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By Root 11219 0

to hear the Doppler Effect of time, it might have made him as uneasy to take that ride with Ferd Ward as it had to sit through a battle. It might have made them all uneasy. Before too long, Ferd Ward as General Grant’s financial adviser, would utterly ruin the ex-hero, and shred away the last rag of his dignity and reputation. He would also, as one of the syndicate that owned the Adelaide mine, put a kink in my grandparents’ lives. He was not a man it was quite safe to know. But Grandmother in her innocence thought it rather splendid that Mr. Ward was going over the range with them and that he would be on the same train as herself as far as Chicago. He was a testimony to their rise, he announced the circles that by his professional competence Oliver had earned the right to move in. This time, when she left him on a station platform, she would leave him solidly established, and she would go East without the taste of failure in her mouth.

In every way this returning was different from the last. Despite the prospect of another winter apart, no tears, no dreary thoughts. In Chicago, Ferd Ward and Mr. Grant took her to a banquet honoring General Grant, and she capped her social season by shaking that conquering hand and looking into those sad, streaked eyes. She met General Sherman and a half dozen other generals of the Army of Tennessee, and she had an animated ten-minute conversation with the principal speaker, Mr. Samuel Clemens. These items are not important. They have for me, as a historian, a sort of corroborating charm: they prove that my grandmother did indeed live in time, among people.

Through the fading autumn she came back to Milton, and after a day’s dismay that her child did not know her, and after a few days of unpacking, washing, talking, and preparing, found herself ready for a winter’s work. There was nothing to hinder–Augusta and Thomas were still abroad. She had finished the Louisa Alcott blocks and had no other contracts for the moment. Without planning it, she found herself beginning a novel about her grandfather, the Quaker preacher who by his abolitionism had got the whole Milton meeting set down.

Writing books about grandparents seems to run in the family.

From the parental burrow Leadville was so far away it was only half real. Unwrapping her apple-cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here.

She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents, as I do, through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel snow-white for winter flirt his black-tipped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes.

Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the Sawatch at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or the smokes of Leadville, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She tried to think whether she would possibly believe in Sam Emmons if he appeared at her Milton door in his white buckskins. She paused sometimes, cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser.

Milton was dim and gentle, molded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured,