Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/119

Rh almost imploringly, to see if "Uncle Sam," or some other relative, would not give a hand to help him out on better footing. But Uncle Sam has grown old, gouty, and unfeeling. Much prosperity and too high living puts him to nodding in his chair. Alas for his far-off frontier children, when they have only him to look to! And New England, dear New England, the very dust of which is most precious to Lawrence ! the whir of her looms, the rattle of her mills, the steam of her numberless engines, make such a noise that poor, awkward Lawrence's cry for help is quite unheeded, except, perhaps, in the passing of a few well-sounding resolutions, which remind one of champagne, long exposed to the air, from which the life and sparkle is gone forever.

Lawrence sits down in his cabin. His floor is of cotton-wood, rough and unwashed; his venison and beef hang upon the wall; his vegetables, in baskets over his head. Lawrence listens, with ears sharpened by intense longing, for sympathy and aid where nature's great heart prompts him to look for it, from his kin. He reads how New England thrusts her hand into well-filled pockets, and, with