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"Is it, Miss Wisdom? You’ll see who I’ll marry, and she won’t have a domestic virtue to bless herself with. She’ll be a snapping turtle, and she’ll be a match for me. All the same, they’re a fine bunch of old dames over there. You admire them yourself. "

"No, I don’t; I detest them. "

"You won’t, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest. Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you’re the real Bohemian Girl, Clara Vavrika!" Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began mockingly to sing:

"Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?"

Clara clutched his shoulder. "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at you. "

"I don’t care. They can’t gossip. It’s all in the family, as the Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda’s patrimony amongst them. Besides, we’ll give them something to talk about when we hit the trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven’t had anything so interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It’ll give them a new lease of life. And Olaf won’t lose the Bohemian vote, either. They’ll have the laugh on him so that they’ll vote two apiece. They’ll send him to Congress. They’ll never forget his barn party, or us. They’ll always remember us as we’re dancing together now. We’re making a legend. Where’s my waltz, boys?" he called as they whirled past the fiddlers.

The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a new air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick waltz to a long, slow glide:

"When other lips and other hearts
Their tale of love shall tell,
In language whose excess imparts
The power they feel so well. "

The old women applauded vigorously. "What a gay one he is, that Nils!" And old Mrs. Svendsen’s cap lurched dreamily from side to side to the flowing measure of the dance.

Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
And you’ll remember me.

VII

The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying against a straw stack in Olaf’s wheat field. His own life seemed strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had read about, or dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and walked to the edge of the field. "She is passing the row of poplars now," he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms. Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara had seen him and she came up at a walk.

Nils took the horse by the bit and stroked his neck.