in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and
left the country--went to be cook in a railway construction camp where
gangs of Russians were employed.

At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness.
During the auction he went about with his head down, and never
lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk
money-lender who held mortgages on Peter's livestock was there, and he
bought in the sale notes at about fifty cents on the dollar. Everyone
said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner. I
did not see him do it, but this I know: after all his furniture and his
cookstove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers,
when his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his
clasp-knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter. When
Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in their wagon to take Peter to the
train, they found him with a dripping beard, surrounded by heaps of
melon rinds.

The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr.
Shimerda. When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log
house and sit there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the
winter snows penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of
the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret
to anyone, but guarded it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine had
gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed,
to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to
sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing
through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like
Virginia.

IX

THE FIRST SNOWFALL came early in December. I remember how the world
looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that
morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had
faded out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its
stiff willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.

Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring
the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained ho