t kolaches are, eh? You're
mistaken, young man. I've eaten your mother's kolaches long before that
Easter Day when you were born.'

'Always too fresh, Leo,' Ambrosch remarked with a shrug.

Leo dived behind his mother and grinned out at me.

We turned to leave the cave; Antonia and I went up the stairs first,
and the children waited. We were standing outside talking, when they all
came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold
heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion
of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy for a
moment.

The boys escorted us to the front of the house, which I hadn't yet seen;
in farm-houses, somehow, life comes and goes by the back door. The
roof was so steep that the eaves were not much above the forest of tall
hollyhocks, now brown and in seed. Through July, Antonia said, the
house was buried in them; the Bohemians, I remembered, always planted
hollyhocks. The front yard was enclosed by a thorny locust hedge, and
at the gate grew two silvery, moth-like trees of the mimosa family. From
here one looked down over the cattle-yards, with their two long ponds,
and over a wide stretch of stubble which they told me was a ryefield in
summer.

At some distance behind the house were an ash grove and two orchards: a
cherry orchard, with gooseberry and currant bushes between the rows,
and an apple orchard, sheltered by a high hedge from the hot winds. The
older children turned back when we reached the hedge, but Jan and Nina
and Lucie crept through it by a hole known only to themselves and hid
under the low-branching mulberry bushes.

As we walked through the apple orchard, grown up in tall bluegrass,
Antonia kept stopping to tell me about one tree and another. 'I love
them as if they were people,' she said, rubbing her hand over the bark.
'There wasn't a tree here when we first came. We planted every one, and
used to carry water for them, too--after we'd been working in the fields
all day. Anton, he was a city man, and he used to get discouraged. But I
couldn't feel so tired that I wouldn't fret about these trees when there
was a dry time. They were on my mind like children. Many a night after
he was asleep I've got up and come out and carried water to the poor
things. And now, you see, we have the good of them. My man worked in the
orange groves in Florida, and he knows all about grafting. There ain't
one of our neighbours has