When the tempest of his homesickness passed and the frame shook spasmodically with subsiding sobs, he would return to the duties of the range.

By and by, the prairies began to look different, he began to make friends with the cattle he tended, the horses he rode, and other life of the plains.

Nomadic red men drifted by at intervals and he had no fear of them. Like Fiddler Campbell, he found heartease in the music of

his violin. Astride his horse, without instruction, he learned to ply the bow with his left hand, while with his right he held the instrument upside down, its drum upon the saddle horn, and its neck extending upwards. In the later days, at the round-up and granger dances, he held the inverted fiddle upon his knees and the music was good.

A Mrs. Stickney, a writer of some note, once visited La Grange, and later published an accurate descriptive story of a round-up dance. The stories of Emerson Hough, in which he describes cowboys dancing in chaps and with spurs jingling, is purely fiction, and Mrs. Stickney did not yield to such impulses to ranmble and exaggerate. But she did describe the violinist as a "bow-legged, left-handed, red-headed and freckle-faced fiddler, who played with the violin standing on its head."

If one recognizes anyone from this description, perhaps one best be as circumspect as was Mrs. Stickney, and mention no name, for though now a grizzled veteran of the prairies, the described can clip the ears of a coyote at a distance of one hundred yards with his old forty-five, or a much greater distance with his new forty-thirty.