ul surprised himself, did
n't he, girls?"

Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: "What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget."

Anna spoke wistfully. "It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know."

"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,"--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels,--"there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!"

"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I
dedicated it to him."

She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.

I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.

XIV

THE day after Commencement I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an empty
room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in earnest. I
worked off a year's trigonometry that summer, and began Virgil alone.
Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room,
looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures
between, scanning the AEneid aloud and committing long passages to memory.
Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I passed her gate,
and asked me to come in and let her play for me. She was lonely for
Charley, she said, and liked to have a boy about. Whenever my grandparents
had misgivings, and began to wonder whether I was not too young to go off
to college alone, Mrs. Harling took up my cause vigorously. Grandfather
had such respect for her judgment that I knew he would not go against her.

I had only one holiday that summer. It was in July. I met Antonia downtown
on Saturday afternoon, and learned that she and Tiny and Lena were going
to the river next day with Anna Hansen--the elder was all in bloom now, and
Anna wanted to make elder-blow wine.

"Anna's to drive us down in the Marshalls' delivery wagon, and we'll take
a nice lunch and have a picnic. Just us; nobody else. Could n't you happen
along, Jim? It would be like old times."

I considered a moment. "Maybe I can, if I won't be in the way."

On Sunday morning I rose early and got out of Black Hawk while the dew was
still heavy on the long meadow grasses. It was the high season for summer
flowers. The pink b