never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they
had. Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she
expected substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly
silence, while the feeble minstrel sheltered in Antonia's hair went on
with its scratchy chirp. The old man's smile, as he listened, was so
full of sadness, of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.
As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of
earth and drying grass. Antonia and her father went off hand in hand,
and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.

VII

MUCH AS I LIKED Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more
of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat me
more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading
lessons. This change came about from an adventure we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off
on foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed.
I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had
been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and
heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled,
hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown,
rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and
get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas
melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the
spade, Antonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog-town and dig
into one of the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight
down, or were horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground
connections; whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers.
We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snakeskins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but grey and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if
the town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that
an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going