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 Golding, and the bow-key held the yoke on.  Ah, those far-off, Arcadian days, and the blessing of blowing those who lived in them!—­G.v.d.M.

“Oh!” exclaimed Magnus, “you shouldn’t talk so!  Ve got plenty to eat.  Dere bane lots people in Norvay would yump at de shance to yange places wit’ us.  What nice land here in Iovay!  Some day you bane rich man.  All dis slew bane some day dry for plow.  I see it in Norvay and Sveden.  And now dat ve got ralroad, dere bane t’ousan’s an’ t’ousan’s people in Norvay, and Denmark, and Sveden and Yermany come here to Iovay, an’ you an’ your vife an’ shildern bane big bugs.  Yust vait, Yake.  Maybe you see your sons in county offices an’ your girls married vit bankers, an’ your vife vare new calico dress every day.  Yust vait, Yake.  And to-night I pop some corn if you furnish butter, hey?”

To hear the pop-corn going off in the skillet, like the volleys of musketry we were so soon to hear at Shiloh; to see Magnus with his coat off, stirring it round and round in the sizzling butter until one or two big white kernels popped out as a warning that the whole regiment was about to fire; to see him, with his red hair all over his freckled face, lift the hissing skillet and shake it until the volleys died down to sharpshooting across the lines; and then to hear him laugh when he turned the vegetable snowdrift out into the wooden butter-bowl a little too soon, and a last shot or two blew the fluffy kernels all over the room—­all this was the very acme of success in making a pleasant evening.  All the time I was thinking of Magnus’s prediction.