When Willa Cather was a girl, her family moved west to the open prairie of Nebraska, leaving behind a world Willa loved dearly. Gone were the wooded hills & the meadows marbled with sheep. In their place was a flat, empty land, as bare as a strip of sheet iron. Willa felt she had come to the end of things; she felt the land did not want them. But then spring came, & the silent land stirred into life. Summer followed, long & hot, & Willa roamed free over the open fields on her pony. Slowly she began to explore the hidden delights of this strange new countryside, & to make friends with her fellow settlers on the Divide. By the time autumn came, with its splendid sunlit colors, Willa understood that what she had thought was an ending was really a new beginning.

Illus.