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 “This! The—the cabbages.”

A slow-dawning film of fun crept over the blue of Klaas Pool’s stare. This film spread almost imperceptibly so that it fluted his broad nostrils, met and widened his full lips, reached and agitated his massive shoulders, tickled the round belly, so that all Klaas Pool, from his eyes to his waist, was rippling and shaking with slow, solemn, heavy Dutch mirth.

“Cabbages is beautiful!” his round pop eyes staring at her in a fixity of glee. “Cabbages is beautiful!” His silent laughter now rose and became audible in a rich throaty chortle. It was plain that laughter, with Klaas Pool, was not a thing to be lightly dismissed, once raised. “Cabbages——” he choked a little, and spluttered, overcome. Now he began to shift his gaze back to his horses and the road, by the same process of turning his head first and then his eyes, so that to Selina the mirthful tail of his right eye and his round red cheek with the golden fuzz on it gave him an incredibly roguish brownie look.

Selina laughed, too, even while she protested his laughter. “But they are!” she insisted. “They are beautiful. Like jade and Burgundy. No, like—uh—like—what’s that in—like chrysoprase and porphyry. All those fields of cabbages and the corn and the beettops together look like Persian patches.”

Which was, certainly, no way for a new school teacher to talk to a Holland truck gardener driving his team along the dirt road on his way to High