Book 2 - Chapter 19. New Life In The Old House

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_ CHAPTER XIX. New Life in the Old House

Meanwhile, Chicago rushing toward its two million mark, had not, alas! lived up to its literary promise of '94. In music, in painting, in sculpture and architecture it was no longer negligible, but each year its authors appeared more and more like a group of esthetic pioneers heroically maintaining themselves in the midst of an increasing tumult of material upbuilding.

One by one its hopeful young publishing houses had failed, and one by one its aspiring periodicals had withered in the keen wind of Eastern competition. _The Dial_ alone held on, pathetically solitary, one might almost say alien and solitary.

Against all this misfortune even my besotted optimism could not prevail. My pioneering spirit, subdued by years of penury and rough usage, yielded more and more to the honor and the intellectual companionship which the East offered. To Fuller I privately remarked: "As soon as I can afford it I intend to establish a home in New York."

"I'd go further," he replied. "I would live in Italy if I could."

It was a very significant fact that Chicago contained in 1903 but a handful of writers, while St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Kansas City had fewer yet. "What is the reason for this literary sterility?" I asked of my companions. "Why should not these powerful cities produce authors? Boston, when she had less than three hundred thousands citizens had Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes."

The answer was (and still is), "Because there are few supporters of workers in the fine arts. Western men do not think in terms of art. There are no literary periodicals in these cities to invite (and pay for) the work of the author and the illustrator, and there is moreover a tendency on the part of our builders to give the eastern sculptor, painter or architect the jobs which might be done by local men. Until Chicago has at least one magazine founded like a university, and publishing houses like Scribners and Macmillans our authors and artists must go to New York." Of course none of these answers succeeded in clearing up the mystery, but they were helpful.

Some of the writers in the Little Room were outspokenly envious of my ability to spend half my winters in the East, but Lorado Taft stoutly declared that the West inspired him, satisfied him. "Chicago suits me," he asserted, "and besides I can't afford to run away from my job. You should be the last man to admit defeat, _you_ who have been preaching local color and local patriotism all your days."

In truth Taft was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me to dinner even if they did not read my books.

The claims of Chicago upon me had been strengthened by the presence of Professor Taft who had given up his home in Kansas and was now settled not far from his son and near the University. He had brought all his books and other treasures with intent to spend the remaining years of his life in the neighborhood of his illustrious son and his two daughters, a fact which I could not overlook in any plans for changing my own residence.

Don Carlos Taft was a singular and powerful figure, as I have already indicated, a stoic, of Oriental serenity, one who could smile in the midst of excruciating pain. With his eyes against a blank wall he was able to endlessly amuse himself by calling up the deep-laid concepts of his earlier years of study. Though affected with some obscure spinal disorder which made every movement a punishment, he concealed his suffering, no matter how intense it might be, and always answered, "Fine, fine!" when any of us asked "How are you to-day?"

He lived in Woodlawn as he had lived in Kansas, like a man in a diving bell. His capacious brain filled with "knowledges" of the days when Gladstone was king and Darwin an outlaw, had little room for the scientific theories of Bergson and his like. He remained the old-fashioned New England theologian converted to militant agnosticism.

Although at this time over seventy years of age his mind was notably clear, orderly and active, and his talk (usually a carefully constructed monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters, music possessed no interest for him.

He had read, I believe, one or two of my books but never alluded to them, although he manifested a growing respect for my ability to earn money, and especially delighted in my faculty for living within my means. He watched the slow growth of my income with approving eyes. To him as to my father, earning money was a struggle, saving it a virtue, and wasting it a crime.

In almost every other characteristic he was my father's direct antithesis--my father, whose faith approximated that of a Sioux warrior. "I take things as they come," was one of his sayings. He was not concerned with the theories of Evolution, the Pragmatic Philosophy or any other formal system of learning or ethics. With him the present was filled with duties, the remote past or the distant future was of indifferent concern. To deal justly and to leave the world a little better than he found it, was his creed.

The one point of contact between these widely divergent pioneers was their love of Zulime, for my father was almost as fond of her as Don Carlos himself, and distinctly more expressive of his love--for Father Taft held affection to be something not quite decorous when openly declared. He never offered a caress or spoke an affectionate word so far as I know.

