e 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 did n'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 quarreled 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 country, and I am going to the
little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it?"

"Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the
night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river
to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the
little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip
you. I ain't never forgot my own country."

There was a crackling in the branches above us, and Lena Lingard peered
down over the edge of the bank.

"You lazy things!" she cried. "All this elder, and you two lying there!
Did n't you hear us calling you?" Almost as flushed as she had been in my
dream, she leaned over the edge of the bank and began to demolish our
flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic; she was panting with
zeal, and the perspiration stood in drops on her short, yielding upper
lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the bank.

It was noon now, and so hot t