Town life went backward in most ways.  My interest in it centered in Virginia and through her in Elder Thorndyke’s family; but of this family I saw little except for my visits from Grandma Thorndyke.  She came out and red up the house as often as she could catch a ride, and I kept up my now well-known secret policy of supplying the Thorndyke family with my farm, dairy and poultry surplus.  Why not?  I lay in bed of nights thinking that Virginia had been that day fed on what I grew, and in the morning would eat buckwheat cakes from grain that I worked to grow, flour from my wheat that I had taken to mill, spread with butter which I had made with my own hands, from the cows she used to pet and that had hauled her in my wagon back along the Ridge Road, and with nice sorghum molasses from cane that I had grown and hauled to the sorghum mill.  That she would have meat that I had prepared for her, with eggs from the descendants of the very hens to which she had fed our table scraps when we were together.  That maybe she would think of me when she made bread for Grandma Thorndyke from my flour.  It was sometimes almost like being married to Virginia, this feeling of standing between her and hunger.  The very roses in her cheeks, and the curves in her developing form, seemed of my making.  But she never came with grandma to help red up.

2

Grandma often told me that now I was getting pretty nearly old enough to be married, or would be when I was twenty-one, which would be in July—­“Though,” she always said, “I don’t believe in folks’s being married under the spell of puppy love.  Thirty is soon enough; but yet, you might do well to marry when you are a little younger, because you need a wife to keep you clean and tidy, and you can support a wife.”  She began bringing girls with her to help fix my house up; and she would always show them the castor and my other things.

“Dat bane for Christina,” said Magnus one time, when she was showing my castor and a nice white china dinner set, to Kittie Fleming or Dose Roebuck, both of whom were among her samples of girls shown me.  “An’ dat patent churn—­dat bane for Christina, too, eh, Yake?”

“Christina who?” asked Grandma Thorndyke sharply.

“Christina Quale,” said Magnus, “my cousin in Norvay.”

This was nuts and apples for Grandma Thorndyke and the girls who came.  Magnus showed them Christina’s picture, and told them that I had a copy of it, and all about what a nice girl Christina was.  Now grandma made a serious thing of this and soon I had the reputation of being engaged to Magnus’s cousin, who was the daughter of a rich farmer, and could write English; and even that I had received a letter from her.  This seemed unjust to me, though I was a little mite proud of it; for the letter was only one page written in English in one of Magnus’s.  All the time grandma was bringing girls with her to help, and making me work with them when I helped.  They were nice girls, too—­Kittie, and Dose, Lizzie Finster, and Zeruiah Strickler, and Amy Smith—­all farmer girls.  Grandma was always talking about the wisdom of my marrying a farmer girl.