, was apprenticed to the latter's trade. You never got anywhere
working for your relatives, he said, so when he was a journeyman he went
to Vienna and worked in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young
fellow who liked a good time didn't save anything in Vienna; there were
too many pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made in the
day. After three years there, he came to New York. He was badly advised
and went to work on furs during a strike, when the factories were
offering big wages. The strikers won, and Cuzak was blacklisted. As he
had a few hundred dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise
oranges. He had always thought he would like to raise oranges! The
second year a hard frost killed his young grove, and he fell ill with
malaria. He came to Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and
to look about. When he began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she
was exactly the kind of girl he had always been hunting for. They were
married at once, though he had to borrow money from his cousin to buy
the wedding ring.

'It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first
crops grow,' he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled
hair. 'Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my
wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty
fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was right,
all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an
acre then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten
years ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys; we can work
a lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain't always
so strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much
beer in town, and when I come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask
me no questions. We always get along fine, her and me, like at first.
The children don't make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.' He
lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.

I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great
many questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the
Ringstrasse and the theatres.

'Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm
the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I
pretty near run away,' he confessed with a little laugh. 'I never did
think how I would be a settled man like this.'