lder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.
I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted
by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia!"

IV

ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony,
under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the
post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time
by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or
to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I
was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after
working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered
sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the
sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's
story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see
the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crac