The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching their oats.  The stream trickled by under the willow roots with a cool, persuasive sound.  Claude and Ernest lay in the shade, their coats under their heads, talking very little.  Occasionally a motor dashed along the road toward town, and a cloud of dust and a smell of gasoline blew in over the creek bottom; but for the most part the silence of the warm, lazy summer noon was undisturbed.  Claude could usually forget his own vexations and chagrins when he was with Ernest.  The Bohemian boy was never uncertain, was not pulled in two or three ways at once.  He was simple and direct.  He had a number of impersonal preoccupations; was interested in politics and history and in new inventions.  Claude felt that his friend lived in an atmosphere of mental liberty to which he himself could never hope to attain.  After he had talked with Ernest for awhile, the things that did not go right on the farm seemed less important.  Claude’s mother was almost as fond of Ernest as he was himself.  When the two boys were going to high school, Ernest often came over in the evening to study with Claude, and while they worked at the long kitchen table Mrs. Wheeler brought her darning and sat near them, helping them with their Latin and algebra.  Even old Mahailey was enlightened by their words of wisdom.

Mrs. Wheeler said she would never forget the night Ernest arrived from the Old Country.  His brother, Joe Havel, had gone to Frankfort to meet him, and was to stop on the way home and leave some groceries for the Wheelers.  The train from the east was late; it was ten o’clock that night when Mrs. Wheeler, waiting in the kitchen, heard Havel’s wagon rumble across the little bridge over Lovely Creek.  She opened the outside door, and presently Joe came in with a bucket of salt fish in one hand and a sack of flour on his shoulder.  While he took the fish down to the cellar for her, another figure appeared in the doorway; a young boy, short, stooped, with a flat cap on his head and a great oilcloth valise, such as pedlars carry, strapped to his back.  He had fallen asleep in the wagon, and on waking and finding his brother gone, he had supposed they were at home and scrambled for his pack.  He stood in the doorway, blinking his eyes at the light, looking astonished but eager to do whatever was required of him.  What if one of her own boys, Mrs. Wheeler thought....  She went up to him and put her arm around him, laughing a little and saying in her quiet voice, just as if he could understand her, “Why, you’re only a little boy after all, aren’t you?”

Ernest said afterwards that it was his first welcome to this country, though he had travelled so far, and had been pushed and hauled and shouted at for so many days, he had lost count of them.  That night he and Claude only shook hands and looked at each other suspiciously, but ever since they had been good friends.

After their picnic the two boys went to the circus in a happy frame of mind.  In the animal tent they met big Leonard Dawson, the oldest son of one of the Wheelers’ near neighbours, and the three sat together for the performance.  Leonard said he had come to town alone in his car; wouldn’t Claude ride out with him?  Claude was glad enough to turn the mules over to Ralph, who didn’t mind the hired men as much as he did.