with the girl and put your coat around her."

Worrying about the child instead of me, thought Sarah climbing over the wheel to the wagon seat. She shared her rain coat with the shivering girl and warmed her with her own body, while Stanley Brailsford, with the strength of a stallion, pulled them both along the road, splashing and singing.

At last the girl ceased to shiver. She tilted her hat and pillowed her head upon the older woman's shoulder. And there she rested until Brailsford cried, "Here we are!"

And so it was that Early Ann Sherman came to the Brailsford farm on Crab Apple Point in the dairy country of southern Wisconsin in April of the year 1913.

2

Stud Brailsford was a breeder famed throughout southern Wisconsin. He had a Poland China boar, a Jersey bull, and a Percheron stallion which were the talk of the countryside. He had cornfed sows which looked like minor blimps wallowing in his pig yards and scratching their ample backs against mail-order scratching posts which turned like screws twisting sinuous curls of soothing grease upward to salve the noble porcine flanks; soft-eyed Jersey cows whose pedigrees compared favorably with that of any reigning monarch; Shetland ponies, Shropshire sheep, and a small herd of goats.

On the little pond which lay like a blue mirror in a hollow between the hills a quarter of a mile north of the house he had tame geese, three varieties of tame ducks, as well as wild mallards, pintails, redheads, and canvasbacks brought home wounded from the fall duck hunting, clipped and kept to propagate more of their species. Wild Canadian geese he also had whose honking overhead in the short flights they essayed about the farm had all the fierce challenge of their kind, all the longing for distant marshes, and the fire of spring.

For spring was upon the land—

Spring had come rushing up the Mississippi valley out of the warm Gulf states, out of the bayous and river bottoms bringing the fragrance of wet earth and leaf mold, the sweet smell of sap running in the maples, the acrid smells of dung and marshland. At Rock Island, Illinois, spring, and the wild fowl, had turned off the main stream to follow the Rock River valley up through Rockford, Beloit, Janesville, until at last with a final onslaught they had taken Lake Koshkonong and the farms and oak woods along its shores.

Overnight wildflowers bloomed on the hills, buttercups, anemones, dog violets, real violets, and the gaudy dandelions which children held beneath each other's chins to discover with great certainty who did and who did not like butter. Pickerel began to run up the creeks and back into the marshy bays of the lake; the little streams were flooded, and furry buds no larger than the ears of mice began to show on the black, gnarled branches of the oak trees.

And spring to Stanley Brailsford meant plowing.

"Hi up there, Bess!" he shouted. "Get a move on, Jinny."

He guided the plow with one hand for a moment, using the other to slap the reins sharply across the sweating flanks of the team of mares. He turned them with an expert grace at the end of the furrow, went down along the fencerow and around the outer edge of the field.

A dozen white chickens, two or three bold robins, and Shep, the mischievous young farm dog followed the furrow in an absurd parade. The birds were greedy for the pink angle-worms, fat, purple night-crawlers, and succulent grubs. The dog delighted in making the chickens leap six feet into the air with playful passes at their proud white tails.

"Get along you lazy hunks of horseflesh," Stud told the team. "Pretty near time we had this twenty planted. What you horses going to eat next winter, sawdust?"

He stopped for a moment to wipe his forehead with his red bandana pulled from the voluminous depths of his overalls pocket, gazed back over the neatly pleated acres of moist, black soil to the meadow beyond, and to the sandy beach of the big lake beyond that. A pickerel splashed in the shallow water.

"Holy Moses, that must've weighed twenty pounds," Stud told the dog.

Even the fish were frisky today. Shep was frisky and so was Stud. Ulysses S. Grant was acting like a wild boar, Napoleon more like a Texas longhorn than a Jersey, while Admiral Dewey, the Shetland pony stallion was the worst of the lot.

The Admiral had a habit of biting bigger horses' legs, then leaping about, prancing and whinnying. Stud knew it was a bad policy to let a stallion run loose in the pasture but he couldn't find it in his heart to shut the little rascal in the barn. The Admiral and Mrs. Dewey were the happiest married couple he had ever seen. They had been running together for five years now. Five pony colts had made Mrs. Dewey look a bit matronly, but the little Stallion was still a holy terror.

"Sarah's a bit like Mrs. Dewey," thought the man. "Quiet, and good and sort of sweet. But me, I'm like the Admiral."

The dinner bell cut across his thoughts with its distant hollow clangor, now full and near as the breeze brought it directly to his ears, now remote and thin as the wind veered. The horses pricked up their ears and stamped impatiently, Stud, whistling loudly and merrily, unsnapped the tugs and clucked. Released from their dragging burden the team trotted over the soft earth at such a pace that Stud Brailsford had to break into a run; and the three of them, the two beasts and the man, came into the barnyard in a whirl of leaping, screeching chickens, hissing ganders, and the hearty hallo of Early Ann.

3

On the broad kitchen stoop Brailsford scraped the black dirt from his shoes, then, whistling, went in to wash. Sarah hurried to prime the cistern pump which wheezed and creaked as it gushed forth a clear stream of clean-smelling rain water. He scrubbed face and hands with a coarse yellow soap, dried himself vigorously on the crash roller-towel, ran the family comb through his curls, and hesitated for a second to look at himself in the uneven glass of the old walnut-framed mirror.

What he saw evidently pleased him: clear blue eyes which could laugh or be very angry, wrinkles at the outer corners more from smiling than from squinting into the sun, a two-days' growth of heavy black stubble over cheeks both ruddy and tan, a good, straight English nose which went oddly but well with the slightly spoiled, pouting mouth; good teeth, a high forehead which bulged at the temples, but was in no way out of proportion to the leonine head with its mass of graying curls. He pulled at his jowls tentatively. No use shaving until Sunday morning.

"Thought you rang the dinner bell, Sarah," he said smilingly as the hot, somewhat harassed woman shuttled back and forth from the roaring cook stove to the kitchen table. "Guess we'll have time for a tune."

He crossed the wide, low-ceilinged room to the graphophone on the big desk under the north window, pushed aside mail-order catalogues, the ten-pound family Bible and back numbers of farm magazines, gave the little crank a dozen turns, and from a homemade box studded with big wooden pegs drew a heavy cylinder record.

"Edison record," the huge tin horn painted like a tiger lily bragged in a cracked barytone. "For I Picked a Lemon in the Garden of Love Where They Say Only Peaches Grow...."

"You play that just to tease me," the woman said. She spoke softly and indulgently as a mother might speak to a mischievous child.

Early Ann came in with an armload of smoothly split oak and hickory which she dumped into the wood box. Her strong round