Her school-teacher English had early reverted.  Her speech was as slovenly as her dress.  She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin coarsened from lack of care and overeating.  And in her children’s ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming.  “You can get away from it,” she counselled her daughter, Minnie.  “Don’t you be a rube like your pa,” she cautioned John, the older boy.  And they profited by her advice.  Minnie went to work at Commercial when she was seventeen, an over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery.  At twenty she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic tendencies.  They moved from town to town.  He never stuck long at one job.  John, the older boy, was as much his mother’s son as Minnie was her mother’s daughter.  Restless, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father.  He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill and down dale.  He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him to Commercial.  It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile.  Given one of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his career much earlier.  As it was, they found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them.  He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous of his own in town.  The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins.

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife together, but it did not.  It only increased her bitterness and her hatred of the locality and the life.

“I hope you’re good an’ satisfied now,” she repeated in endless reproach.  “I hope you’re good an’ satisfied.  You was bound you’d make a farmer out of him, an’ now you finished the job.  You better try your hand at Dike now for a change.”

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at him.  Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father.  He had come honestly by his nickname.  In face, figure, expression, and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors.  Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic.  When, at school, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the reader, dubbed young Ben “Dike” Westerveld.  And Dike he remained.