Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/18

14 the second was more practical. I took up the bundle of shawls, which had been such a trouble to us when we changed cars, feeling amply paid, in the wealth of help they now gave to make others comfortable. One was speedily folded into a mattress, and as the chairs were stuffed haircloth, by thrusting my hand under one, it readily slipped out from the frame. It was speedily transferred to a corner of the room, the shawl covered over it, and the pale little woman laid away upon it for the remaining night-time, while the big baby, Ella, was spread in my lap, to be hushed off to sleep by the scraps of baby lullabies still lingering in my memory, as sung by you when I was young. What a splendid great child ! How did that mother live through so long a ride and this child in her arms?

The room was long, fortunately. The male portion of the party soon settled off into one end of it, with chair-bottoms for pillows; and the women gradually spread themselves among the children, prophesying that they could not sleep, but yet yielding at last to "tired nature's sweet restorer;" and the children, too, did not, I presume, know the difference between