Chapter 1
IT is sixteen years since John Bergson died. His wife now lies
beside him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams
across the wheat-fields. Could he rise from beneath it, he would
not know the country under which he has been asleep. The shaggy
coat of the prairie, which they lifted to make him a bed, has
vanished forever. From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a
vast checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light
and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white
roads, which always run at right angles. From the graveyard gate
one can count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses; the gilded
weather-vanes on the big red barns wink at each other across the
green and brown and yellow fields. The light steel windmills
tremble throu