There was something pathetic in his situation in these days. Full of learning and eager to share it with youth he could find no one willing to listen to him--not even his children. In the midst of a vast city he was sadly solitary. None of his children appeared interested in his allusions to Hammurabi or Charlemagne, on the contrary, monologues of any kind were taboo in the artistic circles where Lorado reigned. We was too busy, we were all too busy with our small plans and daily struggles, to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or played cinch with the men at the village drugstore.

Nevertheless, with full knowledge of these fundamental divergencies in the lives of our sires, I urged Zulime to invite Professor Taft to spend a few weeks in West Salem. "He and father will disagree, but the one is a philosopher accustomed to pioneer types and the other a man of reason and I am willing to risk their coming together if you are."

Don Carlos seemed pleased by this invitation and promised to come "one of these days."

Our return to Wisconsin in April was a return to winter. On looking from our car windows at dawn, we found the ground white with snow, and flakes of frost driving through the budding branches of the trees. Every bird was mute, as if with horror and the tender amber-and-green leaves of the maples shone through the rime with a singular and pathetic beauty.

Happily this was only a cold wave. Toward noon the sun came out, the icy cover sank into the earth and the robins began to sing again as if to reassure themselves as well as us.

We came back to the Homestead now with a full sense of our proprietorship. It was entirely ours and it was waiting for us. Father was at the gate, it is true, but he was there this time merely as care-taker, as supervisor of the garden--our garden.

His greeting of Zulime had a deeper note of tenderness than he had ever used hitherto, for he was aware of our hope, and shared our joyous expectancy. "I'm glad you've come," he said simply. "I hate to see the house standing here cold and empty. It don't seem natural or right."

His first act was to lead us out to the garden where orderly beds of springing vegetables testified to his care. "I didn't do anything about the flowers," he confessed rather shamefacedly. "I'm no good at that kind of work."

As the days went by I discovered that father's heart clung to the old place. He loved to spend his days upon it. He was comfortable in his own little cottage, but it seemed too small and too "slick" for him. He liked our trees and lawn and barn, and I was glad to have him continue his supervision of them. They gave him something to think about, something to do. The curse of the "tired farmers" of the village was their enforced idleness. There was almost nothing for them to exercise upon.

He spent most of each day tinkering around the barn, overseeing the garden or resting on the back porch where mother used to sit and look out on the valley. On Sunday he came in to supper, and afterward called for "The Sweet Story of Old" and "The Palace of the King." He listened in silence, a blur in his dreaming eyes, for the past returned on the wings of these songs.

Nobly considerate in his attitude toward Zulime he seemed to understand, perfectly, her almost childish joy in the possession of a nest of her own. He never came to a meal without invitation, though he was seldom without the invitation, for Zulime was fond of him and had only one point of contention with him: "I wish you wouldn't wear your working clothes about the street," she said--and artfully added, "You are so handsome when you are in your Sunday suit, I wish you would wear it all the time."

He smiled with pleasure, but replied: "I'd look fine hoeing potatoes in my Sunday suit, wouldn't I!" Nevertheless he was mindful of her request and always came to dinner in, at worst, his second best.

Each day the gardens about us took on charm. The plum and cherry trees flung out banners of bloom and later the apple trees flowered in pink-and-white radiance. Wonder-working sap seemed to spout into the air through every minute branch. Showers of rain alternated with vivid sunshine, and through the air, heavy with perfume, the mourning dove sang with sad insistence as if to remind us of the impermanency of May's ineffable loveliness. Butterflies suddenly appeared in the grass, and the bees toiled like harvesters, so eager, so busy that they tumbled over one another in their haste. Nature was at her sweetest and loveliest, and in the midst of it walked my young wife, in quiet anticipation of motherhood.

Commonplace to others our rude homestead grew in beauty and significance to us. Day by day we sat on our front porch, and watched the clouds of blossoms thicken. If we walked in our garden we felt the creative loam throbbing beneath our feet. Each bird seemed as proud of the place as we. Each insect was in a transport of activity.

