and through mountains, and finally as the rain got heavier we pulled up at Lovelock for supper. Margi and I assumed that was the end of the day's travel. But no! Not with David at the wheel. On we went with ominous mountains drawing close and then receding from us, and a heavy black cloud hanging over the orange strip of sunset sky behind us. We passed Battle mountain but haven't any idea what battle it was named for -- probably some Indian affair. We went through Emigrant Pass in complete darkness and maybe it was just as well -- no telling what damage our nerves might have suffered in daylight.

Finally we pulled into Elko and called it a day. David did the room-scouting for us all the way home, and in this place he secured a palatial suite at a huge motel, three big rooms and bath. Sometimes you hear talk of exorbitant prices for tourist accomodations, but we didn't find any. This was the most expensive anywhere and it cost four dollars each. It might be that we could have bedded down as many people as we liked for the same price. With three double beds and a big davenport, seven could have been quite comfortable. We only regretted we got in so late, for it we had arrived early, and if we had know anybody to invite, we could have held quite a large reception in our apartment.

The cheapest rooms we had, a couple of nights nearer home cost us only $7.50 for the three; but as it was quite late and the hostess was about as sleepy as we were, we are inclined to think she made a mistake. Most places we paid three or three and a half dollars each. At Riverside, Cal., the charge was only $2.50 each, and that was the place where they gave free orange juice when we arrived and offered free coffee and rolls before we left. Most of the places have about the same accommodations: all the hot and cold running water you want, ice water to drink if you want it, always a shower and sometimes a tub besides, air conditioning when it is needed and heating arrangements, very comfortable beds, clean and attractive furniture.  Usually there is a good cafe within convenient distance, and what we appreciated was that there was usually one open early enough in the morning to accomodate us. Some places have carports alongside but oftener the cars are just parked around the patio in front of the rooms. Back in Texas and some of those mild southwestern states, we noticed several times that folks just pulled off the road (the shoulders are wide down there) and arranged sleeping quarters in the car. We thought that a young couple trying to economize could very well save quite a bit of cash by doing that. Several times we saw carloads of young fellows just getting up in the morning with a mirror hung somewhere on the car, shaving and getting freshened up for the day.

But to get on with our story, we started from Elko about seven and the weather had cheered up considerably. It was still cold and windy but the sun was out. As we drove on into Utah we thought at first a lot more snow had fallen than we had realized, for the plain was white and crystalline as far as we could see, and with that pale blue sky and bright sun, we thought for a minute we were looking out on a typical winter snow scene. Of course it was just the great salt flats, and off in the distance we could begin to see the blue waters of Great Salt Lake. We reached Salt Lake City at noon and there we made a call on a friend who had lived at the University of Illinois with her two little boys while her husband finished school there. Now they have four boys. We intended just to say hello, take a swing through the city and go on. But she insisted on our joining the family for lunch and then she went sightseeing with us. This was a great advantage, for she had been born and raised here, and was herself a Mormon, in fact, a great-granddaughter of Brigham Young, so she could give us many more interesting and intimate details than most guides. We saw the monument where their leader first said, "This is the place," and of course the temple and the tabernacle and the sea gull monument and the pioneer museum, as well as the lion house with its 20 gables, where Brigham Young's many wives dwelt in harmony together. Our friend pointed out the gable to the apartment of her great-grandmother. Even with this much sightseeing we would have been on our way sooner, except that we got not one of the conducted parties on the temple square, and followed along and listened to the excellent guide expounding her people's history and beliefs. The Mormons are truly a very devout, kindly, generous and tolerant people. Although they suffered much persecution themselves, they never retaliated but invited other sects to come into their valley and settle there. They got along better with the Indians than many pioneers, because they won them with kindness.

It was interesting to think afterward about how close we had been to the heart of three great religions on this trip, and how genuinely generous all of them were: the Franciscan padres of the California missions, the Mormons at Salt Lake, and the Methodists at Santa Barbara. And that reminds me that we copied down the words from two plaques in the church at Santa Barbara. One, it seems to me, was in the church school part of the edifice, and it said:

"Our courteous Lord willeth that we should be as homely with Him as heart may think or soul may desire. But let us beware that we take not so recklessly this homeliness as to leave courtesy. -- Julian of Norwalk."

And the other was near the entrance of the church itself, and said:

"This is a place where prayer is wont to be made, a house which Christ by His Sacramental Presence has made a home."

It was after four when we prepared to leave Salt Lake, and we had hoped to get as far as Rock Springs, Wyo., by that night. Our hostess declared that we couldn't get farther than Evanston, as the road was mountainous and winding and not in extra good condition. But she didn't know David. We found the road just as she said. And it began to rain again besides. But there was no stopping our driver now. At Evanston we merely stopped for supper and went on. We didn't quit till nearly midnight, but we got to Rock Springs, even though we had to wind around mountains in the dark. Back in 1940 or 1941 we had stopped at this town before, coming down from Yellowstone past the Grand Tetons. It didn't exactly seem familiar because it was too dark to see anything, and we drove through and stopped at a motel on the far side, where we could bound out early and dash east again in the morning. At Rock Springs we got another roomy apartment, again with three rooms and a bath, and an extra cot in the kitchen -- and it cost $10 for the three of us.

Soon after 7:00 next morning we were on our way again, on a bright, cold, very windy day, and for quite a while we seemed to be on an endless plain, hardly a mountain to be seen even in the distance -- and this, we found later, was the Great Divide basin. We stopped at Wamsutter, Wyo., and there we had breakfast and mailed our last cards -- and beat them home by three days. We passed the continental Divide and soon ran into mountains again, through Rawlins and Laramie to Cheyenne. When we stopped at Cheyenne before, it was July and the time of rodeos, with many bright-shirted cowboys on the streets. This time we saw something entirely different, namely the air force base named for Francis Warren. David had been stationed here for a while when the base still belonged to the army, and he wanted to take a few minutes to run through it again and show us where he lived. It is a huge place, long established and therefore like a real town. We were impressed by the large brick residences of the officers and the smaller but cheerful cottages for the men (new since David was there), but what impressed us most was the snappy saluting that David rated everywhere he turned. Up to now, among all the aunts and girl cousins, he was just our boy, to park the car and run errands, carry bags and in general look after us -- very dear to us but a little on the order of a porter, we should be ashamed to admit. To be sure he was in uniform, but those captain's bars didn't mean a thing to us civilians. But dear me, when you get into a military environment, how they do count!

A Good Housekeeper Speaks

I was so busy to the day's far end,
I did not write that letter to my friend
In her great need. I had no time at all
To return a neighbor's recent friendly call.
The little child who passed my door went by
Without a smiling answer to her shy
Advancement, and the beggar at my door
Went on, still carrying the burden that he bore.
Even my nearest and my dearest knew
I had no time to spare the long hours through.
And now tonight my house is clean and bright.
The window sills are scrubbed, my boards are white,
The beds are smooth, each dish, neat on its shelf.
I'm pleased with it . . . but not pleased with myself!
Dear God, if a tomorrow may be mine,
Help me, instead, to make my spirit shine.
One should not be too spent at close of day
To read an old loved book, to kneel and pray.

-- Grace Noll Crowell.

Memory Gem

The way to get along with a woman is to let her think she is having her own way. And the way to do that is to let her have it.

Memory Gem

I do the very best I can and mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference. -- Abe Lincoln

Memory Gem

"Badly off as I was, I had a feeling as soon as I got here that this was the place to be, poor or well fixed." -- Victor Borge, Immigrant from Denmark to the U. S. A.

Memory Gem

Too many of us are like wheelbarrows, -- useful only when pushed, and easily upset.

Memory Gem

The sting of a bee carries conviction with it. It makes a man a bee-leaver at once.

Memory Gem

In a flat country molehills look like mountains.

Everybody talks about cutting down expenses but, like the weather, few do anything about it, or if they do (mostly the women) they are likely to get razzed by an indecorous family, especially if they try to work off some of the cheaper cuts of meat, the so-called specialties.

You take oxtails. You might as well, because we won't any more. They are about the cheapest thing on the counter, and by some epicures are counted delectable. Whatever taste I personally might have acquired for them is definitely clabbered.

Ours were braised. The platter was nicely garnished, the way you are supposed to do to charm the appetite and throw off suspicion, but there was mistrust in the countenances of my husband and my father from the moment they spied it, and when it was passed to grandfather there was a very definite pause before he served himself; so long that I was obliged to name the dish. "Oh, he said, "Well. They are supposed to be edible." And he took a scant portion. As my husband took what he considered his fair share, that is all he could reasonably be expected to tackle, a very small amount, I felt I had to explain, and instead of dramatizing the matter or claiming an experimental urge, I came right out with the truth -- namely, they were cheap. "Oh," said he. "Well. I have never seen a better demonstration of the fact that you get what you pay for, or a little less."

There was silence for a little while. Then my husband inquired, as he tried to sever a morsel of meat from the bone, "In a cut like this do you carve with the grain or crosswise?" A little later grandfather felt impelled to add an anecdote. So he told about the teacher from town who boarded with them years ago. She knew absolutely nothing about farm life, but was so fascinated by it that she would follow the men around in her free time and watch all that went on. The family happened to have a cow at that time which had a bob-tail due to some accident. The young lady remarked that she had always been under the impression that a cow had a longer tail than that. "Most of them do," replied the man, "but this is our soup cow. Whenever we need a soup bone we just come out and cut off a joint."

Then to cap the climax, my husband meditated out loud. "I wonder if there is very much anatomical difference between a horse tail and an ox tail?" In view of the recent horse meat scandals in Illinois, this remark was the crowning indignity.

Oh, well, the dog enjoyed what was left. He might have enjoyed it still more in the raw instead of cooked and garnished. And if we have any more oxtails around here, that is the way and the place they will be served.

How can a lady save money if her menfolks won't eat things like tripe, haggis and braised oxtails? How can a cook win the battle of the budget if she is continually sabotaged? -- Hope.

Our 2-year-old Mike is beginning to use a good many words. Someone in the family even taught him to say "Abraham Lincoln" by showing him the picture on the calendar, and now he recognizes that face on any calendar or in any book where he comes across it. The Abraham is quite a mouthful, but it is recognizable, something like "A-ma-man"; the Lincoln is plain as can be.

Now that he can pronounce words, his mother thought it was time for him to take place in a family ritual. For a long time he has understood about bowing his head during the blessing at table, but the other day when Dennie finished saying grace, his mother said, "Now, Mike, you say Amen." But Mike didn't get the idea that first time around. Apparently he thought the first act was over and conversation was beginning. So he raised his head, smiled cheerfully, and said, "A-men Lincoln!" -- Hope.

Back in childhood days we loved that magic phrase in the fairy tales "a year and a day." The prince was bewitched for a year and a day, the princess must wait for a year and a day, the lover must seek for and work for his beloved for a year and a day. In legal papers, both medieval and modern, we come across the same prase. And a few years ago in New Orleans we heard it in connection with burials in the above-ground vaults in the old St. Louis graveyard. Those who can't afford their own family mausoleums may rent the vaults for  "a year and a day." At the end of that time the vault may be rented to someone else and the prior remains put elsewhere. It is as though "a year and a day" is enough time for a family to recover from its grief and cut the final ties with the dead.

The phrases came to mind most vividly at our house when our son's family moved into the big house where Grandmother passed away 12 months ago. It wasn't exactly planned that way, but when it came about, it seemed singularly appropriate that the move was made exactly after "a year and a day." The anniversary and the extra day were gray and disconsolate with cold dripping winter rain, but moving day was bright with brittle winter sunshine. It seemed symbolic, as though it was really time now to break away from sorrow and definitely take up a new way of life.

When the end came last winter, Grandfather came to live with us but left the old home just as it stood. He kept the oil furnace going and whenever he liked (and that was often) he would go up there and sit in the familiar chairs, look over his books and keepsakes, listen to their favorite radio programs, and remember. By fall we had gradually done some sorting and rearranging. He had given away some of the furniture to friends and relatives, sold a few things, moved some down here. When the plan developed for the son's family to move to the bigger quarters, the small house being pretty crowded for three lively boys, there was painting and papering, wiring and plumbing to be looked after. Just by chance, or would you call it fate, everything was ready for the move the very day after the "year and a day."

So the old home is gone for good. Externally the house looks the same but inside, it will be forever different. Even if the old paper and the old furniture had been left, the house would have taken on new character with a different family living there. It could never be the same And yet the change didn't just come all at once on moving day. All year the changes had been subtly growing, and even before that, it wasn't home as it used to be, for Grandmother had been ill so long, with strange nurses in attendance. It makes you realize how few changes really come suddenly and all at once. Gradually Grandfather had been growing used to the change, and so had we all.

To the young folks the move meant starting a whole new era in their lives, with their thoughts all toward the future. To my husband and me the change was not sharply disturbing, for we still have each other, in our own home. To Grandfather it was the keenest blow of all. From now on the old home will live only in his memory, and it will live not as it actually was at the end, but as a composite of all the years they spent together there, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. For the rest of us the door to the past is gently closing. For him, to whom our home is just a waiting room, that door will never entirely close until the door to reunion and a better home opens on the other side. -- Hope.

March

The month of miracles is here again, the wind
Is carrying bird cries, and the smell of loam.
It bends the frozen leaves of grass to find
A pale heroic crocus. Green has come
In little mounds of moss, and near the river
A troop of budding willows bend and quiver.
The birds now put an end to silent days,
The earth is young, familiar things are new.
Better foreswear a hundred blossoming Mays
When all this prophecy will have come true
And spend this afternoon out in the wind
Hearing the birds cry, watching willows bend.

-- By Martha Keegan.

Well, this is a day to prove Grandfather's contention, "The more machinery you have the more work there is to do."

It is an early April evening and men all over the neighborhood are still working. Supper is over and the dishes done, and when you step out on the porch you find the air a-hum with the drone of tractors, and the lights hover over the fields in all directions. The season opened up two or three weeks earlier than it did last year, and the oats and clover will be mostly in the ground before the night grows quiet and those fireflies settle down.

A generation ago farmers worked from dawn to dusk -- they couldn't work longer because they had no way to light the work and the horses couldn't stand any longer hours. A generation ago you would not have heard much but the creak of the windmills this late in the evening. The farmers, true to the adage, would have gone to bed with the chickens. And here they are, with all the modern inventions, laboring far into the night to get the crops in. The machines can go on indefinitely, and the men can take turns to keep the work going steadily on.

But don't for a minute think of them as slaves to the land. They are enjoying themselves. If you were close enough, you could probably hear every one of them whistling or singing -- seems to me I even hear one of them in the distance giving a yodel. I doubt if you could find any group anwhere in the world more contented and satisfied with with what they are doing right now. They are out in those fields because they want to be, not because they are driven. There would be other days to sow that seed -- but the season opened early and favorably and they want to do their part to help it along. Planting weather came along just right, not too early, not too late. And they start this crop with the unexpressed but exhilarating feeling that this may be The Year, the year when everything will go just right and every farmer can show what he and his land can really do when the chips fall right. No late frosts or early freezes, neither flood nor drought, showers in the night so we can work in the day, strong sun so you can hear the crops grow, no insect pests, big yields -- everything just so.

When the season starts too late, cold and wet, we work harder than ever with the hope that things will be better later on; when it comes too early, we say to ourselves, look out, we'll pay for this, be on guard. But when it starts like this, we think This is It! So all together, everybody -- here we go! -- Hope.

Memory Gem

Life is something like an artichoke, you pull out the leaf and only the tip is edible.

Enthusiasm carried us away. After that night of the humming tractors as the men ebulliently sowed oats and clover by artificial light, we had rain, then a freeze, more rain, a frost, more rain, and a gloomy Easter.

Possibly this is not the year. But we are undaunted. We are too far toward head-waters of our streams ever to be endangered by flood, so we haven't the nerve to complain of any moisture that is short of the terrible profusion of Old Man River and the Old Mizzou. No strange under-earth mountain ranges are rumbling with earthquakes beneath our farms. No tornadoes follow their baneful path over our acres. Even the hailstorms swing around to the north or to the south of us.

We never have a complete crop failure in this area, nor dust storms, nor the villainous locust and grasshopper pests that some folks have. And if our oats have washed out, or frozen, we still have time to reseed. This may not be the year, but it is bound to be a year good enough for all practical purposes. Chances are that our seeding is unharmed, and we have just had a reminder that the elements are not yet entirely under the control of man.

The women who uncovered their perennials and peeked under the dirt mounds to see if any roses survived last fall's early freeze find that little damage resulted from this late cold, wet spell, and now whenever the air warms up, everything is ready to boom. And those early bonfires were not a mistake either. The farmsteads that looked woebegone under the rain are now greening up neatly. Autumn bonfires fill a human need, with the pungent smell of burning leaves, a sort of incense that hovers over the laying of the earth to rest. But there is exhilaration about spring bonfires, with all their vigor, a casting out of all discouragement with the debris, a beginning again. It's hard to tell which are most staisfying. Depends on the season we are in, I guess.

So are we downhearted? No! Here we go on another season, not the year, but a good year, with some encouragements and enough troubles to break the monotony. Here we go again, putting our whole hearts into the job of producing more than our share, to make up for the stricken areas where work will be so delayed, so that the sum total of America's agricultural yield may be, as usual, plenty for all. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

If earrings grew on ladies' ears,
And this fact has been proved,
They'd spend the last cent that they have
To get the things removed.

-- Aneta Ziegler.

The arrival of the first grandchild is a world-shaking event, and the announcement of same an impressive project. Announcements of later arrivals get ever-lessening emphasis and eventually become merely routine, just a matter of record.

We now have our eighth. (She says sedately, trying to appear calm and collected.) Our second son's second child, supposed to be a man-child, turned out to be a second girl. But with Gram and Grandpa that is quite all right; the girls are pulling up a little more even in the race. (I say, Gram, not very dignified, perhaps you think. There was a time, with our first, when we were called Grandmother and Grandfather, and there was also great-grandmother and great-grandfather. But when more grandchildren got to talking there seemed to be less and less time for the old formalities, and so, in line with a snappy age, the youngsters of their own volition abbreviated the terms they used oftenest. Hence, Gram. My husband says he can stand that, but he doesn't think he could put up with Granny.) Our first was a granddaughter, then there were five grandsons in a row before we had another girl in the collection, so now our score is five boys and three girls. The tentative name is Theresa Gail. (Where does the younger generation find all these names?)

The father of this newest one was called Sonny in his childhood and it might as well have been called Sunny, for he was always smiling. He was the lucky type -- scarcely any illnesses or accidents, and tasks were easy for him. The youngsters who rode to high school with him used to say enviously that all he had to do to get his lessons was to ride home with his books in the same car; a sort of airy osmosis seemed to transfer the information to his brain, they claimed. His tour of duty in the navy was not too tough, and the war ended before he got into combat. He got his first job for the asking, and the second came without even that, and promotions have followed in amiable succession. Only in this one matter has he met frustration: both of his boys have turned out to be girls. Maybe it is good discipline for him to meet this much rebuff.

That remark about the eighth grandchild being routine was just conventional. As a matter of fact, the more you have, the more fascinating they become. When we only had Caroline, it seemed to us that everything she did was unique -- no other child in the world could be as charming and as interesting. Then her little brothers, Rick and Mark, began to do the same things at the same stage of development; and what was more surprising, the cousins, too, followed the same pattern of development -- Mike and Tim and Karen often duplicate some sweet little habit that I remember from Caroline. If a person had enough granchildren, he would finally come to see, that in spite of individualities, all human beings are basically much alike. So we might sum it up that the proper study of mankind is grandchildren -- you get so much more loving kindness and generosity of judgment that way than if you just study man. -- Hope.

Did all the one-room country schools have baseball for their favorite sport? It seems so to me when our children were attending our little Maple Grove, and my skills fell far short of what was expected at the school picnics! The youngsters played "scrub baseball" because there were seldom enough pupils to make up two full teams. They had to use girls and first-graders and the teacher to have enough to play at all, and when picnic day arrived, the children assumed that all the mothers would want to play, too, as nothing, in their estimation, was any more fun. They had to have special rules for little players, at least they seemed to make allowances for them, but for this particular mother they had to make allowances for total ignorance and bewilderment.

At our childhood home there were five girls and one boy; we had more girl cousins than boy cousins, there were 50 or 60 children in our block, and our school rooms had about 30 pupils apiece, so we had never had to resort to playing with the boys to have enough for games. We were whizzes at jumping the rope and playing jacks, but baseball! That was entirely beyond our experience. To tell the truth, most of my knowledge of the game was acquired while Joe, our youngest, was in high school, for by that time we had radios and it was my duty to listen to the main games closely enough to give him some sort of report when he got home. By degrees I learned not only the names of the players but many of the intricacies of the sport. Such and such a play would occur and the announcer would say so and so about it, and what did that mean? In that way, Joe found out what happened and at the same time taught me my lessons.

To this day I enjoy a game over the radio but I have serious doubts about understanding everything if I just watched a game without someone telling what was happening, and as for playing, if I ever should be where I had to take part, I haven't a doubt that, being left-handed, assumng that I ever hit the ball enough to run, I would head for third base and go around the wrong way . . . Just this spring, we took up the boards and stakes where the boys used to play horseshoes alongside the lane, having decided to let the grass take over, as it has been trying to do ever since they went away. And last week, in cultivating a flower border, I unearthed an old croquet ball, damp, dark and partly split, which the children had probably lost in a game years ago. It's been a long while since we played a game. But the grandchildren will soon be old enough to enjoy it, maybe we'll have to get a new set soon. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

The two greatest highway menaces are drivers under 25 going 65, and drivers over 65 going 25.

Summer evening in the country; a pleasant time, even in this atomic age, even on the verge of a political campaign, after the day's work is over and the supper done and the family gathered on the lawn for that restful period before bedtime. For men, women and children it has been a busy day, in the hay field, the corn field, the strawberry patch, the cherry tree, and the garden, and the play area (which is the fenced yard for the littlest children and the whole farm for the school-agers). The son's family and the hired man's family have gone to their own homes and everything is quiet. And since this is such a momentous time, suppose we record for posterity the spirited discussion of vital topics that occurs in just one typical midwest family in June, less than a hundred miles from Chicago, where a vast amphitheater is being air-conditioned for the opening, in less than a month, of the first of the two big party conventions.

Here we are, the three of us, my husband, his father and myself, in comfortable lawn chairs near the lily pool. First there is a long period of silent meditation -- or at least there is silence. Then my husband, who has been staring somberly at the lively commotion among the lower life in the pool, remarks, "If a baby toad is a tadpole, would you call a baby frog a fradpole?"

Only vague and langid smiles greet this statement. It is not controversial. Meditation, or silence, proceeds. Then grandfather comes out with the gentle question, "That funeral at Sunbury. Do those folks bury at Ransom or at Odell?"

