She would make her husband a great man, and--when that was manifestly impossible without a rebirth of Tom Linkhorn--she would have a son who would wear a black coat like Lawyer Macneil and Colonel Hardin way back in Kentucky, and make fine speeches beginning "Fellow countrymen and gentlemen of this famous State." She had a passion for words, and sonorous phrases haunted her memory.

She herself would have a silk gown and a bonnet with roses in it; once long ago she had been to Elizabethtown and seen just such a gown and bonnet....

Or Tom would be successful in this wild Indiana country and be, like Daniel Boone, the father of a new State, and have places and towns called for him--a Nancyville perhaps or a Linkhorn County.

She knew about Daniel Boone, for her grandfather Hanks had been with him....

And there had been other dreams, older dreams, dating far back to the days when she was a little girl with eyes like a brown owl.
Someone had told her fairy-tales about princesses and knights, strange beings which she never quite understood, but of which she made marvellous pictures in her head She had learned to read in order to follow up the doings of those queer bright folk, but she had never tracked them down again.