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By Root 1684 0

and five-month-old baby, whose wagon broke down and whose baby died, and he had to carry the baby on foot to three Missouri towns, wrapped in a shawl, before he could find a coffinmaker to make a baby coffin, or a preacher to say a service. The wife didn’t see the husband for three weeks after the baby died, and stayed with strangers, waiting for him to return and grieving for her child. This happened to a woman who has been pointed out to me in the street. Of course, one wishes to say a word of comfort, but then that would reveal that she is the subject of gossip; even though it is gossip of the most sympathetic variety, it would be painful. I’ve heard many sad stories that people in the States simply would not believe. Everyone in Lawrence has a story.

But everyone in Lawrence is full of energy and enterprise, and I like it here very much. Soon I shall be writing you from our very own claim, on the river. Mr. Newton’s friends speak very highly of it.

Your affectionate sister,

LYDIA

Postscript: Please give my best to Frank, and say that I wish he were here with me to stroll down the streets of Lawrence and marvel at the sights.

And I did wish that, I really did.

After writing my letter, I rode Jeremiah through the streets of Lawrence and then up to the top of Mount Oread. The vista over the prairies from there was large and delightful. From a distance, I saw the much-discussed Mrs. Robinson. Many people said that for sheer singleness of purpose, Mrs. Robinson had her husband all beat. Later, both he and she became famous—he for being the governor of Kansas, and she for her writings. Although we didn’t speak, Mrs. Robinson gave me a friendly smile, and I watched her after she walked on. This encounter stuck in my mind, I must say, because very shortly—by the time I had gotten back to the corral and the leaning house—my confident notions about my health in Kansas became false. As I walked toward the tall, triangular end where the doorcloth hung, the whole thing seemed to swell to vastness, then shrink to glittering smallness. When I pulled aside the doorcloth, the interior seemed pitch black. I could see nothing, and I felt a vapor of perspiration start from every part of my body at once. Then I fell down.

Many settlers in Kansas fell into such fevers and, if they returned to themselves ever again, did not do so for many weeks. My fancy, however, throughout my fever, was that Mrs. Robinson was walking toward me, and that it was she who was the doctor, not her husband. It was my fixed belief that when she got to me, she would say something, and I would be cured of my fever. She came closer and closer, always with that friendly, self-assured smile, the "Kansas smile," I called it in my dream. And then she did approach the bed, and then she did speak, though I couldn’t decipher the words, and then I woke up, feeling weak but lucid. The woman beside the bed was Mrs. Jenkins, holding a basin of broth and a spoon. I said, "What did you say?" and she said, "Mr. Newton should be back today," and by that I knew that I had been in my fever for only two days. There was much speculation as to what it might be—typhoid? bilious fever? a case of the ague? Mrs. Jenkins said, "Well, my dear, it’s passed off so quickly that we didn’t have a good chance to look at it."

I was a real pioneer now, for in those days it seemed that everyone was sick with the fever or the ague more often than not. Susannah Jenkins could have stood for a portrait of the typical settler of Kansas Territory. Her face was pale and sallow-looking from the ague, even though her shaking days were only one in three and she wasn’t as bad as some on those days. People said it was the land itself—it was so rich that when a man first plowed it up, it sent off a miasma that made everyone ill. Sickness was just the price settlers had to pay for the good things that would come later. There was much nursing back and forth. Every woman got plenty of practice nursing strange men who were sometimes so sick that they couldn’t say who they were or who their friends and relatives