Here is a matter with two sides. My husband offers an opinion. "Odell, I think. It's closer. Or is it? To tell the truth, I don't know exactly how you get to Odell cross-country."

Grandfather contributes, "I went cross-country to Odell once, literally. We struck right out across the prairie. The folks were going over there to visit the William Strawns and took me along. I was pretty small, but I remember stopping on the way to gather gum from the rosin-weeds."

"For heaven's sake, what for?" inquires my husband. Maybe you think excitement is picking up, but the words are more violent than his tepid tone of voice; he is just making talk.

"Why, to chew, of course. That was long before the days of Spearmint!"

"Must have had an awful taste."

"No, it was good . . . The best way was to snap it off the tops of several and wait a while, and when you went back quite a lot of juice would have accumulated at the tops of the stalks. . . I even remember getting gum from ironweed. It would collect in little white drops on the back of the leaves."

"And what kind of flavor did that have?"

"I don't remember now, but we liked it."

At this point the subject of weed-juices seems drained dry.

Eventually my husband ventures on the subject of hay, with the remark that the new mown field smells good, and the additional gratuitous information that the yellow sweet clover is in full bloom in a lot of fields.

"That sweet clover!" exclaims grandfather. "We used to fight that like we do sourdock now. I remember a good many years ago a patch got started near the lane where I went for the cows every evening. I got to taking a spade with me each time and digging up some. When I got rid of that patch, it was a real satisfaction . . . And now look at the price we pay for a pound of the seed to start the stuff deliberately!"

The evening wears on into dusk. One by one the fireflies bestir themselves, trying out thier lights tentatively in the grass, then gradually rising into graceful flight. "How far that little firefly throws its light." This murmur comes from the one who likes best a paraphrase Shakespeare, and who up to this time has not uttered a word, although she is a member of the supposedly wordy sex. And as the fireflies rise higher and stray farther, her thoughts dart in and out over the years, remembering when the children used to chase the little creatures with happy shrieks, and how when the lightning bugs got out of their reach, it was time to herd the little folks to bed. Do they (the fireflies, that is) just keep on flying all night, higher and higher, flashing their little stern-lights on and off for hours -- or do their batteries run down? Never remember seeing any fireflies when getting home late at night. Sometimes we must make a point of just sitting and watching until we find out how high they go and how long they are active, and whether there is a time when you could watch them selttling down gracefully and gradually back into the grass, just as they rose, only in reverse, like a film run backward.

"But not tonight," she says aloud, and firmly, as she starts to the house. Either the men's thoughts have been following along in the same groove, which is most unlikely, or they just don't care, for there is no response at all. Eventually they, too, will wend their way to bed.

So goes the profound discussion of vital issues on just one farm, in this momentous time just before the big conventions, in this atomic age. Multiply this by hundreds and thousands, and what do you get? I don't know. There is probably some deep significance here, but it is beyond me. We leave it to you to figure out. If the Russians could hear all these multitudinous comments, they would know what makes America great. Or would they? And if they would, would they mind explaining it to us?

Anyway, whether the Russians have any conception of it or not, this is one of the happy times. Today we have been busy, but not too busy. We are tired but not too tired. It is hot but not too hot. Sleep will be wonderful when it comes. A good day. And good night. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

One thing I find children have
In common with a pup.
They are able to make a bigger mess
Than they are able to clean up.

-- Aneta Ziegler

By the time you read these lines, your editor will be en route on a brief and unexpected trip to sunny California, or perhaps home from same. Maybe it is brutal to break the news to you-all so abruptly, but that is the way it was broken to me. In the midst of one of those days of which the song was definitely not written, "It's so peaceful in the country," a call came from my sister Margi in Urbana. Would I by any chance be able to drive out with her to California in her son David's car to meet him when he lands in San Francisco from Korea? Oh my goodness, this is so sudden! When would you leave? Tomorrow!

She waited to set the exact date till David got his sailing orders, and the plan had been for a young officer's wife to go along to meet her husband out there, and at the last minute she couldn't go. So it was up to Margi to find a traveling companion or leave the car at home and take a train, plane or bus. Still in a state of shock, yours truly agreed to go, provided the start could be postponed one day. California is lovely, and anyone would be glad of a chance to go, but really, if I'd had my druthers, I'd have chosen places nearer home, with a little more time to prepare.

Even without this phone call, the day was practically in convulsions here. It was like having a second earthquake hit before you got your breath from the first one. (Dad warns us to look out for earthquakes when we get near California.) The men were sorting spring pigs, after having welcomed 12 litters of fall ones in the previous two days (108 new pigs so far). It was the day for an interesting farm management tour to which they planned to go at about 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock, but due to the innate obstinacy of the genus swine, the pigs were not sorted till 12:30 and men and hogs alike were too tired to go anywhere; to say nothing of the unexpected dinner which mother had to prepare. But they picked out 110 barrows for market and 70 gilts to save and got them duly shut up in the proper pens. At 7:00 in the evening the truckers came to load. After which grandfather had to go to Ransom for an elevator meeting to help plan a big community picnic for Sept. 7, and your editor had to go to Kernan in the other direction, to help plan for the annual Harvest Home on Sept. 16, and the hired man and his family left for a two-day vacation down by Bloomington. Dad and Wilbert and his family stayed home, and well content they were to do so.

After my committee meeting, there was some planning and typing to do concerned with the Harvest Home and some installments to prepare for the Corn Belt Farm Dailies. That took till 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and the general feeling was that we had really danced the whole night through, which the song lauds as a pleasant procedure. This morning the washing has been done and some desk work; there are left the odds and ends of getting cash and travellers' checks, doing ironing, packing and sundry small tasks. Dad (who refuses to go with us, either with grandfather because it is too hard a trip for him, or without him because there is no convenient place for him to stay) is trying to persuade us to go by train instead of driving, thus saving both time and strength. I'm willing to yield right now but will have to wait and see what Margi says. If she says the word, we'll hop the El Capitan and be on our way. Of course, since the sole object of my going was to be a driving companion, there would be no point of my going with her on the train. But, dear me, after have sustained the whole shock of deciding and packing, you wouldn't make a change just on that account, would you?

Save for the above items and the routine canning of peaches and tomatoes, our simple rural life pursues the even tenor of its way.

Hoping all of you are the same, I am till further word, cordially yours. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. -- Samuel Johnson.

Well, we drove it. It took us six days and there were moments when we resolved that, just to get to California, we would not drive it again for love or money. We'd take a plane or train. But relaxing here in idyllic Santa Barbara the memories of strain are fading fast and we are almost ready to concede that, just possibly, we wouldn't object to another trip, particularly if we had a leisurely summer or winter to do it in. At the half-way mark we were smitten with dread at the mountains and deserts ahead of us, but we must admit that by another year whoever travels Route 66 will find a splendid pavement most of the way and the few stretches that appalled us will be eliminated.

The first day, of course, was routine. The route was just a means of getting somewhere else fast. We were familiar with the countryside and we by-passed all the big towns. Beyond St. Louis we welcomed the slight change in terrain, with Missouri's green wooded hills and grassy vales just comfortably different from home. The highway, even though it curved and dipped, was easy to drive and no problems disturbed our serenity. We pulled up on schedule at the loveliest motel we saw anywhere, cool and shady, air-conditioned, with a green lawn and a "worm" fence, and a most pleasant, quiet dining room across the way.

The second day was different. That was the day we had all our mechanical difficulties, and the weather grew hotter and the prospect wider and drier and more unfamiliar. We had got only as far as Joplin when we discovered the radiator was leaking. We found that the radiator on this particular model was made of iron during war shortages a year ago and the company instructed all to be replaced by copper ones by the first of this past June. Our nephew had bought the car in Pensacola, had driven it home to Illinois, had left it there and gone on to Korea. Somehow he had missed getting word that the part should be changed. However, we found a good shop where the man did the job and fixed us up in only two or three hours. No charge.

While we waited we wandered around the city of Joplin and found it a very comely place, with its wide, wide streets and its nice stores and its friendly people. We crossed into Oklahoma and found the vegetation getting more sparse and the spaces wider, the towns farther apart. Before we went very far we suddenly had a flat tire, out of sight of any habitation or tree on a blazing hot day. Luckily, before we had time to walk more than a few rods toward help, a young man came along and changed to the spare for us and told us that the tire was definitely defective. Part of the outer casing had never been properly vulcanized to the inner part, and pieces of it had simply torn off, and lay there beside the road.

All the rest of the way across the continent we were to see such scraps of rubber and to feel a sympathy with unknown travelers who had similar experiences. Our friend told us we would find a tire man in the next town but one. We spent what should have been the lunch hour prowling around that town trying to get to the place that people there all told us we couldn't miss, and when we found it, the proprietor admitted the tire should be replaced but he didn't happen to have the right size. He sent us on to the next town, Vinita, Okla., where they gave the same verdict, but the tire man was out to lunch. It seemed a good idea by then for us to have lunch, too, which we did, and then we took a look at a big department of conservation busload of native animals, such as foxes (which we found surprisingly small), and skunks and prairie dogs and quail and a wolf, and so on, on display in front of the handsome city hall. By then the tire man had done his duty and stored our new replacement in the trunk. Again no charge. But we began to wonder if this car, with only a little over 5,000 miles on it, was completely made up of defective parts, and if so which one would go next and whether we would always find the necessary replacements as easily.

Later that hot afternoon we witnessed a near-hit between a car and a truck passing, and we made one such pass ourselves, which was too close for comfort. As a result, by the time we got part way through Tulsa and found that due to road construction it would take us three hours yet to get to Oklahoma City where we had planned to stop, we felt that our nerves had taken enough punishment for one day, and we would stop there. However, we had gone considerably past the recommended motel and thought we could just go around the block and retrace our steps. That did not seem to work very well, and we found ourselves in the midst of beautiful tall and impressive civic buildings and churches downtown, but turned in our directions and at a loss how to proceed. Noticing we were near the Chamber of Commerce building we went there for help and were given a map with our way marked in ink. We were just to take an angling street for a block from where we were, turn left for a while, then turn right so far, and there we would be on Tenth street. "Yes, but we want to get back to Eleventh street," we said. "Oh, Tenth runs into Eleventh," said the girl brightly. We left, bewildered by the vagaries of city planning, but sure enough Tenth ran into Eleventh if you can imagine how such a thing could be, and it wasn't long before we were back where we wanted to be settled for the night in smallish but pleasant quarters, air-conditioned and comfortable. Once in, we didn't have the energy to go out again to hunt an eating-house but dined simply on some tomatoes and muskmelons, crackers and cookies which we had brought along from home just in case such a situation as this arose.

It has been a couple of years since we have gone touring to any extent and we must mention that motels have made tremendous improvement in that time -- and there are so many new ones going up everywhere, each excelling the other, that we wonder when the saturation point will be reached, and how many of the earlier ones will be crowded into failure, after all their investment by newer and fancier courts. One other point might be mentioned here; Whoever had the idea of giving ice water to weary travelers had a psychological stroke of genius. The very statement,  not "Do you want ice water?" but "We will send out ice water right away," gives a lift in torrid weather; and when that tinkling glass pitcher of sparkling water actually arrives at the hand of a friendly host, it is like "the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land."

In the morning, driving on to Oklahoma City, we were glad indeed that we had waited till we were rested, for a good deal of the way was detour. We will never forget that vivid red soil being scraped and manipulated to lay out a wide straight highway for future trips, but this present trip seemed exceedingly trying. In comparison with what we came to later, it was child's play.

