"Perhaps, when you have improved your land and made it really valuable you will be sold up by the companies and you will lose your property," said I.
He did not think that possible.
"And what is the cost of living with you?"
"Cheap," said my friend; "beef is 2½ cents a pound, eggs 10 cents the dozen, butter 12 cents the pound, potatoes 35 cents the bushel; but the things we import, such as boots, clothes, fruits, are very dear, much too dear for our pockets."
"Food is cheaper than in the country in Russia, then?"
"Meat and butter and milk are cheaper, but other things are more than twice as dear. Still we do not complain. It is a good life out there; our children are growing up stalwart, happy, earnest. God's own blessing is upon our enterprise."
"Are you ever going back to Russia with its persecutions, its sins, its crimes, its pilgrimages, the secret police, the hermits who live in forest huts, its moujiks and babas, who think that America is a place in a fairy-tale, at the other side of endless forests?"
The farmer smiled in a peculiar way. He would like to go to see it.
Was he quite sure he was going to be an American and not a Russian?