All this was gone glimmering now—­and yet as I sit here, there are the trees, and there are the flowers, very much as planned, in the soft blue-grass lawn; about the only thing lacking being the white columns.

I was lying on the ground, looking out across the marsh, and as my misfortunes all rolled back over my mind I turned on my face and cried like a baby.  Finally, I felt a large light hand laid softly on my head.  I looked up and saw Magnus Thorkelson bending over me.

“Forty acres,” said he, “bane pretty big farm in Norvay.  My fadder on twenty acres, raise ten shildren.  Not so gude land like dis.  Vun of dem shildern bane college professor, and vun a big man in leggislatur.  Forty acre bane gude farm, for gude farmer.”

I turned over, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and sat up.

“I guess I dropped asleep,” I said.

“Yass,” he said.  “You bane sleep long time.  I came back to ask if I stay vith you.  I halp you.  You halp me.  Ve halp each udder.  Ve be neighbors alvays.  I get farm next you.  I halp you build house, an’ you halp me.  Maybe ve lif togedder till you git vooman, or I git vooman—­if American vooman marry Norwegian man.  I stay?”

I took his hand and pressed it.  After a few days’ studying over it, I made up my mind that in the kindness of his heart he had come back just to comfort me.  And all that he had said we would do, we did.  Before long we had a warm dugout barn built in the eastern slope of the hillside, partly sheltered from the northwestern winds, and Magnus and I slept in one end of it on the sweet hay we cut in the marsh while the cows ranged on the prairie.  Together we broke prairie, first on his land, then on mine.  Together we hauled lumber from the river for my first little house.

If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good house.  I never saw any until the last of Iowa was settling up, out in the northwestern part of the state, in Lyon, Sioux and Clay Counties.

All that summer, every wagon and draught animal in Monterey County was engaged in hauling lumber—­some of it such poor stuff as basswood sawed in little sawmills along the rivers; and it was not until in the ’eighties that the popular song, The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim proved two things—­that the American pioneer had learned to build with something besides timber, and that the Homestead Law had come into effect.  What Magnus and I were doing, all the settlers on the Monterey County farms were doing—­raising sod corn and potatoes and buckwheat and turnips, preparing shelter for the winter, and wondering what they would do for fuel.  Magnus helped me and I helped him.