It was at Amarillo, Texas, that night that we really got panicky. It isn't exactly clear why, except we were getting more tired and more amazed at the wide open spaces, feeling we could appreciate our country just as well or more from a plane, in much more comfort. We had been pleased at the fine wide roads in Texas and at the roadside clumps of trees like oases in a huge land -- so much so that we stopped under one of them and had an impromptu picnic with more tomatoes and crackers.

That night we were in commodious quarters, with a good cafe in connection with the motel, and we stopped driving early before we were too fatigued and refreshed ourselves by dressing for dinner. Everything had gone well, and yet when we got ready for bed and had written our nightly letters home and began to bone up on our procedures for the rest of the trip, we were suddenly appalled at the boldness of our adventure. How and why did we get into this project, we wondered; and could we ever make it over those lofty mountains and over the desert? We were so low in spirit that we even considered just stopping where we were and wiring David to come meet us there. Part of our depression may have been due to the hostess saying when she signed us in for the night, "Two women alone? I'd be scared to death." Part may have been due to the occasional comments of service station men about the hazards ahead. Anyway we went to sleep in a fine fever of worry. But the next morning we started on again with part of our fears allayed by rest. -- Hope.

(Tomorrow Hope is accosted by "The Law.")

That was Sunday of the Labor Day week-end. We had been warned at home to beware of traffic at that time, but we didn't have a quieter day in all the trip. Trucks were off the highway for the Sabbath, the weather was hot and brilliant but every one who was going anywhere (but us) seemed to have got there. Before we got out of Texas, buttes suddenly appeared and we began to get a variety of scenery, endless plains, then this more rugged conformation. We saw great herds of grazing cattle, and a few antelope came close to the road once or twice.

When we got past Tucumcari we had a new type of adventure; we were eased off the road by a traffic cop. We couldn't imagine what we had done wrong, but it turned out he suspected us, he said, of being one of a caravan of cars being sneaked across the state without paying an entry fee. He based his suspicion on the fact that our rear license plate was wired on instead of being bolted on. That had happened back in Missouri when we noticed that one corner had broken loose from its bolt, and finding a wire near-by and having no tools at hand, we had simply wired it into place. Then it turned out that the front plate was also wired on, which we hadn't noticed before. That probably happened because my sister had bolted on the plates herself and must have left them too loose, and when a nephew had driven her car to Chicago lately, he must have lost a bolt or two and wired the plate in place without saying anything about it. In Illinois it hadn't made any difference, but here they were more strict. It seemed odd to us that any one who wanted to smuggle a car across a state wouldn't be smart enough to bolt the license tags in place and make himself as inconspicuous as possible. And it seemed especially odd that any one would smuggle a car across which was a year old. However, we had been suspected. Of course our papers were in order and we had plenty of proof of our legal ownership and so on. The officer was convinced but suggested we had better get the bolts in as soon as we could. And there being a sort of blacksmith shop and garage across the road, he sharply summoned a man standing there to come across. It turned out that the innocent fellow was a tourist in trouble himself, not the proprietor. He had had three flat tires in a day and a half and was at that moment having some broken part welded in that shop. But being ordered over by a cop he came forthwith, and was kind enough to go back and borrow some pliers and a screwdriver, and even some bolts for the front tag, and in short order he had us fixed up. The cop had bade us a pleasant farewell and gone merrily on his way, whistling down half a dozen cars for speeding before he was very far away. What I mean, he was a public servant really on duty that day! As to the guy who fixed our bolts, we felt quite a friendly feeling for him. He had one kind of trouble and we had another, and while he was a westerner at the present time, he had once lived or visited in Illinois.

As we went on we speculated on how long our plates had been noticed, whether we were being followed by detectives across several states and so on -- for that morning at Amarillo, when we set the suitcases out the door quite early, ready to pack in the trunk, a police car had slowly and silently and darkly glided around the circle looking at the cars parked there. Ours was the only Illinois license (in fact we saw but one or two such on the whole trip, though Illinois folks are reputed to be great travelers, because, as some other states think, we have a good state to make money in but have to go away to enjoy it). At the time we had thought the police car was making a routine inspection and wondered if they made the rounds of all the motels every night; or if they might have been searching for a certain car to notify travelers that some trouble had developed at home -- and so on. But this experience made us wonder if we were under suspicion even then and had been eyed with distrust by who knows how many eyes. Not very many probably, in any case, for we never saw another traffic cop the rest of the way.

By the time this incident was over and we had exercised our imagination on all its aspects, we noticed that we were climbing higher and higher and hills were turning into mountains. Sometimes we swept around great curves but oftener we went up and down straight horrifying giant coasters. We thought to ourselves, well, today brings us to the highest elevations of the trip, and if we can just live through today we can surely face that one more hazard of the desert, and our troubles will be over. We stopped at some of the highest points, truly windswept heights. Of course 7,500 feet isn't very high compared with those peaks of the real Rockies farther north, around Denver, say, or in the Tetonos; but it's a whole lot different when you are doing the driving yourself for the first time, and we really felt we had achieved wonders. We felt so fine and got along so well that we went on farther than we had expected to, and put up at a most attractive Spanish type motel at Gallup, N. M., all white and pink plaster walls, with bright turquoise doors and window frames; with a vine-covered pergola at our front door and a lush inner court. We dined in state at El Rancho, a typical western lodge of logs hung in the foyer with Navajo rugs, something like the lodge at Starved Rock and at Yellowstone.

No air-conditioning here, nor from here on over. None is needed, for hot as the day may be, the nights grow cool giving blessed relief. The plaster walls hold out the heat of the sun, so the rooms seem cool even before daylight ends. Then suddenly comes that great restful chill, and the stars and moon seem near enough to touch. We slept in Gallup with the innocence of babes, with no foreboding of the morrow. We rested in the confidence that the worst was over, that we had fought a good fight and won.

Perhaps it is well that we can not know the future. We might not have slept so soundly that quiet Sunday night. But on the other hand, we wouldn't have been so well fortified to meet it. -- Hope.

(Take another jaunt with Hope tomorrow.)

It is a pity to go so fast on a trip like this that there is no chance to read all the historical markers, stop and look at points of interest, learn more about the crops and the culture of the people, and even go off the route here and there as much as 50 miles or so if there is something noteworthy to investigate. But on this trip we did none of those things. Our aim was to get here with the car in time to meet David.

One subject in which my sister and I are both especially interested is the Indians of the southwest, partly because Margi's daughter Anne had spent some time while she was a cadet army nurse at Fort Defiance, a Navajo Indian hospital. Her sympathies were much touched by the whole situation -- but more of that another time. On this trip the best we could do was watch for what signs of Indians we could see as we drove along. Of course we began to see Indians on the streets as far back as Oklahoma, some in American dress and some in native. In fact we are used to seeing Indian men in our own neighborhood, for they work along the Santa Fe railroad and some of them roam the village only four miles from our house at times. But out here in New Mexico on the Sunday and Monday of Labor Day weekend we began to see many more individuals in their showy holiday attire, probably gathering for some tribal event. Before we got to Gallup we saw many Indian houses made of a sort of soft-looking yellowish brick, and often a little roadside stand would be built at the roadside to match the house. Sometimes these stands were quite well-built, like little roofed houses, just big enough for a person or two to sit inside, with a little brick table in front on which would be laid out any items the Indians had for sale. Sometimes the stands would be ramshackle, built of branches and roofed with some sort of thatch, sometimes they appeared to have been started and abandoned without being finished, or else were falling into ruins. Through here their fields were green and healthy and looked well-tended; corn and alfalfa and something that might have been beans.

We saw little activity as we drove along, and most of the roadside stands were empty, but occasionally we would see a big white towel or rag blowing in the wind on an extension of the roof timbers, and that meant "open for business." Usually we wouldn't see anyone till we were right at the stand, then we could detect a person sitting modestly within, almost out of sight, with a little display of pottery on the table in front. There was nothing pushing about these salesmen! No placards or ads, just the white flag and the items for sale. If you cared to buy, just stop and be politely served. If you didn't, there was no pressure whatever. The ware seemed to be small and dainty and light in color, quite different from what we had seen blatantly displayed and advertised along the way in bigger, more commercial roadside stands. We made up our minds that at the very next place we would stop and see it and probably buy some. But at that point we ran clear out of the area of this type of house and shanty. We learned afterward that these were Laguna Indians, but we never did find any of their handiwork anywhere. They must be more reserved and self-contained than some tribes, less commercialized and keeping strictly to themselves. It will be something to look forward to in the future -- to see Laguna ware and learn something more of this tribe. By the way, we passed huge lava beds before we got to Gallup but haven't yet found out anything about them: how they came to be, how old they are, and so on. They looked black and tarry in the sun. That is another thing we will have to find more about.

We hoped we would find more of the Lagunas farther on, but as we neared Gallup the character of the Indian dwellings changed, some being of wood siding, unpainted, and some were grouped in villages. And beyond Gallup, the next day, when we came into Navajo country, the homes were quite another kind. The Navajos build hogans, round, with the roof sloping to the center where there is often left a hole for the smoke to escape. They have few windows and doors and are very low, as though they were used strictly for sleeping. They couldn't have been comfortable for much else. Often there would be an outdoor oven, and a stockade or roofless room where women apparently did some of their work. Very curious, and we would like to have stopped long enough to learn more. We did stop at a genuine old Indian trading post which has been there since the 80s and has a fascinating museum including the mummy of a Hopi cliff-dwelling woman. The old man there told us quite a bit about the items, and we bought some of the real Indian dolls and the silver and turquoise jewelry. He could have talked all day and we would gladly have listened -- if we had had time. That was on Labor Day, after we had left the pink-blue-and-white plaster patio where we had spent the night at Gallup.

It was at Gallup that we had our first chance to sit and talk with tourists in the lobby of the motel, so we took the occasion to find out a little about what we still had to face in our travels. If we followed Route 66 all the way we would go through Needles; how about that, would that be hard driving, would there be any better way to go? Oh, don't go by Needles! warned the honeymooning couple who had just come through from there. It is unbearable, they said; go by Las Vegas. Yes, said the proprietoress, by all means don't go by Needles, go either by Las Vegas or else down to Prescott and over  the desert. They took over the argument among themselves whether it was best to go to Kingman and put up there and start on very early in the morning for Las Vegas or drive clear to Vegas in the first place and spend the night there. The honeymoon couple were positive we should stop at Kingman; the woman just as positive that Vegas was best. Meanwhile we kept in our minds the suggestion of a service-station man farther back who had been just as positive that we should go to Prescott. We were grateful for all the discussion, but still were not sure what to do. So from then on we asked at every stop, and at alternate stops we would be told to go north and to go south; and the ones who advised going south alternated between advising crossing the desert by day and by night, and they varied in how comfortable or how uncomfortable the trip would be. One man said if it was him, he would go clear to Wickenburg and cross from there; another said by all means don't go to Wickenburg but cut off on 71 at Congress Junction. We decided that we would just continue to ask questions and leave it up to the last one we asked what we would do.

