And feast on cherry-pie.

"I'll get us a white, smearkase cow,

"And a yard full of guinea-hen geese;

"A red-beet tree as high as the moon,

"And a patent-leather fence.

"The chickens I'll keep in the kitchen," they sang; whereupon Martha
broke down laughing.

"It's a new world, and for now a cold world; but it's God's world, with
home just up ahead," Aaron shouted. He pulled the wagon up next to the
arctic tent that was to be their temporary farmhouse, beside the wagon
loads of provision he'd brought before. He jumped down and swung Martha
to earth. "Light the stove, woman; make your little kitchen bright,
while I make our beasts feel welcome."

The Amishwoman pushed aside the entrance flap of the tent. Enclosed was
a circle some twelve feet wide. The floor was bare earth. Once warmed by
the pump-up "naptha" lantern and the gasoline hotplate, it would become
a bog. Martha went out to the wagon to get a hatchet and set out for the
nearby spinny of pines to trim off some twigs. Old Order manner forbid
decorative floor-coverings as improper worldly show; but a springy
carpet of pine-twigs could be considered as no more than a wooden floor,
keeping two Plain Folk from sinking to their knees in mud.

The pots were soon boiling atop the two-burner stove, steaming the
tent's air with onion-tangy _tzvivvele Supp_ and the savory pork-smell
of _Schnitz un Knepp_, a cannibal odor that disturbed not a bit
Wutzchen, snoring behind the cookstove. Chickens, penned beneath the
bed, chuckled in their bedtime caucus. The cow stood cheek-by-jowl with
Yonnie, warming him with platonic graciousness as they shared the hay
Aaron had spread before them. Martha stirred her soup. "When the bishop
married me to you," she told Aaron, "he said naught of my having to
sleep with a pig."

"Ah, but I thought you knew that to be the purpose of Christian
marriage, woman," Aaron said, standing close.

"It's Wutz I mean," she said. "Truly, I mind not a bit living as in one
of those automobile-wagons, since it's with you, and only for a little
while."

"I'll hire a crew of our neighbors to help with the barn tomorrow,"
Aaron said. "That done, you'll have but one pig to sleep with."

After grace, they sat on cases of tobacco to eat their meal from a table
of feed sacks covered with oilcloth. "The man in the ship's little
kitchen let me make and freeze pies, Stoltz," Martha said. "He said we'd
have a deepfreeze big as all outdoors, without e