Little Dinky-Dink is fast asleep in his hand-carved Scandinavian cradle. The night is cool, so we have a fire going. Big Dinky-Dunk, who has been smoking his pipe, is sitting on one side of the table, and I am sitting on the other. Between us lies the bundle of house-plans which have just been mailed up to us from Philadelphia. This is the second night we've pored over them. And we've decided what we're to do at Casa Grande. We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through, and a wind-mill and running water, and a new barn with a big soft-water tank at one end, and a hot-water furnace in the new house and sleeping porches and a butler's pantry and a laundry chute—and next winter in California, if we want it. And Dinky-Dunk blames himself for never having had brains enough to plant an avenue or two of poplars or Manitoba maples about Casa Grande, for now we'll have to wait a few years for foliage and shade. And he intends to have a playground for little Dinky-Dink, for he agrees with me that our boy must be strong and manly and muscular, and must not use tobacco in any form until he is twenty at least. And Dinky-Dunk has also agreed that I shall do all the punishing—if any punishing is ever necessary! His father, by the way, has just announced that he wants Babe to go to McGill and then to Oxford. But I have been insisting on Harvard, and I shall be firm about this.
That promised to bring us to a dead-lock, so we went back to our house-plans again, and Dinky-Dunk pointed out that the new living-room would be bigger than all our present shack and the annex put together. And that caused me to stare about our poor little cat-eyed cubby-hole of a wickyup and for the first time realize that our first home was to be wiped off the map. And nothing would ever be the same again, and even the prairie over which I had stared in my joy and my sorrow would always be different! A lump came in my throat. And when Olga came in and I handed Dinky-Dink to her she could see that my lashes were wet. But she couldn't understand.
So I slipped over to the piano and began to play. Very quietly I sang through Herman Lohr's Irish song that begins:
In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still ...
But before I got to the last two verses I'm afraid my voice was rather shaky.
In the dead av the year, acushla,
When me wide new fields are brown,
I think av a wee ould house,
At the edge av an ould gray town!
I think av the rush-lit faces,
Where the room and loaf was small:
But the new years seem the lean years,
And the ould years, best av all!
Dinky-Dunk came and stood close beside me. "Has my Gee-Gee a big sadness in her little prairie heart?" he asked as he slipped his arms about me. But I was sniffling and couldn't answer him. And the cling of his blessed big arms about me only seemed to make everything worse. So I was bawling openly when he held up my face and helped himself to what must have been a terribly briny kiss. But I slipped away into my bedroom, for I'm not one of those apple-blossom women who can weep and still look pretty. And for two blessed hours I've been sitting here, Matilda Anne, wondering if our new life will be as happy as our old life was.... Those old days are over and gone, and the page must be turned. And on that last page I was about to write "TamÁm shud." But kinglike and imperative through the quietness of Casa Grande I hear the call of my beloved little tenor robusto—and if it is the voice of hunger it is also the voice of hope!
THE END
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