the soft sand beside her and asked her what was
the matter.

'It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,' she said softly.
'We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always
grew in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the
bushes. In summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with
his friend that played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down
there to hear them talk--beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this
country.'

'What did they talk about?' I asked her.

She sighed and shook her head. 'Oh, I don't know! About music, and
the woods, and about God, and when they were young.' She turned to
me suddenly and looked into my eyes. 'You think, Jimmy, that maybe my
father's spirit can go back to those old places?'

I told her about the feeling of her father's presence I had on that
winter day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and I
was left alone in the house. I said I felt sure then that he was on his
way back to his own country, and that even now, when I passed his grave,
I always thought of him as being among the woods and fields that were so
dear to him.

Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and
credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.

'Why didn't you ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure for
him.' After a while she said: 'You know, Jim, my father was different
from my mother. He did not have to marry my mother, and all his brothers
quarrelled with him because he did. I used to hear the old people at
home whisper about it. They said he could have paid my mother money, and
not married her. But he was older than she was, and he was too kind to
treat her like that. He lived in his mother's house, and she was a poor
girl come in to do the work. After my father married her, my grandmother
never let my mother come into her house again. When I went to my
grandmother's funeral was the only time I was ever in my grandmother's
house. Don't that seem strange?'

While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue
sky between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming
and singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did not
come down into the shadow of the leaves. Antonia seemed to me that day
exactly like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr.
Shimerda.

'Some day, Tony, I am going over to your countr