ig spoon
before many years; and then had a long and happy life. I forgave her,
even at the time, for making fun of the Hell Slew Dutch boy. All the
girls made fun of me but Virginia, and she did sometimes--Virginia and
Rowena Fewkes.

Thinking of Rowena reminded me of the fact that I had not seen any of
the Fewkeses for nearly two years. This brought up the thought of Buck
Gowdy, who had carried them off to his great farmstead which he called
Blue-grass Manor. Whenever I was in conversation with him I was under a
kind of strain, for all the fact that he was as friendly with me as he
was with any one else. I remembered how I had smuggled Virginia away
from him; and wondered whether or not he had got intimate enough by this
time at Elder Thorndyke's so that she had given him any inkling as to my
share in that matter.

This brought me back to Virginia--and then the whole series of Virginia
dreams recurred. She sat in the chair which I had bought for her, in the
warm corner next the window. She was sewing. She was reading to me. She
was coming over to my chair to sit in my lap while we talked over our
adventures. She looked at my chapped and cracked hands and told me I
must wear my mittens every minute. She--but every boy can go on with the
series: every boy who has been in the hopeless but blissful state in
which I then was: a state which out of hopelessness generates hope as a
dynamo generates current.

This was followed by days of dark despondency. Magnus Thorkelson and I
were working together plowing for oats, for we did not work our oats on
the corn ground of last year then as we do now, and he tried to cheer me
up. I had been wishing that I had never left the canal; for there I
always had good clothes and money in my pocket. We couldn't stay in this
country, I said. Nobody had any money except a few money sharks, and
they robbed every one that borrowed of them with their two per cent, a
month. I was getting raggeder and raggeder every day. I wished I had not
bought this other eighty. I wished I had done anything rather than what
I had done. I wished I knew where I could get work at fair wages, and I
would let the farm go--I would that! I would be gosh-blasted if I
wouldn't, by Golding's bow-key[15]!

[15] "By Golding's bow-key" was a very solemn objurgation. It could be
used by professors of religion, but under great provocation only. It
harks back to the time when every man who had oxen named them Buck and
Goldi