Into the radiant white of the cherry blossoms, impetuous green shoots (new generations) appeared as if in feverish haste, unwilling to await the passing of the flowers. The hills to the south were soaring bubbles of exquisite green vapor dashed with amber and pink and red. Each morning the shade of the maple trees deepened, and on the lawn the dandelions opened, sowing with pieces of gold the velvet of the sward. The songs of the robin, the catbird and the thrush became more confident, more prolix until, at last, the drab and angular little village was transfigured into celestial beauty by the heavenly light and melody of completed spring.

In a certain sense here was the wealth I had been struggling to secure. Here were--seemingly--all the elements of man's content, a broad roof, a generous garden, spreading trees, blossoming shrubs, a familiar horizon line, a lovely wife--and the promise of a child!

Truly, I should have been happy, and in my sour, big-fisted way I was happy. I tried, honestly, to grasp and hold the ecstasy which these days offered. I who had lived for twelve years on railway trains, in camp, on horse-back or in wretched little city hotels, was now a portly householder, a pampered husband and a prospective parent. And yet--such is my perverse temperament--I could not overlook the fact that this tranquil village like thousands of others scattered over the West, was but a half-way house, a pleasant hospital into which many of the crippled, worn-out and white-haired farmers and their wives had come to rest for a little while on their way to the grave.

As I walked the shaded street, perceiving these veterans of the hoe and plow, digging feebly in the earth of their small gardens, or sitting a-dream on the narrow porches of their tiny cottages my joy was embittered. Age, age was everywhere. Here in the midst of the flowering trees the men of the Middle Border were withering into dust.

In the city one does not come into anything like this close relationship with a dying generation. The tragedy is obscured. Here Zulime and I, young and strong, were living in the midst of an almost universal senility and decay. There was no escape from these grim facts.

Looked at from a distance there was comfort in the thought of these pioneers, released from the grind of their farm routine, dozing at ease beneath the maple trees, but closely studied they became sorrowful. I knew too much about them. Several of them had been my father's companions in those glorious days in fifty-five. Yonder white-haired invalid, sitting in the sun silently watching his bees, had been a famous pilot on the river, and that bushy-haired giant, halting by on a stick, was the wreck of a mighty hunter. The wives of these men equally worn, equally rheumatic and even more querulous, had been the rosy, laughing, dancing companions of Isabel McClintock in the days when Richard Garland came a-courting. All, all were camping in lonely cottages while their sons and daughters, in distant cities or far-off mountain valleys, adventuring in their turn, were taking up the discipline and the duties of a new border, a new world.

As a novelist I could not fail to observe these melancholy features of a life which on its surface seemed idyllic. In New York, in Chicago I was concerned mainly with happy, busy people of my own age or younger,--here I was brought into close contact daily--almost hourly--with the passing of my father's generation and, also, I was made aware of the coming in of an alien, uninspiring race. The farms of the Dudleys, the McKinleys, the Coburns were being taken by the Smeckpeffers, the Heffelfingers, and the Bergmans! Already the pages of the village newspaper were peppered with such names, and a powerful Congregation was building a German church on the site of the old-time Methodist meeting house of my boyhood. My strain was dying out--a new and to my mind less admirable America was coming on.

As June deepened my father (who realized something of the changes going on) proposed a trip to the town in Iowa near which we had lived for twelve years, and to this I consented, feeling that this visit could not safely be postponed another year.

He had never been back to our prairie farm in Mitchell County since leaving it, over twenty years before, and now (with money and leisure) he was eager to go, and as my old Seminary associates had asked me to speak at their Commencement, we rode away one lovely June day up along the Mississippi to Winona, thence by way of a winding coulee, to the level lands, and so across to Mitchell County, our old home. The railroad, which was new to us, ran across Dry Run prairie within half a mile of our school-house, but so flat and monotonous did the whole country now appear, we could not distinguish any familiar landmarks. The "hills" along the creek were barely noticeable from the car, and all the farm-steads were hidden by groves of trees. We passed our former home without recognizing it!

