_ Summer is here, in earnest, and the last few days have been hot and windless. School is over, for the next eight weeks, and I shall have my kiddies close beside me. Gershom, after a ten-day trip down to Minneapolis for books and clothes, is going to come back to Casa Grande and help Dinky-Dunk on the land, as long as the holidays last. He thinks it will build him up a bit. He is also solemnly anxious to study music. He feels it would round out his accomplishments, which, he acknowledged, have threatened to become overwhelmingly scientific. So I'm to give Gershom music lessons in exchange for his tutoring Dinkie. They will be rather awful, I'm afraid, for Gershom has about as much music in his honest old soul as Calamity Kate. I may not teach him much. But all the time, I know, I will be learning a great deal from Gershom. He informed me, last night, that he had carefully computed that the Bible mentioned nineteen different precious stones, one hundred and four trees or plants, six metals, thirty-five animals, thirty-nine birds, six fishes, twenty insects, and eleven reptiles.
As I've already said, summer is here. But it doesn't seem to mean as much to me as it used to, for my interests have been taken away from the land and more and more walled up about my family. Dinky-Dunk's grain, however, has come along satisfactorily, and there is every promise of a good crop. Yet this entirely fails to elate my husband. Every small mischance is a sort of music-cue nowadays to start him singing about the monotony of prairie-life. Ranching, he protests, isn't the easy game it used to be, now that cattle can't be fattened on the open range and now that wheat itself is so much lower in price. One has to work for one's money, and watch every dollar. And my Diddums keeps railing about the government doing so little for the farmer and driving the men off the land into the cities. He has fallen into the habit of protesting he can see nothing much in life as a back-township hay-tosser and that all the big chances are now in the big centers. I had been hoping that this was a new form of spring-fever which would eventually work its way out of his system. But I can see now that the matter is something more mental than physical. He hasn't lost his strength, but he has lost his driving power. He is healthy enough, Heaven knows. Indeed, he impresses me as being a bit too much that way, for he has quite lost his old-time lean and hungry look and betrays a tendency to take on a ventral contour unmistakably aldermanic. He may be heavy, but he is hard-muscled and brown as an old meerschaum. There is a canker, however, somewhere about the core of his heart. And I can see him more clearly than I used to. He is a strong man, but he is a strong man without earnestness. And being such, I vaguely apprehend in him some splendid failure. For the wings that soar to success in this world are plumed with faith and feathered with conviction.
It did not surprise me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner--for we'll be taking side-trails where no car could venture--and pike off for a whole blessed day of care-free picnicking. So to-morrow Struthers and I will be solemnly busy in the kitchen concocting suitable dishes to be taken along in the old grub-box, and when that is over we'll patch together something in the form of bathing-suits, for there'll be a chance for a dip in the slough-water, and our kiddies have arrived at an age imposing fit and proper apparel on their sadly pagan but chastened parents. _