me in the
meantime, about his plans for building a church, and how he was teaching
Virginia, so that she could be a teacher herself when she was
old enough.

"We'll be filling this country with schools, soon," he said, "and
they'll want nice teachers like Virginia."

"Won't that be fine?" asked Virginia. "I just love children. I play with
dolls now--a little. And then I can do something to repay my new father
and mother for all they are doing for me. And you must come to
church, Teunis."

"Virginia says," said the elder, "that you have a good voice. I wish
you'd come and help out with the singing."

"Oh, I can't sing," I demurred; "but I'd like to come. I will come, when
I get back."

"Yes, you can sing," said Virginia. "Here's a song he taught me back on
the prairie:

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o;
Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!

"'The river was up, the channel was deep, the wind was steady
and strong,
The waves they dashed from shore to shore as we went sailing along--

"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o;
Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!'"

"I think you learned a good deal--for one day," said Mrs. Thorndyke,
coming in. "How do you do, Jacob? I'm glad to see you."

Thus she again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been
together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of
it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes of pleading was
incontrovertible."

The river of immigration was still flowing west over the Ridge Road,
quite as strong as earlier in the season, and swollen by the stream of
traffic setting to and from the settlements for freight. People I met
told me that the railroad was building into Dubuque--or at least to the
river at Dunlieth. I met loads of lumber which were going out for Buck
Gowdy's big house away out in the middle of his great estate; and other
loads for Lithopolis, where Judge Stone was making his struggle to build
up a rival to Monterey Centre. I reached Dubuque on the seventeenth of
July, and put up at a tavern down near the river, where they had room
for my stock; and learned that the next day the first train would arrive
at Dunlieth, and there was to be a great celebration.

It was the greatest day Dubuque had ever seen, they told me, with cannon
fired from the bluff at sunrise, a long parade, mu