would notice an old wooden cradle, painted blue, that
stood in a corner. A button-eyed, blank-faced rag doll,
the size of a baby at the fist-sucking age, was tucked
neatly under the red-and-white patchwork quilt made to
fit the cradle. Hanging directly over the cradle by a
stirrup was Jean's first saddle,--a cheap pigskin affair
with harsh straps and buckles, that her father had sent
East for. Jean never had liked that saddle, even when
it was new. She used to stand perfectly still while her
father buckled it on the little buckskin pony she rode;
and she would laugh when he picked her up and tossed her
into the seat. She would throw her dad a kiss and go
galloping off down the trail,--but when she was quite
out of sight around the bend of the bench-land, she would
stop and take the saddle off, and hide it in a certain
clump of wild currant bushes, and continue her journey
bareback. A kit-fox found it one day; that is how the
edge of the cantle came to have that queer, chewed look.

There was an old, black wooden rocker with an oval
picture of a ship under full sail, just where Jean's
brown head rested when she leaned back and stared
big-eyed down the coulee to the hills beyond. There
was an old-fashioned work-basket always full of stockings
that never were mended, and a crumpled dresser
scarf which Jean had begun to hemstitch more than a
year ago in a brief spasm of domesticity. There were
magazines everywhere; and you may be sure that Jean
had read them all, even to the soap advertisements and
the sanitary kitchens and the vacuum cleaners. There