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ance their debts, if that. If they could find the two hundred dollars to prove up, the land would be theirs, anyway, and Manly thought he could.
It would be a fight to win out in this business of farming, but strangely she felt her spirit rising for the struggle.
The incurable optimism of the farmer who throws his seed on the ground every spring, betting it and his time against the elements, seemed inextricably to blend with the creed of her pioneer forefathers that “it is better farther on”—only instead of farther on in space, it was farther on in time, over the horizon of the years ahead instead of the far horizon of the west. She was still the pioneer girl and she could understand Manly’s love of the land through its appeal to herself.
“Oh, well,” Laura sighed, summing up her idea of the situation in a saying of her Ma’s:
“We’ll always be farmers, for what is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.” And then Laura smiled, for Manly was coming from the barn and he was singing:
“You talk of the mines of Australia,
They’ve wealth in red gold, without doubt;
But, ah! there is gold in the farm, boys—
If only you’ll shovel it out.”
The oval glass bread plate Laura and Manly bought for their first Christmas together. The plate survived the fire and was found among Rose Wilder Lane?s things after her death. It is now at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association in Mansfield, Missouri, for all visitors to see.
The End
