University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
IN LOVE WITH A DUTCHMAN.

“I DON'T believe that you'd care a cent if she
did marry a Dutchman! She might as well as to
marry some white folks I know.”

Samuel Anderson made no reply. It would
be of no use to reply. Shrews are tamed only by
silence. Anderson had long since learned that the little shred
of influence which remained to him in his own house would
disappear whenever his teeth were no longer able to shut his
tongue securely in. So now, when his wife poured out this
hot lava of argumentum ad hominem, he closed the teeth down
in a dead-lock way over the tongue, and compressed the lips
tightly over the teeth, and shut his finger-nails into his work-hardened
palms. And then, distrusting all these precautions,
fearing lest he should be unable to hold on to his temper even

with this grip, the little man strode out of the house with his
wife's shrill voice in his ears.

Mrs. Anderson had good reason to fear that her daughter
was in love with a “Dutchman,” as she phrased it in her contempt.
The few Germans who had penetrated to the West at
that time were looked upon with hardly more favor than the
Californians feel for the almond-eyed Chinaman. They were
foreigners, who would talk gibberish instead of the plain English
which everybody could understand, and they were not yet
civilized enough to like the yellow saleratus-biscuit and the
“salt-rising” bread of which their neighbors were so fond.
Reason enough to hate them!

Only half an hour before this outburst of Mrs. Anderson's,
she had set a trap for her daughter Julia, and had fairly
caught her.

“Jule! Jule! O Jul-y-e-ee!” she had called.

And Julia, who was down in the garden hoeing a bed in
which she meant to plant some “Johnny-jump-ups,” came
quickly toward the house, though she knew it would be of no
use to come quickly. Let her come quickly, or let her come
slowly, the rebuke was sure to greet her all the same.

“Why don't you come when you're called, I'd like to know!
You're never in reach when you're wanted, and you're good
for nothing when you are here!”

Julia Anderson's earliest lesson from her mother's lips had
been that she was good for nothing. And every day and almost
every hour since had brought her repeated assurances that she
was good for nothing. If she had not been good for a great
deal, she would long since have been good for nothing as the
result of such teaching. But though this was not the first, nor

the thousandth, nor the ten thousandth time that she had been
told that she was good for nothing, the accustomed insult
seemed to sting her now more than ever. Was it that, being
almost eighteen, she was beginning to feel the woman blossoming
in her nature? Or, was it that the tender words of
August Wehle had made her sure that she was good for something,
that now her heart felt her mother's insult to be a stale,
selfish, ill-natured lie?

“Take this cup of tea over to Mrs. Malcolm's, and tell her
that it a'n't quite as good as what I borried of her last week.
And tell her that they'll be a new-fangled preacher at the
school-house a Sunday, a Millerite or somethin', a preachin'
about the end of the world.”

Julia did not say “Yes, ma'am,” in her usually meek style.
She smarted a little yet from the harsh words, and so went
away in silence.

Why did she walk fast? Had she noticed that August
Wehle, who was “breaking up” her father's north field, was
just plowing down the west side of his land? If she hastened,
she might reach the cross-fence as he came round to
it, and while he was yet hidden from the sight of the house
by the turn of the hill. And would not a few words from
August Wehle be pleasant to her ears after her mother's sharp
depreciation? It is at least safe to conjecture that some such
feeling made her hurry through the long, waving timothy of the
meadow, and made her cross the log that spanned the brook
without ever so much as stopping to look at the minnows
glancing about in the water flecked with the sunlight that
struggled through the boughs of the water-willows. For, in
her thorough loneliness, Julia Anderson had come to love the

[ILLUSTRATION]

TAKING AN OBSERVATION.

[Description: 555EAF. Page 014. In-line engraving of a women pushing her way through a grove of plants.] birds, the squirrels, and the fishes as companions, and in all her
life she had never before crossed the meadow brook without
stooping to look at the minnows.

All this haste Mrs. Anderson noticed. Having often scolded
Julia for “talking to the fishes like a fool,” she noticed the
omission. And now she only waited until Julia was over the
hill to take the path round the fence under shelter of the blackberry
thicket, until she came to the clump of elders, from the

midst of which she could plainly see if any conversation should
take place between her Julia and the comely young Dutchman.

In fact, Julia need not have hurried so much. For August
Wehle had kept one eye on his horses and the other on the
house all that day. It was the quick look of intelligence between
the two at dinner that had aroused the mother's suspicious.
And Wehle had noticed the work on the garden-bed, the
call to the house, and the starting of Julia on the path toward
Mrs. Malcolm's. His face had grown hot, and his hand had
trembled. For once he had failed to see the stone in his way,
until the plow was thrown clean from the furrow. And when
he came to the shade of the butternut-tree by which she must
pass, it had seemed to him imperative that the horses should
rest. Besides, the hames-string wanted tightening on the bay,
and old Dick's throat-latch must need a little fixing. He was
not sure that the clevis-pin had not been loosened by the collision
with the stone just now. And so, upon one pretext and
another, he managed to delay starting his plow until Julia came
by, and then, though his heart had counted all her steps from
the door-stone to the tree, then he looked up surprised. Nothing
could be so astonishing to him as to see her there! For love
is needlessly crafty, it has always an instinct of concealment, of
indirection about it. The boy, and especially the girl, who
will tell the truth frankly in regard to a love affair is a miracle
of veracity. But there are such, and they are to be reverenced
—with the reverence paid to martyrs.

