Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/334

294 I'd regret life less if I knew that you would take up the work I once hoped to accomplish, won't you?"

I couldn't resist his appeal: "All right", I said, after choking down my tears, "give me a few months and I'll go, round the world first and then to Germany to study".

He drew me to him and kissed me on the fore-head: I felt it as a sort of consecration.

A day or so afterwards he took train for Denver and I felt as if the sun had gone out of my life.

I had little to do in Lawrence at this time except read at large and I began to spend a couple of hours «very day in the town library. Mrs. Trask, the librarian, was the widow of one of the early settlers who had been brutally murdered during the Quantrell raid when Missourian bandits "shot up" the little town of Lawrence in a last attempt to turn Kansas into a slave-owning state.

Mrs. Trask was a rather pretty little woman who had been made librarian to compensate her in some sort for the loss of her husband. She was well-read in American literature and I often took her advice as to my choice of books. She liked me, I think, for she was invariably kind to me and I owe her many pleasant hours and some instruction.

After Smith had gone West I spent more and more time in the library for my law-work was becoming easier to me every hour. One day about a month after Smith had left, I went into the library and could find nothing enticing to read. Mrs. Trask happened to be passing and I asked her: "What am I to read?"

'Have you read any of that?" she replied pointing to Bonn's edition of Emerson in two volumes. "He's good!"