Change your partners, forward four;
Hear the music to your feet,
Pick ’em up Silas and lay ’em down deep.
The only fault we had to find with Gus’ musical attainments was that he didn’t say anything about the dingbusted lighting plant going on the blink during the dance. Something went wrong and the lights went out, and when we came to again, I was horrified. Mrs. Bill says we can’t give any more dances; not if those girls from Sugar Creek are allowed to attend.
* * *
Here it is Spring, the poets are with us and the Thursday musicales can now render “The Coming of Spring” by a scanty Aphrodite girlie in true aesthetic rhythm, but I hearken naught to their artificial atmosphere. I crave Mother Nature in all its ruggedness.
Hence I have fared to my log cabin settlement on the shores of Big Pelican lake in northern Minnesota, accompanied by Mrs. Bill, the five kids, my dog Shep, our new perfumed Persian pussy and, last but not least, the good, old pedigreed bull, Pedro. Fred La Page, my French-Canadian friend and the lord and master of the Pequot settlement, threw in a couple of cows in the deal wherein I acquired title to the cabins and the shore property and advised me to bring the pedigreed bull along to keep the cowlets company. And so here we are at Pequot, and as I said before, it is Spring and the birdies are singing in the treelets.
We’ve hardly been here a week when into our wild and wooded midst enters, like an angel from Heaven, a pretty young miss, a graduate of Minneapolis aristocracy and unlearned in the ways of we simple country folk. She had never seen a real pumpkin sprout in the garden of nature and her knowledge of the products of the soil was confined to what she had read in some seminary institution.
The first evening, Gus, our hired man, picked some of Brother La Page’s wild asparagus. We did it up in butter, as was my wife’s custom, and served it in big helpings on the old pine table.