filled. "To this day I'm
ashamed because I quarreled with Jake that way. I was saucy and
impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with people sometimes, and I wish
somebody had made me behave."

"We are n't through with you, yet," they warned me. They produced a
photograph taken just before I went away to college; a tall youth in
striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look easy and jaunty.

"Tell us, Mr. Burden," said Charley, "about the rattler you killed at the
dog town. How long was he? Sometimes mother says six feet and sometimes
she says five."

These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with Antonia as
the Harling children had been so many years before. They seemed to feel
the same pride in her, and to look to her for stories and entertainment as
we used to do.

It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and
started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with us,
and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the corral
and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of the
pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.

The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down
before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into the
stars. Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a hay-cave, back under the eaves,
and lay giggling and whispering. They tickled each other and tossed and
tumbled in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had been shot, they
were still. There was hardly a minute between giggles and bland slumber.

I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window
on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Antonia and her children;
about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's
jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out
of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to
see. Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not
fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of
such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer:
Antonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came
home in triumph with our snake; Antonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as
she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Antonia coming in with
her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial
human attitudes which we