He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you a school."
"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've played the grasshopper for a few weeks—from this time on I'm the busy ant."
So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.
Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man in the song, Twenty Years Ago—indeed I sang, "I've wandered through the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone! In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did not speak.
Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills, the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained, the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious, less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless, and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.
Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill, back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said sadly—then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord will bring us all together again."
We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered, "except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."
"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away. I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."
This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time—scarcely of my country. He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of "the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."
He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,—notions which came down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character had lost something of its mellow charm—but it had gained in dramatic significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish world.