Osage, we soon discovered, was almost as much of an asylum for the aged as West Salem. It, too, was filled with worn-out farmers, men with whom my father had subdued the sod in the early days. Osmond Button, William Frazer, Oliver Cole, David Babcock were all living "in town" on narrow village lots, "taking it easy" as they called it, but they were by no means as contented as they seemed to the casual onlooker. Freed from the hard daily demands of the farm, many of them acknowledged a sense of uselessness, a fear of decay.

As fast as they learned of our presence, scores of loyal friends swarmed about us expressing a sincere regard for my father, and a kind of wondering respect for me. Some of them clung to my father's hand as though in hope of recovering through him some gleam of the beauty, some part of the magic of the brave days gone--days when the land was new and they were young. "You must come home with me," each man insisted, "the women folks all want to see you."

Twenty years had wrought great changes in the men as well as in the county, and my father was bewildered and saddened by the tale. One by one he called the names of those who had been his one-time friends and neighbors. Some were dead, others had moved away--only one or two remained where he had left them, and it was in the hope of seeing these men and at the same time to visit the farm and school-house on Dry Run, and the church at Burr Oak, that I hired a carriage and drove my father out along the well-remembered lane to the north and east--I say "well-remembered" although the growth of the trees and the presence of new buildings made its appeal mixed and unsatisfactory to us both.

We found our house almost hid in the trees which we had planted on the bare prairie thirty years before. As we stood in the yard I spoke of the silver wedding which took place there. The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many years presented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. Our stay was short.

Strangers were in all of the other houses along the way--we found but two of our former neighbors at home, and the farther we drove the more melancholy we both became.

One of the places which I wished especially to revisit was the school-house at Burr Oak, the room which had been our social center in the early eighties. In it we had listened to church service in summer, and there in winter our Grange Suppers and Friday Lyceums had been held. It was there, too, that I had worshiped at the shrine of Hattie's girlish beauty, when as a shock-haired lad I forgot, for a day, the loneliness of my prairie home.

Alas! the tall oaks which in those days had given dignity and charm to the yard had all been cut down, and the building, once glorified by the waving shadows of the leaves, now stood bare as a bone beside the road. An alien lived where Betty once reigned, and the white cottage from which Agnes was wont to issue in her exquisite Sunday frock, was untenanted and falling into decay.

How lovely those girls had seemed to me as I watched them approach, walking so daintily the path beside the fence! What rich, alluring color flamed in Bettie's cheek, what fire flashed in Aggie's dark and roguish eyes!

To a stranger, Burr Oak--my Burr Oak--even in Seventy-two was only a pleasant meeting place of prairie lanes on the margin of a forest, but to me it had been a temple of magic. I had but to shut my eyes to desolating changes, turning my vision inward, in order to see myself (a stocky awkward boy in a Sunday suit with a torturing collar) standing on the porch waiting to see those white-clad maidens pass into the vestibule.

Too shy in those days to meet their eyes, too worshipful to ever hope for word or smile, I remained their silent adorer. Here and now I set down the tribute which I could not then express:

O maids to whom I never spoke, to whom
My dreaming ran in lonely field,
Because of you I saw the bloom
Of Maytime more abundantly revealed.
From you each bud new magic caught.
When you were near, my skies
Were brighter, for your beauty brought
A poet's rapture to my eyes.

Men tell me you are bent and gray,
And worn with toil and pain;
And so I pray the Wheel of Chance
May never set us face to face again.
Better that I should think of you
As you then were, strong and sweet,
Walking your joyous sunlit way
Between the wheat and roses of the lane--
_Pass on, O weary women of today--_
_Remain forever 'mid the roses and the wheat,_
_O girls with laughing lips and dancing feet!_

That ride and the people I met closed a gate for me. I accomplished a painful relinquishment. That noon-day sun divided my past from my present as with the stroke of a flaming sword. Up to this moment I had retained, in formless fashion, a belief that I could some time and somehow reach out and regain, at least in part, the substance of the life I had once lived here in this scene. Now I confessed that not only was my youth gone but that the friends and the place of my youth had vanished. My heart, wrung with a measureless regret filled my throat with pain, and as I looked in my father's face I perceived that he, too, was feeling the force of Time's inexorable decree.

