THE HESPERIAN
7
LOU, THE PROPHET.
It had been a very trying summer to every
one, and most of all to Lou. He had beon
in the West for seven years, but ho had
never quite gotten over his homesickness for
Denmark. Among the northern people who
emigrate to the great west, only the children
and the old people ever long much for the
lauds they have left over the water, Tho
men only know that in theis new land their
plow runs across the field tearing up the fresh,
warm earth, with never a stone to stay its
course. That if they dig and delve the land
long enough, and if they are not compelled
to mortgage it to keep body and soul to
gether, some day it will be their's, their
very own. They are not like the southern
people; they loose their love for their father
land quicker and have less of sentiment about
them. They have to think too much about
how they shall get bread to care much what
soil gives it to them. But among even the
most blunted, mechanical people, the youths
and the aged always have a touch of romance
in them.
Lou was only twenty-two; he had been
but a boy when his family left Denmark, and
had never ceased to remember it. He was
a rather simple fellow, and was always con
sidered less promising than his brothers ;
but last year he had taken up a claim of his
own and made a rough dug-out upon it and
he lived there all alone. His life was that
of many another young man in our country.
He rose early in the morning, in the summer
just before day-break; in the winter, long
before. First he fed his stock, then himself,
which was a much less important matter.
He ate the same food at dinner that he ate
at breakfast, and the same at supper that he
ate at dinner. His bill of fare never changed
the year round; bread, coffee, beans and sor
gum molasses, sometimes a little salt pork.
After breakfast he worked until dinner time,
ate, and then worked again. He always
went to bed soon after the aim set, for he
was always tired, and it saved oil. Some
times, on Sundays, he would go over home
after ho had done his washing and houso
cleaning, and sometimes ho hunted. His
life was as same and as unoventful as tho life
of his plow horses, and it was as hard and
thankless. Ho was thrifty for a simple,
thick-headed fellow, and in the spring ho was
to have married Nelse Sorenson's daughter,
but he had lost all his cattle during tho
winter, and was not so prosperous as ho had
hoped to be; so, instead she married her
cousin, who had an "eighty" of his own.
That hurt Lou more than anyone ever
dreamed.
A few weeks later his mother died. Ho
had always loved his mother. She had been
kind to him and used to come over to see
him sometimes, and shake up his hard bed
for him, and sweep, and make his bread.
She had a strong affection for the boy, he
was her youngest, and she always felt sorry
for him; she had dance a great deal before
his birth, and an old woman in Denmark
had told her that was the cause of. the boy's
weak head.
Perhaps the greatest calamity of all was
the threatened loss of his corn crop. He
had bought a new corn planter on time that
spring, and had intended that his corn should
pay for it. Now, it looked as though he
would not have corn enough to feed his
horses. Unless rain fell within the next
two weeks, his entire crop would be ruined;
it was half gone now. All these things
together were too much for poor Lou, and
one morning he felt a strange loathing for
the bread and sorgum which he usually ate
as mechanically as he slept. He kept think
ing about the strawberries he used to gather
on the mountains after the snows were gone,
and the cold water in the mountain streams.
He felt hot someway, and wanted cold water.
He had no well, and he hauled his water
from a neighbor's well every Sunday, and it
got warm in the barrels those hot summer
days. He worked at his haying all day; at
night, when he was through feeding, he
stood a long time by the pig stye with a
basket on his arm. When the moon came
up, he sighed restlessly and tore tho buffalo