acclamation of the full tide of life sucked up from the richest breast
that Mother Earth in all her bountiful curves turns to the lips of her
offspring. But all our children for all future generations shall help to
put the harvests of those days into the barns and silos of the future
state. God save it from the mildews of monopoly and tyranny, and the Red
rot of insurrection and from repression's explosions!

We were children, most of those of whom I have been writing. It was a
baby county, a baby state, and Vandemark Township was still struggling
up toward birth. "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts": but
after all they are only the stirrings of the event in the womb of life.
I would not have married Virginia on the day after the party at Governor
Wade's if she had in some way conveyed to me that she wanted me. I
should not have dared; for I was a child. I suppose that Magnus would
have taken Rowena Fewkes in a minute, for he was older; but I don't
know. It takes a Norwegian or a Swede a long time to get ripe.

The destinies of the county and state were in the hands of youth,
dreaming of the future: and when the untamed prairie turned and bit us,
as it did in frosts and blizzards and floods and locusts and tornadoes,
we said to each other, like the boy in the story when the dog bit his
father, "Grin and bear it, Dad! It'll be the makin' o' the pup!" Even
the older men like Judge Stone and Governor Wade and Elder Thorndyke and
heads of families like the Bemisdarfers, were dreamers: and as for such
ne'er-do-weels as the Fewkeses, they, with Celebrate's schemes for
making money, and Surrager's inventions, and their plans for palaces and
estates, were only a little more absurd in their visions than the rest
of us. The actual life of to-day is to the dreams of that day as the
wheat plant to the lily. It starts to be a lily, but the finger and
thumb of destiny--mainly in the form of heredity--turn it into the
wheat, and then into the prosaic flour and bran in the bins.

As I came driving into Monterey County, every day had its event,
different from that of the day before; but now comes a period when I
must count by years, not days, and a lot of time passes without much to
record. As for the awful to-do about the county's lost money, I heard
nothing of it, except when, once in a while, somebody, nosing into the
matter for one reason or another, would come prying around to ask me
about it. I began by telling them t