One young man--two.

Well"-- with maternal pride--"Molly ain't never lacked for beaus! "But look at the wagons come!" she added.

"All the country's going West this spring, it certainly seems like." It was the spring gathering of the west-bound wagon-trains, stretching from old Independence to Westport Landing, the spot where that very year the new name of Kansas City was heard among the emigrants as the place of the jump-off.

It was now an hour by sun, as these Western people would have said, and the low-lying valley mists had not yet fully risen, so that the atmosphere for a great picture did not lack.
It was a great picture, a stirring panorama of an earlier day, which now unfolded.

Slow, swaying, stately, the ox teams came on, as though impelled by and not compelling the fleet of white canvas sails.