But all our children for all future generations shall help to
put the harvests of those days into the barns and silos of the future
state. God save it from the mildews of monopoly and tyranny, and the Red
rot of insurrection and from repression's explosions!
We were children, most of those of whom I have been writing. It was a
baby county, a baby state, and Vandemark Township was still struggling
up toward birth. "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts": but
after all they are only the stirrings of the event in the womb of life.
I would not have married Virginia on the day after the party at Governor
Wade's if she had in some way conveyed to me that she wanted me. I
should not have dared; for I was a child. I suppose that Magnus would
have taken Rowena Fewkes in a minute, for he was older; but I don't
know. It takes a Norwegian or a Swede a long time to get ripe.
The destinies of the county and state were in the hands of youth,
dreaming of the future: and when the untamed prairie turned and bit us,
as it did in frosts and blizzards and floods and locusts and tornadoes,
we said to each other, like the boy in the story when the dog bit his
father, "Grin and bear it, Dad! It'll be the makin' o' the pup!" Even
the older men like Judge Stone and Governor Wade and Elder Thorndyke and
heads of families like the Bemisdarfers, were dreamers: and as for such
ne'er-do-weels as the Fewkeses, they, with Celebrate's schemes for
making money, and Surrager's inventions, and their plans for palaces and
estates, were only a little more absurd in their visions than the rest
of us.
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