Page:The New Penelope.djvu/104

 garden for my wife, even put up the pegs or nails she was to hang her dresses on. I intended that fall to get on my horse, ride through the Wallamet Valley, and find me my girl."

At the notion of courting in that off-hand, general style, both my husband and I laughed doubtingly. Ela laughed, too, but as if the recollection pleased him.

"You think that is strange, do you? 'Twasn't so very strange in those days, because girls were scarce, don't you see? There was not a girl within forty miles of me; and just the thought of one now, as I was fixing those nails to hang her garments on; why, it ran just through me like a shock of electricity!

"Well, as I said, I had about two hundred and fifty head of cattle, a house with a garden, a young orchard, and vegetables growing; everything in readiness for the wife I had counted on getting to help me take care of it. And what do you think happened? There came such a plague of grasshoppers upon the valley that they destroyed every green thing: crops, orchard, flowers, grass, everything! My stock died, the greater portion of them, and I was ruined." (Deep bass.) "I considered myself disappointed in love, too, because, though I hadn't yet found my girl, I knew she was somewhere in the valley waiting for me; and I felt somehow, when the grasshoppers ate up every thing, as if I had been jilted. Actually, it pierces me with a pang now to think of those useless pegs on which so often my imagination hung a pink calico dress and a girl's sun-bonnet."

Knitting his brows, and sighing as he shifted his position, Ela once more pulled the hair over his forehead, in his peculiar fashion, and went on:

"I became misanthropic; felt myself badly used. Packing up my books and a few other traps, I started for the mountains with what stock I had left, built myself a fort, and played hermit."