“Teunis and I,” she gasped, “have been lost in the storm, and nearly froze to death, and he tied that man up with the well-rope, and maybe he’s starved to death in Teunis’s house, and Teunis and I slept in a strawstack, and Teunis is just as brave as he can be, and we’re going to be married awful soon, and I’m going to board with him then, and that’ll be nicer than with the McConkeys’ and nearer the schoolhouse, and cheaper, and Teunis will build fires for me, and we’ll be just as happy as we can be, and when you quit this stingy church you’ll both of you live with us forever and ever, and I want you to kiss Teunis and call him your son right now, and if you don’t we’ll both be mad at you always—­no we won’t, no we won’t, you dear things, but you will marry us, won’t you?”

And then she cried hysterically and kissed us all.

“What Virginia says,” said I, “is all true—­especially the getting married right now, and your living with us.  We’ll both be awful sorry if we can’t have you right off.”

“I snum!” exclaimed Grandma Thorndyke.  “Just as I expected!”

Grandma outlived the elder by many years; and it was not very long before she came, a widow, to live with us “until she could hear from her folks in Massachusetts.”  She finally heard from them, but she lived with us, and is buried in our lot in the Monterey Centre burying-ground.  She always expected everything that happened.  I have given some hints of her character; but she had one weakness; she always, when she was a little down, spoke of herself as being a burden to us, especially in the hard times in the ’seventies.  There was never a better woman, or one that did more for a family than she did for Virginia and me and our children—­and our chickens and our calves and our lambs and goslings and ducks and young turkeys.  Of course, she wanted Virginia to do better than to marry me; and that was all right with me after I understood it:  but grandma made that good, by always taking my side of every little difference in the family.  Peace to her ashes!

5

Now I have reached the point in this history where things get beyond me.  I can’t tell the history of Monterey County; and the unsettled matters like the Wade-Stone controversy, the outcome of the betrayal of Rowena Fewkes by Buckner Gowdy, and other beginnings of things like the doings of the Bushyager bandits; for some of them run out into the history of the state as well as the county.  And as for the township history, it is now approaching the point where there is nothing to it but more settlers, roads, schools, and the drainage of the slew—­of which, so far as the reader is concerned if he is not posted, he may post himself up by getting that Excelsior County History, which he can do cheaply from almost any one who was swindled by their slick agent.  What remains to be told here is a short horse and soon curried.  Vandemark Township was set off as a separate township within six weeks of the day we crawled out of the strawstack—­and on that day we had been married a month, and Virginia was boarding with me as she predicted.  Doctor Bliven as a member of the County Board voted for the new township just as his wife said he would after I talked with her about it.