Mrs. Shimerda was a good
housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her
family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin
peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste
out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the
measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this
residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk
or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the
two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown
owls housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid of
him.

V

WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two
girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.

I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: "My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody
laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very
nice!"

I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in
that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a
little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country--farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all
the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were
the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,
so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to
people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no