new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took
hold of him. "Maybe I will, maybe I will!" he declared. He stared out of
the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had
the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. "Of
course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great
deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've
had no practice in any other form of presentation."

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most
wanted to know about Antonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little
girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter
afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur
overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with
some pride as he stood warming his hands.

"I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said. "Now, what
about yours?"

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

"Notes? I did n't make any." He drank his tea all at once and put down the
cup. "I did n't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself
and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it has
n't any form. It has n't any title, either." He went into the next room,
sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the
word, "Antonia." He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word,
making it "My Antonia." That seemed to satisfy him.

"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it influence
your own story."

My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's
manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.

BOOK I-- THE SHIMERDAS

I

I FIRST heard of Antonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey
across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I
traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands"
on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to
work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider
than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our