Meanwhile we had reached and passed Flagstaff, Ariz., and had practically decided to go to Prescott, since the desert way looked shorter than the northern, and in our innocence we thought that our main problem from here on was preparing for the heat of the desert. But at Flagstaff we had to make a choice between Route 89 from Ashfork and Alternate 89 from here. On the last advice before we left town we went toward Ashfork. No one gave us any inkling that we were facing anything as bad as what we had been through in mountain driving up to this point, and from the map we judged we had passed the highest places or at least wouldn't go any higher than we had successfully negotiated without a nervous breakdown. Maps tell you so much and omit as much you ought to know. It is a curious thing that everyone we have talked to since concerning our Waterloo has looked surprised and murmured, "Oh, that -- but there wasn't much of that. That's not so bad." However, to us that stretch we ran into between Flagstaff and Ashfork was the straw that almost broke the camel's back. It was a stretch labelled "Dangerous but passable" and that is exactly what it was. It was high, rough and narrow; there were two lanes but ours was the one next to the dropoff into the canyon. The whole way is only 50 miles between those two towns, but he narrow detour alone seemed twice that long to us. Alongside we could see the magnificent four-lane highway that was being constructed for future tourists, but for us there was only this nerve-wracking way. This and the early moment of panic at Amarillo and one later point in the desert where the three spots of utter discouragement we suffered the whole way; three moments from which we felt we would probably never recover. But within a few hours after we reached Santa Barbara we were laughing at our fears as heartily as anyone could, and our hair is no grayer than when we left home. -- Hope.

(Tomorrow Hope continues her jaunt to sunny California.)

That Monday night we spent in the lovely town of Prescott, Ariz. When we reached there we had been of a mind to follow earlier advice and get on down out of the mountains so as to cross the desert by night. One idea had been to linger till the cool of the evening in Prescott, having a leisurely dinner there while the sun went down. But the service-station man assured us that if we went on at all we had better go as soon as we could, for we had close to 40 miles of winding mountain roads in which we descended 2,000 feet. But then he admitted that when we had negotiated that stretch there wasn't much of any place to get a meal or stay for the night, and we wouldn't want to keep driving all night, after all day, without a rest. So we just stopped where we were, got quarters in a fine hospitable motel, had an excellent dinner across the street and got a Phoenix paper to read. They say the Lord always protects babies and fools, and we understood instantly how privileged we had been, when we found that during the Labor Day week end two men had run off the road at Winslow and been killed; one man had a heart attack while driving, just a few miles north of Prescott and his car and body had been found in the canyon. We had passed the very places without seeing an accident or having any trouble except the mental misery we endured among those curves and peaks and drops.

Starting refreshed the next morning, after having breakfast in Prescott to allow daylight to arrive for our protection down that downhill road, we found the way perfectly beautiful, and didn't worry a bit. Of course, this time we were hugging the mountain, and it makes all the difference in the world which side you are on. We met one woman driving up alone. She had stopped stock-still at a turn-out, with such a look of strain on her face that she seemed to be deciding whether just to die there or go on with her eyes shut and let the worst happen quick. I'd hate to drive up that stretch, on the outside all the way! Someone told us later that it was the stretch where Tom Mix lost control of his car and rolled into the canyon to his death. But for us, on that bright morning, in the inside track, it was one of the most beautiful stretches we encountered. The mountains there were covered with trees, and with every turn there was a change in the view, the mountains seeming to approach and recede as we saw them at different angles. At times we could see so far, great stretches of plains with fold after fold of mountains in the distance, and then the mountains would seem to gather close, but comfortably this time, not as ominously as when we were on that terrible narrow track back beyond Williams.

Eventually we crossed the Colorado River (not especially impressive at that point, we thought) and entered California, passed through the inspection point and reached Blythe, that place which according to the radio every morning at home suffers the most intense heat of any place in the United States. It was 10 o'clock in the morning of a hot sunny day. We don't know how hot because we haven't seen a thermometer since we left home nor heard a weather report. Since arriving here we have learned that the whole country had been having a heat wave. And we could see evidences of prolonged drought most of the way. The exceptions, as near as we remember now, were in Missouri and near Gallup, New Mexico. Anyway, we had reached the point where we were to get the car completely checked, find out what special accouterments if any we needed to cross the desert, and whether we dared cross at once or must wait over till the cool of the evening to start this most momentous portion of the trip.

Ten o'clock on a brazen hot morning at Blythe, Cal., at the edge of the desert (or already half way across, as some folks figure it), we faced our next step with a wild surmise, like Balboa or whatever explorer that was who stood silent upon a peak in Darien. Having met with such diverse advice up to this point, we had left the decision to the last one we asked. This was a service-station man at the east edge of Blythe.

"Sure, it's warm. Where isn't it?" he told us cheerfully. "But the desert doesn't get really hot till about 3:00; it's only 10:00 now and you will be across in three hours. The desert is painted lots worse than it is. If your car is in good shape and you take along plenty of water, you've not a thing to worry about. Go right on."

So we were in for it. To tell the truth, we couldn't see much use, having got that far, in hanging around all day in the heat waiting for the cool of the night, when we could just as well suffer as we drove.

On we went, with a water-bag hanging from the radiator,  a thermos bottle of ice water, and a pail partly filled with cold water and some wash cloths to sponge our faces and arms. The water in the pail was soon as warm as bath-water, but it helped anyway. Another time we would put a chunk of ice in the pail instead of water. There is no problem of roads across the desert; they are completely adequate and uncomplicated. We seemed to get plenty warm inside the car but not much warmer than we had been all week. That is, until we got to Indio, which is below sea level. We reached there at high noon and were beginning to get a little flushed of countenance. We had thought we might stop there for lunch but couldn't bear the thought of lingering, so drove on. Life was going on there just as normally as in any town we had seen.If the natives were over-heated they didn't show it. I suppose the human constitution can get used to anything.

We did our best to see all we could and admire every thing possible across the desert but there was a certain monotony about the sand and the tufts of vegetation, and not having taken any notes we can't at this moment recall anything of intense interest to tell you. By 1:00 o'clock we figured we were across and drew a deep breath of relief. We weren't any cooler for quite a while, but we were safe. Soon after 8:00 we drew up at a motel in Riverside and called it a day. This motel was the Spanish type, set right in an orange grove, run by most hospitable, homey folks. The accommodations cost less than anywhere we had been, and furthermore we were given fresh orange juice as well as ice water when we arrived, and were promised free coffee and rolls in the morning if we waited till 7:00 or after to start. We appreciated the kindliness but didn't take advantage of the morning treat; we were too anxious to get  to the end of our journey. We bathed and relaxed, ate some crackers and cheese and peaches we had with us and went to bed, right then in broad daylight. In the morning early we got up and wrote our daily letters home (omitted the night before) and were packed and on the road by 5:00, before daylight but cheered by a gorgeous full moon.

Back in Prescott we had been fortunate enough to meet a couple who had just come from Santa Monica, who gave us their detailed map and instructions for getting through Los Angeles, which had been our final worry. Following these directions, we sped along and were through that huge and fantastic city before morning traffic picked up. "Just follow route 60 or 70 or both, sometimes it will be one, sometimes the other, and sometimes they join; it doesn't matter. Eventually you will find yourself on the Ramona Freeway. You will come to a sign that says routes 60 and 70 end. Don't pay any attention to that. Just go on and you will be on the Hollywood Freeway."

Those were the instructions and they worked out except that when we paid no attention to the sign, we didn't find ourselves on the Hollywood Freeway. True to form we had been able to miss what our advisers said couldn't be missed. However, after a few stabs in different directions we located the freeway and found an entrance to it. Those freeways are sheer delight, and they are building more of them all the time here in California. They are so easy to get onto and off of, and spacious enough so that every driver can take his own pace without bothering any one else.

We were to see a sign, "Santa Monica Boulevard 1/4 mile," and sure enough we did. And what do you know? We were back on good old 66. We followed that right to the sea, turned right on alternate 101 and jogged comfortably north the last hundred miles of our trip, almost all of the time being within sight of great Pacific. At Santa Barbara we turned onto a street that appeared to lead into town, and luck seemed to be all our way this day. At the filling station we got a city map, stopped next door for a good warm breakfast, then simply drove up Milpas street to Anapamu, on that to Garden, then to the corner of Loma Vista and Carmelita, and there we were, at the house with the pepper tree over the walk. (Such lovely street names they have here!)

As we climbed out of the car we heard David's voice exclaiming, "Here they are!" This was not according to plan. We had expected his ship to be late, that it would take a day or two for processing, and then while he got down here we would have time to get our hair done, have the car washed and greet him in lady-like state. Instead his ship had docked early, it had taken only two hours for processing, he had been lucky enough to get the last available roomette on the south-bound train, and the last three or four days while we were struggling toward him over mountain and sand, he had been lolling on the beaches and picnicking in the mountains, resting and reading, here in this comfortable place with our sister-in-law and her 14-year-old daughter. However, in the joy of meeting, with our soldier safe in the homeland after his year at the front in Korea, all was forgiven all around, his premature arrival and our delayed one, and since then all has gone merry as a marriage bell, as the saying goes.

Within a few hours we felt completely rested and the memory of any difficulties had begun to fade. This is certainly a place where it is easy to take your ease. We will be here two or three days and then head for home. We haven't a thing to worry about. We have a man to drive! -- Hope.

Santa Barbara has everything, the sea on one side, the mountains on the other; a downtown district metropolitan enough for any one, clean and spacious, a residential area as relaxed and friendly as a small town. The people are comfortable and easy going, the climate so perfect that you never even think about it. Flowers everywhere, and exotic trees, like palms and eucalyptus and live oak, acacia and pepper trees.

But for us it is more than that, it is a place of sentimental memories, for here our only brother made his home years ago, and here our father and mother spent many placid hours in their latter years. So we not only wanted to enjoy the things all tourists enjoy here, but the things we remembered our parents especially enjoying: like the huge gnarled fig tree with its tortured roots, down by the railroad station, the bird refuge, the place up on Alameda Padre Serra where our father often talked of buying a lot and putting up a home (but never did), the church and the park within walking distance, the magnificent court house, and all the favorite walks from which our father used to come home with a pocketful of odd seeds and a twinkle in his eye. He planted many of those seeds, either in Santa Barbara or back home in Illinois; he raised sequoia trees to be two feet high, and to this day there is a date palm in a corner of Edith's yard that he started from a seed. It is not much over a foot high now and is probably 15 years old, so it is not likely to make a problem of space for some time to come.

We had thought that with three days or so to spend, we would have oceans of time to buy gifts and souvenirs, but we never did get down town long enough to shop. There didn't seem to be any rush at any time, and we were having such a good time elsewhere. We just admired the windows as we drove through and let it go at that. The first afternoon and night of course we had to drive past all the memory-places, winding up high on the mountain side where we could see the lighted city spread out below us, cupped between the heights and the sea. And every night we looked at a few reels of the old family movies, reminding us of happy times half forgotten. Sometimes we had tray dinners around the fireplace, visiting among ourselves or with callers; one night we had a beach picnic, and it was cold, but impressive to see and hear the waves come thundering in under the moon. Once we went out for Chinese dinner, and afterward drove north to the village of Goleta and sat in a drive-in theater to see two shows that we could have seen at home that very week. It is curious how much at home a person can be anywhere in the states or in Canada, you will find the same movies, the same dime stores, the same chain groceries, the same varieties of eating houses using just about the same china and style of service. So whatever strange new factors enter in, you always have that little hold on familiarity.

One afternoon we went on a garden tour and saw four beautiful beach houses with their gardens and one mountain home with the biggest display of succulents we ever saw anywhere. In one of the beach houses we saw some really fine flower arrangements with driftwood, and that set us off on the ambition to bring home a piece of driftwood to use here. We did, eventually, find a piece but it is rather a ratty-looking one compared to the beauties we saw there. But at least it is driftwood, or we think it is.

