ing his grain with a nervous
eye, remarked that our offspring would be once more mingling with
Mennonites and Swedes and Galicians and Ukrainians. I resented that
speech, though I said nothing in reply to it. But I decided to
investigate Gershom's school.

So yesterday afternoon I drove over in the car. I had a blow-out on
the way, a blow-out which I had to patch up with my own hands, so I
arrived too late to inspect Gershom conducting his classes. It was
almost four, in fact, before I got there, so I pulled up beside the
school-gate and sat waiting for the children to come out. And as I sat
there in the car-seat, under a sky of unimaginable blue, with the
prairie wind whipping my face, I couldn't help studying that bald
little temple of learning which stood out so clear-cut in the sharp
northern sunlight. It was a plain little frame building set in one
corner of a rancher's half-section, an acre of land marked off by a
wire fence where the two trails crossed, the two long trails that
melted away in the interminable distance. It seemed a lonely little
house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even two
months of idleness had given scant harborage for the seeds that wind
and bird must have brought there. But as I stared at it it seemed to
take on a dignity all its own, the dignity of a fixed and far-off
purpose. It was the nest of a nation's greatness. It was the outpost
of civilization. It was the advance-guard of pioneering man, driving
the wilderness deeper and deeper into the North. It was life preparing
wistfully for the future.

From it I heard a sudden shrill chorus of voices and the clatter of
feet, and I knew that the day's work was over. I saw the children
emerge, like bees out of a beehive, and loneliness no longer reigned
over that bald yard in the betraying northern sunlight. Yet they were
not riotous, those children confronting the wine-like air of the open.
They were more subdued than I had looked for, since I could only too
easily remember one of my earlier calls for Dinkie at noon, when I
found the entire class turned out and riding a rancher's pig, a heavy
brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the
school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to
resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon,
to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls. But
now, from my car-seat, I could see Gershom surrounded by a
multi