?'

'He wasn't any Rockefeller,' put in Master Leo, in a very low tone,
which reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had once said that
my grandfather 'wasn't Jesus.' His habitual scepticism was like a direct
inheritance from that old woman.

'None of your smart speeches,' said Ambrosch severely.

Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke
into a giggle at a tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated, with an
awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them: Jake and
Otto and I! We had it taken, I remembered, when we went to Black Hawk on
the first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska. I was glad to see Jake's
grin again, and Otto's ferocious moustaches. The young Cuzaks knew all
about them. 'He made grandfather's coffin, didn't he?' Anton asked.

'Wasn't they good fellows, Jim?' Antonia's eyes filled. 'To this day
I'm ashamed because I quarrelled with Jake that way. I was saucy and
impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with people sometimes, and I wish
somebody had made me behave.'

'We aren't through with you, yet,' they warned me. They produced a
photograph taken just before I went away to college: a tall youth in
striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look easy and jaunty.

'Tell us, Mr. Burden,' said Charley, 'about the rattler you killed
at the dog-town. How long was he? Sometimes mother says six feet and
sometimes she says five.'

These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with Antonia
as the Harling children had been so many years before. They seemed
to feel the same pride in her, and to look to her for stories and
entertainment as we used to do.

It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and
started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with
us, and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the
corral and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of
the pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.

The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down
before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into the
stars. Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a hay-cave, back under the eaves,
and lay giggling and whispering. They tickled each other and tossed and
tumbled in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had been shot,
they were still. There was hardly a minute between giggles and bland
slumber.

I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-mov