ed. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.

Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.

The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill,--bought on credit,--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.

When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April,
Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Antonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.

She gave me a shrewd glance. "He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know
about the wet and the dry."

I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.

When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to