hot and cold water both right on the spot, and I reckon there ain't no such natural washtub as that in all Ioway. I got me a wash that will last me a long while. There wasn't no towels, and so I took my skirt. Now, Cynthy——”

   But Cynthy was writing notes in her diary. All college girls write notes in diaries, and sometimes they take to free verse. Of course writing in a diary is only a form of egotism, precisely like writing on a geyser formation. They both ought to be illegal, and one is. Maw knows all about that. Sometimes, even now, she will tell me how she came to be fined by the United States commissioner at Mammoth Hot Springs.

   “So Maw, dear, old, happy, innocent Maw, knelt down with her hatpin and wrote:”—p. 19

   You see, the geysers rattled Maw, there being so many and she loving them all so much. One day when they were camped near the Upper Basin, Maw was looking down in the cone of Old Faithful, just after that Paderewski of the park had ceased playing. She told me she wanted

   to see where all the suds came from. But all at once she saw beneath her feet a white, shiny expanse of something that looked like chalk. At a sudden impulse she drew a hatpin from her hair and knelt down on the geyser cone—not reflecting how long and slow had been its growth.

   For the first time a feeling of identity came to Maw. She never had been anybody all her life, even to herself, before this moment on her vacation. But now she had seen the mountains and the sky, and had oriented herself as one of the owners of this park. So Maw, dear, old, happy, innocent Maw, knelt down with her hatpin and wrote: Margaret D. Hanaford, Glasgow, Iowa.

   She was looking at her handiwork and allowing she could have done it better, when she felt a touch on her shoulder, and looked up into the stern young face, the narrow blond mustache, of the ranger from Indianapolis. The ranger was in the Engineers of the A. E. F. When Maw

   saw him she was frightened, she didn't know why.

   “Madam,” said the ranger, “are you Margaret D. Hanaford?”

   “That's me,” answered Maw; “I don't deny it.”

   “Did you write that on the formation?”

 Prev. P 8/25 next