On her part, Julia Anderson had walked on as though she
meant to pass the young plowman by, until he spoke, and then
she started, and blushed, and stopped, and nervously broke off
the top of a last year's iron-weed and began to break it into

bits while he talked, looking down most of the time, but lifting
her eyes to his now and then. And to the sun-browned but
delicate-faced young German it seemed a vision of Paradise—
every glimpse of that fresh girl's face in the deep shade of the
sun-bonnet. For girls' faces can never look so sweet in this
generation as they did to the boys who caught sight of them,
hidden away, precious things, in the obscurity of a tunnel of
pasteboard and calico!

This was not their first love talk. Were they engaged?
Yes, and no. By all the speech their eyes were capable of in
school, and of late by words, they were engaged in loving one
another, and in telling one another of it. But they were young,
and separated by circumstances, and they had hardly begun to
think of marriage yet. It was enough for the present to love and
be loved. The most delightful stage of a love affair is that in
which the present is sufficient and there is no past or future.
And so August hung his elbow around the top of the bay horse's
hames, and talked to Julia.

It is the highest praise of the German heart that it loves
flowers and little children; and like a German and like a lover
that he was, August began to speak of the anemones and the
violets that were already blooming in the corners of the fence.
Girls in love are not apt to say anything very fresh. And Julia
only said she thought the flowers seemed happy in the sunlight.
In answer to this speech, which seemed to the lover a bit
of inspiration, he quoted from Schiller the lines:

With the quick and crafty modesty of her sex, Julia evaded

[ILLUSTRATION]

A TALK WITH A PLOWMAN.

[Description: 555EAF. Illustration page. Page 017. Engraving of a man and a woman in a bonnet; the man is leaning on one of two horses harnessed to a plow. ]

this very pleasant shaft by saying: “How much you know,
August! How do you learn it?”

And August was pleased, partly because of the compliment,
but chiefly because in saying it Julia had brought the sun-bonnet
in such a range that he could see the bright eyes and blushing
face at the bottom of this camera-oscura. He did not hasten to
reply. While the vision lasted he enjoyed the vision. Not until
the sun-bonnet dropped did he take up the answer to her question.

“I don't know much, but what I do know I have learned out
of your Uncle Andrew's books.”

“Do you know my Uncle Andrew? What a strange man he
is! He never comes here, and we never go there, and my mother
never speaks to him, and my father doesn't often have anything
to say to him. And so you have been at his house. They say
he has all up-stairs full of books, and ever so many cats and
dogs and birds and squirrels about. But I thought he never let
anybody go up-stairs.”

“He lets me,” said August, when she had ended her speech
and dropped her sun-bonnet again out of the range of his
eyes, which, in truth, were too steadfast in their gaze. “I spend
many evenings up-stairs.” August had just a trace of German
in his idiom.

“What makes Uncle Andrew so curious, I wonder?”

“I don't exactly know. Some say he was treated not just
right by a woman when he was a young man. I don't know.
He seems happy. I don't wonder a man should be curious
though when a woman that he loves treats him not just right.
Any way, if he loves her with all his heart, as I love Jule
Anderson!”

These last words came with an effort. And Julia just then

remembered her errand, and said, “I must hurry,” and, with a
country girl's agility, she climbed over the fence before August
could help her, and gave him another look through her bonnet-telescope
from the other side, and then hastened on to return
the tea, and to tell Mrs. Malcolm that there was to be a Millerite
preacher at the school-house on Sunday night. And August
found that his horses were quite cool, while he was quite hot.
He cleaned his mold-board, and swung his plow round, and
then, with a “Whoa! haw!” and a pull upon the single line
which Western plowmen use to guide their horses, he drew the
team into their place, and set himself to watching the turning
of the rich, fragrant black earth. And even as he set his plowshare,
so he set his purpose to overcome all obstacles, and to marry
Julia Anderson. With the same steady, irresistible, onward
course would he overcome all that lay between him and the
soul that shone out of the face that dwelt in the bottom of the
sun-bonnet.

From her covert in the elder-bushes Mrs. Anderson had seen
the parley, and her cheeks had also grown hot, but from a very
different emotion. She had not heard the words. She had seen
the loitering girl and the loitering plowboy, and she went back
to the house vowing that she'd “teach Jule Anderson how to
spend her time talking to a Dutchman.” And yet the more she
thought of it, the more she was satisfied that it wasn't best to
“make a fuss” just yet. She might hasten what she wanted to
prevent. For though Julia was obedient and mild in word, she
was none the less a little stubborn, and in a matter of this sort
might take the bit in her teeth.

And so Mrs. Anderson had recourse, as usual, to her husband.
She knew she could browbeat him. She demanded that

August Wehle should be paid off and discharged. And when
Anderson had hesitated, because he feared he could not get
another so good a hand, and for other reasons, she burst out
into the declaration:

“I don't believe that you'd care a cent if she did marry a
Dutchman! She might as well as to marry some white folks I
know.”