We started homeward in silence, speaking only now and then when some object made itself recognizable to us.

"I shall never ride this lane again," I said as we were nearing the town. "It has been a sad experience. The world of my boyhood--the world we both knew--is utterly gone. It exists only in your memory and mine. I want to get away--back to Zulime and the present."

"I'm ready to go," replied my father. "I thought I'd enjoy visiting the old place and seeing old neighbors, but I haven't. It's all too melancholy. I'm ready to go back to the LaCrosse Valley and stay there what little time I've got left to me."

That night, at the Seminary, I met the Alumni and spoke to them on some subject connected with the early history of the school, and in doing so I obtained once again a perception of the barrier which had risen between my classmates and myself. They were not only serious, they were piteously solemn. No one laughed, no one took a light and airy view of life. Once or twice I tried to jest or ventured a humorous remark, but these attempts to lighten the gloom were met with chilling silence. No one whispered or smiled or turned aside. It was like a prayer meeting in the face of famine.

Part of this was due no doubt to their habit of listening to sermons, but some of it arose I am sure from a feeling of poignant regret similar to that which burdened my own heart. As usual in such reunions the absent ones were named and the faces of the dead recalled. In all our songs the rustling of withered leaves could be heard. All felt the pitiless march of time and I respected them for their perception of life's essential enigma.

After the "Services" were finished, several of the women came up to me and introduced themselves. One handsome gray-haired woman said: "I am Rosa Clinton," and it shocked me to be unable to find in her the girl I once knew. Another matron whom I recognized at once, retained something inescapably girlish in both face and voice. It hurt me to detect in her withered lips the quaint twist which had once been so charming to me--but then she undoubtedly discovered in me equally distressing reminders of decay.

Not all my philosophy could prevent me from falling into profound melancholy. I went back to my hotel thinking of these men and women as they were when, as a youth of twenty, I trod with them the worn plank walks beneath the magical murmuring maple trees. The bitter facts of their lives gave rise to question. What was it all about? What was the value of their efforts or my own? Has the life of man any more significance than that of an insect?

Just before leaving for the train next day we called on Osmond Button, who clung to my father with piteous intensity. "Stay another day," he pleaded, but father would not listen to any postponement.

This old neighbor went to the train with us, knowing full well that he and my father would never meet again.

Thus it happened--curiously, yet most naturally--that the last man we saw as we left Osage was our first neighbor on Dry Run prairie in the autumn of Seventy-one.

From this melancholy review of the bent forms of ancient friends and neighbors, dreaming of the past, I returned to my wife, who was concerned entirely with the future. What had she to do with elderly folk? Life to her was sweet and promiseful. Intently toiling over the adornment of tiny caps, socks and gowns, joyful as a girl of seven making dresses for a doll, she insisted on displaying to me all of that lilliputian wardrobe. A dozen times each day she called on me to admire this or that garment, and I was greatly relieved to find that the growing wonder of the experience through which she was about to pass, prevented her from giving way to fear of it. Over me, at times, an icy shadow fell. Suppose--suppose----!

One night she dreamed that a babe had come to us, and that the nurse had carelessly allowed it to chill and die, but I had no such disturbing premonitions. Contrary to the statements of sentimental novelists and poets I almost never dreamed of my wife. I more often dreamed of Howells or Roosevelt or some of my editorial friends, indeed I often had highly technical literary dreams wherein I prepared manuscripts for the press or composed speeches or poems, and sometimes my mother or Jessie came back to me--but Zulime had never up to this time entered my sleep.

One afternoon during this period of waiting and just after I had finished the writing of _Hesper_ we joined our good friends the Eastons on an excursion up the Mississippi on their house-boat, a glorious outing which I mention because it was the farthest removed from my boyhood life on Dry Run prairie whose scenes had just been vividly brought to mind.

