em."

"You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you're the real Bohemian Girl, Clara
Vavrika!" Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began mockingly to
sing:

"Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?"

Clara clutched his shoulder. "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at you."

"I don't care. They can't gossip. It's all in the family, as the
Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony amongst them.
Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit the
trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had anything so
interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It'll give
them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the Bohemian vote, either.
They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll vote two apiece. They'll
send him to Congress. They'll never forget his barn party, or us.
They'll always remember us as we're dancing together now. We're making
a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he called as they whirled past the
fiddlers.

The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a new
air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick waltz to
a long, slow glide:

"When other lips and other hearts
Their tale of love shall tell,
In language whose excess imparts
The power they feel so well."

The old women applauded vigorously. "What a gay one he is, that Nils!"
And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily from side to side to the
flowing measure of the dance.

"Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
And you'll remember me."

VII

The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black
shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep,
crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to
have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender,
midsummer moon. The splendour of it seemed to transcend human life and
human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one
looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf
under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson
was lying against a straw stack in Olaf's wheat field. His own life
seemed stra