always does. Of course, we'll do all we can for the old folks, but Lije is heavily in debt again, with the ever-recurring interest staring us all in the face. John will want his money, with interest,—they all do,—and we know how rapidly it accumulates, from our own dearly bought experience, the result of poor Joe's troubles!"
"I hope my dear father and mother won't live very long," sighed Mrs. Ranger. "If John would only let me make them a deed to my little ten-acre farm! But I can't get him to talk about it."
II
EARLY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE WEST
THE surroundings of the budding daughters of the Ranger and Robinson families had thus far been limited, outside of their respective homes, to attendance at the district school on winter week-days when weather permitted, and on Sundays at the primitive church services held by itinerant clergymen in the same rude edifice.
Oh, that never-to-be-forgotten schoolhouse of the borderland and the olden time! Modelled everywhere after the same one-roomed, quadrangular pattern,—and often the only seat of learning yet to be seen in school districts of the far frontier,—the building in which the children of these chronicles received the rudimentary education which led to the future weal of most of them was built of logs unhewn, and roofed with "shakes "unshaven. One rough horizontal log was omitted from the western wall when the structure was raised by the men of the district, who purposely left the space for the admission of a long line of little window-panes above the rows of desks. A huge open fireplace occupied the whole northern
