the jars of tobacco seed, whose hair-fine sprouts were
just splitting the hulls.

The rations packaged in Pennsylvania were shrinking. The Stoltzfoos
stake of silver and gold cowries was wasting away. Each night, bruised
with fatigue, Aaron brought his little household into the parlor while
he read from the Book that had bound his folk to the soil. Waziri bowed,
honoring his master's God in his master's manner, but understood nothing
of the hard High German: "_For the Lord God will help me: therefore
shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint,
and I know I shall not be ashamed. Awmen._"

"Awmen," said Martha.

"Awmen," said Waziri, fisting his hand in respect to his friend's
bearded God.

* * * * *

The Murnan neighbors, to whom late winter was the slackest season in the
farm-year, visited often to observe and comment on the off-worlder's
work. Aaron Stoltzfoos privately regarded the endless conversations as
too much of a good thing; but he realized that his answering the
Murnan's questions helped work off the obligation he owed the government
for the eighty light-years' transportation it had given him, the
opportunity he'd been given to earn this hundred acres with five years'
work, and the interest-free loans that had put up his barn and
farmhouse.

With Waziri hovering near, Aaron's proud lieutenant, the neighbors would
stuff their pipes with native tobacco, a leaf that would have gagged one
of Sir Walter Raleigh's Indian friends, while the Amishman lit a stogie
in self-defense. Why, the neighbor farmers demanded, did Aaron propose
to dust his bean-seeds with a powder that looked like soot? Martha's
microscope, a wonder, introduced the Murnans to bacteria; and Aaron
tediously translated his knowledge of the nitrogen-fixing symbiotes into
Hausa. But there were other questions. What was the purpose of the brush
stacked on top of the smooth-raked beds where Aaron proposed to plant
his tobacco-seedlings? He explained that fire, second best to steaming,
would kill the weed-seeds in the soil, and give the tobacco uncrowded
beds to prosper in.

Those needles with which he punctured the flanks of his swine and
cattle: what devils did they exorcise? Back to the microscope for an
explanation of the disease-process, a sophistication the Murnans had
lost in the years since they'd left Kano. What were the bits of blue and
pink paper Aaron pressed into mudballs pic