One day we went driving up the Santa Ynes valley. Years ago on my only other trip to California, we had driven down the Ojai valley toward Pasadena. On this trip we recalled having heard of many valleys around California, and we asked, "The San Joaquin valley, for instance. Where is that?" "Oh," said Edith and Jean cheerfully, "that is about six or seven valleys over." So you see Santa Barbarans have no shortage of places to go, -- if they are tired of one range of hills they just go over beyond into some other valley for a change. But in this particular valley we had some interesting adventures indeed. For one thing we came on a beautiful town called Solvang, which is Danish and as true to its mother-land as if it had been transplanted bodily. We took time there to buy some groceries for a picnic and to browse through a gift shop where Danish ware was emphasized. My purchase was some baskets that thrilled me as being very very Scandinavian. It was not till we got home that we noticed the label on the bottom said Made in Hongkong.

After our picnic in the environs of this thatch-roofed town, we visited the Santa Ynes mission and a little farther north La Purissima mission. This series of Franciscan missions has always fascintated us, and we always had been told that they were built a day's journey apart, for the convenience of weary travelers. The padre at Santa Ynes squelched that theory, however. He said they were much farther apart than that, and they were not built in order, but were built where situations were favorable. There had to be water and there had to be clay or suitable materials for brick, and there had to be Indians for the padres to work among. The Indians in this area were the Cuchamas, and at the present time a big dam to supply water to Santa Barbara is under construction, called, after that tribe, Cuchama Dam.

La Purissima was especially interesting, although at present it doesn't seem to have any padres in residence; it is under the control of the State Park system, and has been reconstructed to look as much as possible as it did in the original days. Great crews of CCC boys (remember them, back in leaf-raking days?) actually made bricks by hand and rebuilt the mission according to plans on record. It is a huge place, still not finished, but it is complete with chapel and rooms for the padrers, but guard rooms and stables, wash-house, and a dormitory for Indian girls, and an infirmary and other buildings. To say nothing of the elaborate garden surrounded by pear trees, with four lovely pools for beauty, from which the overflow water ran into other pools for lavenderia, or laundries, and from there to settling pools from which it was guided off in canals to irrigate the fields.

From La Purissima we drove on north to Lompoc, where our sister-in-law Edith used to teach, and near which many flower seeds are produced in huge colorful fields. We were too late in the season to see the bulk of these, but we did see acres of asters and zinnias and such late flowers. They told of one big field, which we didn't see, in which the flowers were arranged to represent the American flag. And only nine miles from Lompoc stands Camp Cooke, where our own Illinois National Guard is under training. Some of our home town boys are among them, but it was too late to go out and try to locate them on this trip.

Sunday, our last day in Santa Barbara, we went to the church our mother liked so well, where our brother was so active as long as he lived and where his widow and daughter still help in many ways. Then we had several quiet hours on the sunlit beach and in late afternoon visited the Mission. We had expected it to be the highlight of the trip, so thoroughly impressed had we been on our other visit, but the effect was not the same. The towers have had to be torn down and are being rebuilt. The parking space had been much enlarged, altering the effect of the round well we remembered in the front yard: and so much construction material had to be piled about that we couldn't get the same compassionate feeling toward the graves of the Indians and the vaults of the early workers in the Mission. Even the decorations in the chapel seemed more elaborate. -- not so primitive or so typically Indian as we remembered them. However, we did find, and buy, in the souvenir rooms an exquisite carved Madonna of pearwood, only seven or eight inches tall, but so simple, slender and smooth, so truly spiritual in effect that it will be a joy forever. Perhaps when the rebuilding is all complete and the rubble cleared away, the Mission will regain some of the gentle simplicity we remember. Right now it is too busy, too modern. We were almost sorry that we went.

The last evening we spent quietly around the fireplace, visiting with callers who dropped in, and wound up with the last of the family movies; thus concluding a perfect visit. But before going on with the rest of our trip, we ought to tell you a little about earthquakes, for after all, that is the only flaw in the ointment out there, and the bad should be mentioned with the good. -- Hope.

About these earthquakes, we bring up the subject not only because it is in the forefront of interest at this time but because earlier earthquakes had a good deal to do with our family. Only a few weeks before we reached Santa Barbara this year, the city had been slightly damaged by a series of shudders, and it seemed to us people were still a little jittery. At least once in every group we were with. But as one woman remarked, "Back east you have floods and snows that last for weeks, and tornadoes that are just as terrifying and do as much damage, so why should we worry over quakes, which come and go so suddenly? They are awful, but they are over before you have time to worry, and in that respect at least they are less nerve-wracking than some other natural tragedies." Up at Bakersfield the damage this year was much more severe, they say, but we didn't see that. All we saw here was a few damaged buildings, -- a chimney down, a corner out of line. We would probably not have noticed even these traces if they hadn't been pointed out to us.

Then in going through the Missions we were reminded of the subject because both Santa Inez and La Purissima were ruined by the big quake of 1812 and had to be rebuilt, only about a dozen years after they were established.

But the earthquake that affected our family especially was the fairly big one of 1925. Edith showed us dozens of pictures of the Santa Barbara buildings at that time, -- but just the negatives. Our brother had taken the pictures himself, but the chamber of commerce or some officials had decreed at the time that no prints of such pictures should be made or distributed, as it would be bad publicity for the town. Our folks laughed at the idea then, but as years went on, their loyalty to their adopted hometown induced them never to have prints made. Some day these negatives will be collectors' items, -- for the day will come when Santa Barbara (if it is like most towns) will want to prove that it had the biggest and best of something, even if it was only an earthquake.

The way we happen to be connected with the 1925 earthquake was this. After the first World War, my brother and three or four of his buddies, when they got out of the army, went to South Dakota to homestead, and while they were proving up on their claims, they taught school and ran small businesses of different sorts in town. Teaching in the same school with our brother was the charming young woman whom he eventually married, another homesteader. After they both proved up on their claims, they decided that while they were foot-loose and fancy-free they would take a year or so to see their country, stopping where they liked when they liked, for as long as they liked; and if they didn't find a town that appealed to them any more than home, they would come back to Illinois and settle down. They swung down southeast, and up to New England, across the great Northwest, down into Texas and finally got into California. On the way they had many amusing adventures that they wouldn't have missed for worlds. One that Edith told us this time, which we hadn't heard before, was the time they picked cotton for a day somewhere, and she earned eighty-five cents and our brother $1.25, while the regular pickers were making eight and ten dollars a day; and she overheard the overseer say, concerning the row she had picked, "It looks like a cow had gone down that row, and licked it." She is very clever in many ways and wonderful at teaching school, but from then on she never claimed to be an expert at cotton-picking.

Anyway, they arrived at Santa Barbara soon after the big quake, where dozens of business houses and homes were wrecked and ruined. My brother's line in college had been architecture and his practical experience had been working summers with our father, who was a contractor and builder. Here was a place needing the kind of help he could give, and he couldn't keep his hands off. By the time the place had been made presentable again, Wilbert and Edith had fallen in love with the town, its climate, its people, its natural advantages, so they built themselves a home and settled down. There their first child was born, my namesake, in January, 1936, and died three days later and is buried. There our brother was laid to rest in 1943 when he was stricken on Father's Day with coronary thrombosis, two weeks after the second and only living child celebrated her fifth birthday. The last pictures we have of him are the birthday-party movies of that June.

This Jean is the youngest of the twenty cousins, while our Ruth is the oldest. Jean was born in June of 1938, the very month that Ruth finished college and as her graduation trip had a trip to California. (It had been our idea to make a tradition of a California trip for each child's graduation. But by the time Wilbert finished, the war was on and he went into the army instead. The next year the war was still on, so Ernie went into the navy the day after commencement. And this year, when Joe would have finished, he was about mid-way in his army services. So our "tradition" didn't get past first base.) Jean is also called the "golden wedding baby" because she was born the year our parents celebrated their fiftieth anniversary.

So it was an earthquake that induced the folks to settle in Santa Barbara, but a lot of other things kept them there. It is impossible to mention all the advantages, but one of the most interesting phenomena is the vegetation. It is a cross between the tropical and the temperate zones. You see lots of palms and eucalyptus, lots of desert cacti and succulents, and yet you see many plants more familiar to us, only they grow so big. The things we grow in pots grow here as shrubs. For instance, outside the breakfast window and reaching up to the top of it, is a lantana in bloom. And by the walk is a red geranium three feet wide and three feet high. And remember those oleanders our grandmothers used to have in tubs, indoors in winter and out on the porch in summer? It seemed to me they were considered very rare and precious and took a good deal of care. Here they grow outside the year round in great profusion. Some are in hedges clipped to taste, some are shrubs, some are actually trees.

On my previous trip, which was in December, the poinsettias amazed me, growing as tall as the one-story houses, vivid against the plaster. This time the bougainvillea is predominant, growing on houses and walls and fences, tall luxuriant vines with cascades of blossoms. You see all colors: fuchsia, magenta, scarlet and crimson, blue and purple, lavender, pink and white. Well, maybe not white. But they are plentiful and beautiful and different from anything we have at home. We reveled in it all. But we must confess that when we got out of California, and saw some of the good old trees we are used to, they looked good. The lawns there are green and thick, but of course everything has to be watered daily, to keep them that way.

But this is enough about Santa Barbara, our only real stop on the trip, -- except for a day in San Francisco which we must tell another day. -- Hope.

When in California one must eat at least once the way the Californians do, that is, Chinese style. This time our Oriental meal was taken in a very simple place, not one of those dark, exotic places with grillwork labyrinths and heavy incense in the air. It was bright, light and pleasant, and the whole proceeding was interesting.

There were five of us, but to our surprise our hostess ordered "Dinner for Four." It seems that Dinner for One consists of three certain dishes, Dinner for Two adds a dish, for three adds another and so on. At an adjoining table, also a party of five, we heard them order "Two Dinners for Two."

Dinner for One consists of chow mein, fried rice and fried shrimp and costs a dollar. For two, they add egg foo yung and a dollar in price. For three, chow yoke and another dollar; for four, spareribs and a dollar; for five, chicken almond and another dollar, and for six, they substitute Chinese-fried chicken for the chicken almond. The dishes are so large that dinner for four makes more than we five could eat.

The first things the waitress brings are tiny cups without handles, for tea, and small butter-plates with sauce for the shrimps. About half a teaspoon of horseradish-mustard and about a teaspoon of catsup, not mixed but separate. There may be some significance in the two colors, for some Chinese students at the University of Illinois who prepared a full meal of Chinese dishes for some of us had one dish they called "the red-and-yellow." Anyway, this little dish made a nice spot of color in a meal that was just a little drab in looks, though tasty. Next came the pot of tea and the fortune cakes. These cakes were to use with the tea and each contained a paper slip with a sentence forecasting one's fate. (My first one said "You will meet a new romantic interest soon" and since that didn't appeal to me, the young niece traded me hers which said "You will take a journey in the near future," which we certainly had reason to believe would come true.) The cakes also constitute the only dessert. They are interesting in shape but we didn't find out how they were made. They are very brittle and seem to be made of flour, water and a little sugar, cut into circles three or four inches across and baked hard to a light tan. The edges are drawn together to form a half-circle but without creasing across the diameter, then the two points of the half-circle are drawn down toward each other over a rod (this is just the way it looked to us -- they may be cooked on a special iron to shape them), so that the center bulges out crosswise, leaving a little space or room or pocket where the paper fortune is found. Not a very clear description, but anyone who has seen them will remember the interesting shape, and perhaps someone can tell us more about how they are made.