Here was the flawless poetry of recreation, the perfection of travel. To sit in a reclining chair on the screened-in forward deck of a beautiful boat, what time it was being propelled by some invisible silent machinery, up a shining river, reflecting wooded bluffs, was like taking flight on the magic carpet of my boyhood's story book. The purple head-lands projecting majestically into the still flood took on once more the poetry and the mystery of the prehistoric. One by one those royal pyramids ordered and adorned themselves for our inspection while the narrow valleys opening their gates, displayed all their tranquil pastoral charm.

Our meals, delicately cooked and perfectly served, appeared as if by conjury, on a table in the dining-room amidships, and as we ate we watched the glory deepen on the clouds, while the waters, soundless as oil, rolled past our open doors. It was all a passage to the Land of the Lotos to me. How had I, whose youth had been so full of penury and toil, earned a share in such leisure, such luxury? Was it right for me to give myself up to the enjoyment of it? For Zulime's sake I rejoiced in it, knowing that her days were long with waiting and suspense.

Without knowing much of the bitter anguish of the ordeal, I held maternity to be (as the great poets had taught me to hold it) a noble heroism. "If mankind is worth continuing on this earth," I had written, "then the mother is entitled to the highest honor, the tenderest care. Science should do its best to lessen her pain, to make her birth-bed honorable."

In spite of my wife's brave smile I sensed in her a subconscious dread of what was coming, and this anxiety I shared so fully that I ceased to write and gave all my time to her. Together we walked the garden or drove about the country in the low-hung, easy-riding old surrey, tracing the wooded ways we loved the best, or climbing to where a wide view of the valley offered. I understood her laughing stoicism much better now, and it no longer deceived me. She made light of her own fears in order that I might not worry. The fact that she was past her first youth was my torment, for I had read that the danger increased with every year beyond twenty-five and the thought that we might never ride these lanes again came into my mind and would not be exorcised. At such moments as I could snatch I worked on a series of lectures which I was scheduled to deliver at the University of Chicago--lectures on Edwin Booth which brought back my Boston days.

At last the dreaded day came!--I shall not dwell upon the long hours of the mother's pain, or on the sleepless anxiety of my household, for I have no desire to relive them. I would rather make statement of my relief and gratitude when after many, many hours of suffering, Edward Evans of LaCrosse, a scientific, deft and powerful surgeon, came to the mother's rescue. He was a master--the man who knew!

[Illustration: At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife--lovely as a Madonna--out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.]

He saved both mother and child, and when the nurse laid in my arms a little babe, who looked up at me with grave, accusing blue eyes,--the eyes of her mother,--I wondered whether society had a right to put any woman to this cruel test--whether the race was worth maintaining at such a price.

Our loyal friend, Mary Easton (mother of five children), who was present to help us through our stern trial, assured me that maternity had its joys as well as its agonies, and after she had peered into the face of my small daughter she remarked to me with a delightful note of admiration, "Why, she is already a _person_!"

So indeed she was. Her head, large and shapely and her eyes wide, dark and curiously reflective, were like her mother's. True, she hadn't much nose, but her hair was abundant and her fingers exquisite. She lay in my big paws with what seemed to me to be tranquil confidence, and though her legs were comically rudimentary, her glance manifested an unassailable dignity. My father insisted she resembled her grandmother.

* * * * *

At last came the blessed day when the nurse permitted me to wheel the convalescent out upon the porch. The morning was lovely, with just a hint of autumn in its coolness, and to Zulime it was heavenly sweet, for it seemed that she had emerged from a long dark night of agony and doubt.

As she sat with the babe in her lap looking over the familiar hills, she was more beautiful than she had ever been before. She was a being glorified.

Later in the day, as the sun was going down in a welter of gold and crimson, she came out again and in its splendor I chose to read the promise of a noble future for Mary Isabel. It gave me joy to know that she had taken up her life beneath the same roof and almost in the same room in which Isabel Garland had laid her burden down.

Yes, the Homestead had a new claimant. In the midst of my father's decaying world a new and vigorous life had miraculously appeared. Beneath the moldering leaves of the leaning oaks a tender yet tenacious shoot was springing from the soil. _

Read next: Book 2: Chapter 20. Mary Isabel's Chimney

Read previous: Book 2: Chapter 18. The Old Pioneer Takes The Back Trail

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