I
told her where I had got every one of them. We looked at the chickens
and the ducks; and the first brood of young turkeys I ever had. I showed
her all my elms, maples, basswoods, and other forest trees which I had
brought from the timber, and even the two pines I had made live, then
not over a foot high.
I just now came in from looking at them, and find them forty feet high
as I write this, with their branches resting on the ground in a great
brown ring carpeted with needles as they are in the pineries.
We sat down on the blue-grass under what is now the big cottonwood in
front of the house. I had stuck this in the sod a little twig not two
feet long, and now it was ten or twelve feet high, and made a very
little shade, to be sure, but wasn't I proud of my own shade trees! Oh,
you can't understand it; for you can not realize the beauty of shade on
that great sun-bathed prairie, or the promise in the changing shadows
under that little tree!
Rowena leaned back against the gray-green trunk, and patted the turf
beside her for me to be seated.
Every circumstance of this strange day comes back to me as I think of
it, and of what followed. I remember just how the poor girl looked as
she sat leaning against the tree, her cheeks flushed by the heat of the
summer afternoon, that look of distress in her eyes as she looked around
so brightly and with so gay an air over my little kingdom. As she sat
there she loosened her belt and took a long breath as if relieved in
her weariness at the long ramble we had taken.
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