They then lived for a time in a huge sod cabin, some distance west of the Big Horn range in Wyoming, but later left their happy mountain domicile for the old home in Ohio.

"Sometimes when Lillie musing sits, A dreamy mist before her flits, And to her waking memories come Fair visions of a mountain home. And all her gilded marble halls Become transformed to sodded walls, Her frescoed ceilings fade away To rough hewn poles and boughs and hay.

"The mists they break before her eyes, 'Twas but a dream of Paradise.

"Since then the mountain fires swept o'er And burned the ivy round the door. The rotting door frame stands alone, Save idly swinging door, with moan, Its hinges coated o'er with rust. The walls have crumbled into dust."

There are not a great many of the old guard of pioneers surviving, but those that are still with us in their travels over western Nebraska, occasionally see the ruins of a sod cabin, and to each there come a sadness, for each sees therein the home shrine of a once hopeful family that came into the west.

We all had the same ambitions, and all did our level best to make those humble places of abode, real homes. We had no wild or extravagant ideas or desires, but we wanted that farm for ours and our children. A few, like the dwellers in the cabin west of the Big Horns, went back to better things (perhaps) in the east. The most of us that have survived are still here, where our lives are woven into the woof and warp of the fabric of western Nebraska.