The meal arrives on a huge tray carrying the six dishes and bowls, and you pass them around the table for each to serve himself as much as he desires. The chow mein is a great grayish mound of strings; bean sprouts, slivers of meat, celery, onion and who knows what, cooked very tender in a slightly thickened sauce or gravy, on a generous bed of crisp fried Chinese noodles.

The fried rice looked gray, too, probably from soy sauce, and it was seasoned with miscellaneous viands, hard to distinguish. The shrimp were practically the same as we make in our own homes -- just dipped in egg batter and fried in deep fat.

Egg foo yung turned out to be patty-cakes fried something like hamburgers, only made from some sort of egg mixture. The patties were about four inches across. Chow yoke was the nearest we had to a vegetable or salad. It was a mixture of rather coarse pieces of celery, cabbage or Chinese cabbage and other things, the most unusual of which were the bright green pea-pods. These were broader and shorter than any peas we raise and the peas had scarcely begun to develop. These vegetables were all cooked together and served in the same grayish sauce, almost a glaze. The spareribs were made from very small tender ribs cut in inch lengths and cooked in a rich sweet-sour tomato flavored sauce, a good deal like we would call barbecued spareribs.

No salad. No dessert. We enjoyed the meal for its novelty but would not care for it often. We were glad we were eating in a clean, simple dining room in bright afternoon sunshine, and could see into the immaculate kitchen, for to tell the truth, in one of those obscure, dim, incense-filled, elaborate Chinese places where secretive hangings box you in and the service always seem stealthy, we might have been skeptical about the whole thing. I wouldn't go so far as some of our 4-H boys did the first time they had chop suey and call it chop sewage; but I might say that Chinese food is like Christmas -- once a year is enough. -- Hope.

We had one more brief visit to make before heading home, and that was at San Francisco, where our niece Paula works as an expert draftsman for a shipbuilding concern, and does art work, her real heart interest, on the side. This is the same niece who long ago lost her little white shoe in the corn field, some of you perhaps will remember. Another niece, Elizabeth, called Obit, by the family because that is how the little ones used to pronounce her name, has just settled in san Francisco, too, with a pharmaceutical firm, after completing her scholarship and getting her advanced degree in bacteriology and stuff at the University of Southern California. As luck would have it, her firm chose this very week to send her back to the campus for some research work. If it had been a week earlier, we could have seen her while we were in Santa Barbara. As it was, she would be speeding south by train at the very time we were going north by car. So we talked by long-distance Sunday and made that do.

Then on Monday morning we set out northward from Santa Barbara. It makes you realize the size of the state when it takes you a whole day to get from there to San Francisco, and that is only about a quarter of the length of California. On the way we stopped to call on a cousin of our mother's who resembles her so much that it seemed almost like a reincarnation. The same build the same quick sweet smile, the same gentle ways. It was an experience both sweet and sad. She lives in San Luis Obispo, where another of the famous missions is located, so we took time to drive around it though it was too early for visiting the interior. It is the mission our mother considered the nicest of all. Later, by the way, we stopped at San Migual mission and wandered through its quiet garden and burial ground, and climbed the narrow, winding rock staircase to the beautiful bell tower, three bells in three arches. So we have now seen five of the series of missions and hope some day to see the rest.

We mentioned the brilliant flowers and green lawns of Santa Barbara, and admired the same things in all the towns we traversed, and yet the big over-all impression we carry away of California, it seems, is that endless succession of great smoothly rolling tawny hills, with live-oaks against them. That is what we saw most of the day's trip northward. We took route 101 which is somewhat inland, and felt that we had a good chance to see the country. There is a road, route 1, closer to the sea, and we wished we might have traveled both.

It got cooler and windier as we went up-country, and in late afternoon as we approached San Francisco, it struck us as a White City. If Rome was built on seven hills, San Francisco must be built on twenty-seven. And all the houses on different levels stacked up against each other like the white dominoes. When we got into the city it seemed as though the buildings all rose straight up from the pavements. They have large and lovely park areas, and no doubt residential parts where there are lawns and trees, but the general impression going through the city is strictly of white buildings rising from wide steep streets. The place is not only hilly but is so ingeniously contrived that you always seem to approach a stop-light at a very steep place and you fairly hold your breath hoping the light will change and you can get under way again before you roll back. Unless you see it, you can hardly imagine how any city could manage to have every street on an incline. At the intersections it seems as though all four ways drop away from you, and that is odd, for you must have to be at the bottom of the hill somewhere.

Anyway, the whole atmosphere of the place is invigorating. It didn't seem to be feverishly active, and yet everyone seemed alert and had a sparkle in the eye.

We found Paula's place with no trouble, in time for dinner. She is much more pleasantly situated than many career girls, who sometimes have to live in a room-and-a-half apartment. She lives on the second floor of one of the big old San Francisco residences, with a young widow about her own age and her 3-year-old son. Just to show you how much room they have; across the front, a large living room and a bedroom; then in succession, another bedroom, Peter's bedroom and playroom, a dining room, kitchen, utility room, and a sun deck. No motels for us this night, there was room to spare.

After dinner Paula thought it would be nice for us to see Fisherman's Wharf and on the way walk through a block or two of Chinatown. We asked if we needed wraps, and she said always after five you do. We found out she was absolutely right. After wondering for a week why we had cumbered ourselves with extra clothing and wraps, we found out. We went into wool suits at San Francisco and stayed in them till the last day of the trip.

We didn't use the car, for you haven't "done" San Francisco unless you have ridden the famous cable cars. So we walked over a couple of blocks and caught the one on California street and rode clear to the top of Nob Hill, past the well-known Mark Hopkins hotel. Leaving the car, we turned into Grant street, which is Chinatown. It was lined with bright, cheerful retail shops, busy with tourist customers. We were  still wandering from store to store, marveling at the low prices and deciding what to buy when we came to a Chinese movie theater and thought how much fun it would be to see a picture in a foreign language. So we went in and saw the picture through, with all its strange sights and sounds, and when it was over we all had extraordinarily different ideas of the plot. It took us hours of discussion later, off and on, to clear up some points. David claimed we had seen the same thing through three times, but then he was bored to begin with. We found it quite an experience and we had much more sympathy for foreigners in a strange land than we ever had before.

One of the queerest incidents had nothing to do with the screen. We sat in a front row of seats where an aisle crossed in front of us. There were many little children in the theater and they kept trotting back and forth, even as yours and mine. At one time a couple of pretty little Chinese girls about 4 years old started to scamper across in front of us but looked up at us and shied off like frightened colts, drew back a couple of steps and stared at us in a sort of horror and finally slunk past as far from us as they could get. Imagine that! They thought we were the foreigners! Oh, well, "all are odd but thee and me, and even thee is a little odd."

We never did get to Fisherman's Wharf.

In fact, we almost didn't get home. It was ten when we went into the show, midnight when we came out. And these cable cars don't seem to run so frequently after that. We went a block this way and a block that but finally got on a car. It was so sparsely filled that a warning sign was visible that we hadn't noticed before: Passengers Must Hold on at Curve. About the time we noticed it, the conductor called out the same words, and the car took a curve so smartly that we were practically wrapped twice around the posts we grabbed. Or anyway once-and-a-half. We mentioned that this was an invigorating place. The folks who ride these cars get the equivalent of a brisk osteopathic treatment on every trip. Not only up hill and down, but around bends.

Next morning after a leisurely breakfast we set out on a day that was to be a wonderful experience. We saw a lot but were not rushing to see everything. We had no sense of hurry and we had plenty of time to talk and visit. Using David's car this time, we first went to Telegraph Hill where we could see the whole city from the top of the tower, including the bay and the bridges and Alcatraz and all. Then we drove sightseeing through parts of the city, getting into several dead-end streets by mistake. It is a place where one could browse for weeks and always find something new. We drove around in a rich residential district, Belvedere, seems to me they said it was an island but if so, don't aks me how we got to it. We went over the Golden Gate bridge to Tiburon and there we had a leisurely early dinner at Sam's Anchor Cafe, right on the edge of the water. We looked out our window straight across the bay toward the Mark Hopkins hotel and Telegraph Hill, where we had been earlier. In the blue water we watched outboard motor boats, sailboats and palatial cabin cruisers. We lingered a long while over our meal, the most expensive and in some ways the most satisfying of the trip, and then we drove down to Muir Woods to see the big trees, since we didn't have time to go to Yosemite. Then in the twilight we went back over Golden Gate and so home to coffee and ice cream and more visiting.

As we crossed Golden Gate bridge that last time, the girls remarked cheerfully that it was a  great place for suicides. It seemed to have a fatal attraction for the depressed. And next norming we saw by the paper that within thirty minutes of the time we went across, the 141st suicide had leaped to his death. He had driven to the middle of the bridge, got out of his car, locked it and put the keys in his pocket, before he jumped. Such is the power of habit. If he had only thought, since he was determined to end it all, he could have made one last gesture of courtesy by leaving the keys in the ignition for the convenience of the police.

This incident just shows how we seemed to travel in a sort of vacuum of safety. We were not on any accidents and we did not even see any happen, but we would read in the paper of tragedies of various sorts happening at the very places we had been or were going. Like back at Pacific, Missouri, when we watched some airplanes overhead with mild interest and didn't know till night that they were trying to spot an escaped convict in the woods, and police cars and officers were all about us seeking. And later, in Arizona, folks were running off the highway and falling into canyons. And still later, in Nevada and Utah, two escaped convicts were on the loose and suspected of trying to hitch-hike to safety. One of them was tall and blonde, the other short and swarthy. We made it a rule to pick up no hikers at any time, but we imagined we saw those two convicts, alone and together, at least a dozen times along the highway, trying to thumb a ride. Since we got home, we have read in the papers that one of them is still supposed to be at large in salt Lake city. We get in on the fringes of excitement, but fate seems to have ordained for us a placid life.

It was a joy to have little Peter with us all that day. He is just 3, like our little Mike, and as blonde as Mike is dark. But it was amusing to see that they liked exactly the same jokes and games and stories, and liked equally well to be cuddled by Gram and Aunt Margi. It made us homesick for our own little ones and we were quite willing to start for home and step along lively. -- Hope.

Memory Gem

A physiologist says a nose is nine-tenths for breathing and one-tenth for smelling. That leaves nothing at all for sticking into other folks' business.

Memory Gem

By the time she is the mother of four or five, a woman is no longer irked by the noise of the children. It is the prolonged silence that stirs her dark doubts.

We sent out from San Francisco bright and early on the homestretch of our rather impromptu trip to California and now we were to have no more time for visit, side trips, or sightseeing for David was headed for home like a hungry horse at the end of a hard day, or to put it more poetically "he was the sworn companion of the wind". What we saw would be observed strictly from the road as we sped along, filled out by the memory of what geography and history we could bring to mind. This time we crossed the Bay bridge and wild through Berkeley and other cities that fringe the Eastern shore, then struck out north east for Sacramento. That was about the last place we noticed much tropical vegetation. No more palms and eucalyptus, Acacia and pepper trees, but as we said before, while it was wonderful to see those exotic things. It really seemed comfortable and nice to look once more good old, maples, oaks, and evergreens.

It began to rain before we were far out of Sacramento and then began to snow. When we went through Donner Pass, a thin blanket of white already lay over the mountains, and the stormy aspect really made the passage more impressive, but we couldn't help but think back to those days of old when that brave little party of pioneers met their tragic end at this place, starving freezing, and betrayed. We wondered how they had the audacity to seek a way through the mountains. It was bleak enough for us on that good smooth road with humans and machines within call if we had trouble, with a heater in the car and food available whenever we wanted it. Such a far cry from the situation then. And still with all our modern advantages the weather can still be a master, for right here only last year two crack trains were stalled for days in the snow.

By the time we got to Reno, people really looked almost blue with cold and the gas man told us they expected a foot of snow by morning. The temperature dropped suddenly just the day before. The rain would stop and start again from time to time it would snow or sleet or hail. Once in a while, the sun came out. We went over the plains and through the mountains, and finally as the rain got heavier, we pulled up at Lovelock for supper. Margie and I assumed that was the end of the day travel. But no, not with David at the wheel. On we went with ominous mountains drawing close, and then receding from us, and a heavy black cloud hanging over the orange strip of sunset sky behind us. We passed Battle Mountain, but haven't any idea what battle it was named for – probably some Indian affair. We went through Emigrant Pass in complete darkness, and maybe it was just as well – no telling what damage our nerves might've suffered in daylight.

Finally, we pulled into Elko and called it a day. David did the room scouting for us on the way home and in this place he secured a palatial suite at a huge motel, three big rooms and bath. Sometimes you hear of exorbitant prices for tourist accommodations but we didn't find any. This was the most expensive anywhere and it cost four dollars each. It might be that we could've bedded down as many people as we liked for the same price. With three double beds and a big Davenport seven would've been quite comfortable. We only regretted that we got the in so late for if we had arrived early and if we had known anybody to invite, we could've held quite a large reception in our apartment.

The cheapest rooms we had a couple of nights near our home cost us only $7.50 for the three; but is it as it was quite late and the hostess was about a sleepy as we were. we are inclined to think she made a mistake. Most places we paid three or three and one half dollars each. At Riverside California the charge was only $2.50 each, and that was the place where they gave free orange juice when we arrived and offered free coffee and rolls before we left. Most of the places have about the same accommodations; all the hot and cold water you want, ice water to drink if you want it, always a shower and sometimes the tub besides, air-conditioning if needed and heating arrangements, very comfortable beds, clean and attractive furniture. Usually there is a good café within inconvenient distance and what we appreciated was that there was usually one open early enough in the morning to accommodate us. Some places have carport alongside but oftener the cars are just parked around the patio in front of the rooms. Back in Texas and some of those mild southwestern states we noticed several times the folks just pulled off the road (the shoulders are wide down there) and arranged sleeping quarters in the car. We thought that a young couple trying to economize could do very well and save quite a bit of cash by doing that. Several times we saw carloads of young fellows just getting up in the morning with a mirror hung somewhere in the car, shaving and getting freshened up for the day.

But to get on with our story, we started from Elko about seven and the weather had cheered up considerably. It was still cold and windy, but the sun was out. As we drove on into Utah, we thought it first a lot more snow had fallen than we realized, for the plain was white and crystallized as far as we could see, and with that the pale blue sky and bright sun, we thought for a minute we were looking out on a typical winter snow scene. Of course, it was just the great salt flats, and off in the distance we could begin to see the blue waters of the Great Salt Lake. We reached Salt Lake City at noon, and there we made a call on a friend who lived at the University of Illinois with her two little boys while her husband finished school there. Now they have four boys. We intended just to say hello, take a swing through the city, and go on. But she insisted on joining the family for lunch and then she went sightseeing with us. This was a great adventure, for she had been born and raised here, and was herself a Mormon, in fact, a great granddaughter of Brigham Young, so she could give us many more interesting and intimate details than most guides. We saw the monument where their leader first said, "This is the place", and, of course the temple and the tabernacle and the sea gull monument and the Pioneer museum, as well as the lion House with its 20 gables where Brigham Young's many wives lived well in harmony together. Our friend pointed out the gable to the apartment of her great grandmother. Even with this much sightseeing, we would've been on our way sooner except we got into one of the conducted parties on the temple Square and followed along and listened to the excellent guide to explaining her peoples history and beliefs. The Mormons are truly a very kindly, generous, tolerant people. Although they suffered much persecution themselves, they never retaliated, but invited other sects to come into their valley and settle there. They got along better with the Indians than many pioneers, because they won them with kindness.

It was interesting to think afterward about how close we had been to the heart of three great religions on this trip, and how genuinely generous all of them were; the San Francisco Padres of the California missions, the Mormons at Salt Lake, and the Methodists at Santa Barbara. And that reminds me that we copied down the words from two plaques in the church at Santa Barbara. One it seems to me was in the church school part of the ediface, and it said "Our courteous Lord willeth that we should be as homely with him as heart may think or soul may desire. But let us be aware that we take not so recklessly this homeliness as to leave courtesy". – Julian of Norwalk,

And the other was near the entrance of the church itself and said "This is the place where prayer is wont to be made, a house  which Christ by his Sacramento presence has made a home".

It was after four when we prepared to leave Salt Lake, and we had hoped to get as far as rock Rock Springs, Wyoming by that night. Our hostess declared we couldn't get further than Evanston as the road was mountainous and winding and not in extra good condition. But she didn't know David. We found the road just as she said. And it begin to rain again besides. But now there was no stopping our driver now. At Evanston, we merely stopped for supper and went on. We didn't quit until nearly midnight, but we got to Rock Springs even though we had to wind around mountains in the dark. Back in 1940 or 1941 we had stopped at this town before coming down from Yellowstone past the Grand Tetons. It didn't exactly seem familiar because it was too dark to see anything, and we drove through and stopped in a motel on the other side where we could bound out early and dash east again in the morning. At Rock Springs we got another room apartment again with three rooms and a bath and an extra cot in the kitchen – and it cost $10 for the three of us.

Soon after 7 o'clock the next morning we were on the way again on a bright cold, very windy day, and for a while, it seemed to be an endless plain, hardly mountain to be seen even in the distance – and this we found later was the Great Divide basin. We stopped at Wamsutter, Wyoming, and there we had breakfast and mailed our last card – and beat them home by three days. We passed the Continental Divide, and soon ran into the mountains again through Rawlings and Laramie to Cheyenne. When we stopped at Cheyenne before it was July and the time of rodeos with many bright Cowboys on the streets. This time we saw something entirely different, namely, the Air Force Base named for Francis Warren. David had been stationed there for a while when the base still belonged to the army, and he wanted to take a few minutes to run through it again and show us where he lived. It is a huge place long established, and therefore like a real town. We were impressed by the large brick residences of the officers and the smaller but cheerful cottages for the men, new since David was there, but what impressed the most was the snappy saluting that David rated everywhere as he turned up. Up to now among all the aunts and girl cousins he was just our boy to park the car and run errands and carry bags in general look after us – very dear to us, but a little on the order of a porter we should be ashamed to admit. To be sure he was in uniform, but those captain's bars didn't mean anything to us civilians, but dear me when you get into a military environment, how they do count!

A Good Housekeeper Speaks

I was so busy as the days to the days are in.
I did not write that letter to my friend.
In her great need I had no time at all.
To return the neighbors friendly call?
The little child who passed my door went by
Without a smiling answer to her shy
Advancement and the begger at my door.
Went on still carrying the burden that he bore.
Even my nearest and my dearest knew.
I had no time to spare the long hours through

And now that tonight my house is clean and bright.
The window sills are scrubbed, my boards are white.
The beds are smooth, each dish neat on the shelf.
And pleased with it ... but not pleased with myself!
Dear God, if tomorrow may be mine.
Help me to make my spirit shine.
One should not be too spent at close of day
To read an old love book to kneel and pray.
– Grace Neil Cowell 

MEMORY GEM 

The best way to get along with a woman is to let her think she is having her own way. And the way to do that is to let her have it.

MEMORY GEM

I do the very best I can, and mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't come out to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, 10 angels, swearing I was right, would make no difference – Abe Lincoln.

MEMORY GEM

As badly off as I was, I had a feeling as soon as I got here that this was the place to be, poor or well fixed – Victor Borge, immigrant from Denmark to the USA.

MEMORY GEM

Too many of us are like wheelbarrows, useful only when pushed and easily upset.

MEMORY GEM

The sting of a bee carries conviction with it. It makes a man a bee-leaver at once.

MEMORY GEM

In flat country molehills look like mountains.

Our Tim is 2. Grandfather, grandmother and great-grandfather were invited up for dessert to help celebrate. The occasion will live in memory for at least two reasons. One was the cake itself, which was a charmingly novel idea for a little one's birthday. Instead of a big angel food or similar elaborate cake, this was an ice-cream roll, and the two little candles looked very perky on the "log." Chocolate sauce from a pitcher enabled each person to make his dessert as rich and massive as he liked. Tim was shy about blowing out his candles, and even about eating his portion, but his 3-year-old brother Mike was only too happy to oblige in both departments.

But the second feature of the evening is what will make the day live on in infamy for the ladies of the family. Tim's mama had a new dress which needed a hem marked. The two little boys were fascinated with the process, and helped all they could by handing gram the pins from the tomato pincushion. We used a lot, not only because the skirt was full but because the boys were enjoying the game so much. The dress was then hung in the closet ready for sewing the next day.

It wasn't long till Tim appeared with his hands and pockets full of pins. The dress hung at such a nice height for a little boy to sit down on the floor and take them all out. He was ready for another nice game of taking pins out of one place and putting them in another.

We haven't gone into the psychological matter of whether this proves Tim to be clothes-conscious or not. But no doubt the story will seem funnier than it did at the time, in years to come when we recount what Tim did when he was 2 years old. -- Hope.

Another turn of the wheel, another cycle, and here is another New Year coming up. Some of us have been together a good long while in our Household comradeship, though few of us have ever met face to face.

Can you believe it is almost 30 years since "Hope Took the Helm"? In the beginning we had three little tykes around our house, Ruth, Wilbert and Ernest Vail, aged about nine, five and four. Our tagalong Joe wasn't born for several years after that. Many of you had about the same number of children, about the same ages, and many of you had postscript babies, even as we. These children of ours and yours have gone through school, gone through war service, married and had children of their own; and many of you have kept us posited on all these occurrences, with the problems and pleasures that come along with each stage. And now we have nine grand-children -- just about up to the average, according to what we hear from you, though many have out-stripped us in that line. Let's drink a cup of kindness now, for auld lang syne!

We wish you all good fare, good fellowship and good fortune. And may there be goodwill between us all and between the nations of the world this New Year. -- Hope.

Of all the millions of letters that have been written down through history, comparatively few have survived. For instance, we have only a few of the letters written by Paul to the early Christian churches, only a few of the letters written by soldiers on the battle-field to their families back home, and so on.

There is no way of telling how much we have missed by not having these letters, but I know whenever one does appear that has happened to be saved, we are all touched by the comparison of the days when the letter was written and the present time.

I've just had my attention called to a most interesting letter that has curiously survived for 17 centuries, and I want to share it with you, for I think it will be comforting to most of you. It was written by a middle-aged man name Cyprian, in a garden near the city of Carthage in Northern Africa, to a friend named Donatus. both the garden and the city have long been destroyed, yet this communication has survived, and can be copied and circulated, so that the ideas expressed live on and on. It goes like this:

"This seems to be a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see. Brigands on the high roads, pirates on the seas, in the amphitheaters men murdered to please applauding crowds, under all roofs misery and selfishness and cruelty. Yet in the midst of it I have found a quiet and a holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasure of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians -- and I am one of them." -- Hope.