Month after month slipped by, and the first ripple of local excitement and curiosity born of their advent subsided. Ichabod knew nothing of farming, but to learn was simple. It needed only that he watch what his neighbors were doing, and proceed to do likewise. He learned soon to hold a breaking-plough in the tough prairie sod, and to swear mightily when it balked at an unusually tough root. As well, he came to know the oily feel of flax as he scattered it by hand over the brown breaking. Later he learned the smell of buckwheat blossoms, and the delicate green coloring of sod corn, greener by contrast with its dark background. Nor was Camilla idle. The dresses she had brought with her, dainty creations of foreign make, soon gave way to domestic productions of gingham and print. In these, the long brown hands neatly gloved, she struggled with a tiny garden, becoming in ratio as passed the weeks, warmer, browner, and healthier. "Are you happy?" asked Ichabod, one day, observing her thus amid the fruits of her hands. Camilla hesitated. Catching her hand, Ichabod lifted her chin so that their eyes met. "Tell me, are you happy?" he repeated. Another pause, though her eyes did not falter. "Happier than I ever thought to be." She touched his sleeve tenderly. "But not completely so, for--" she was not looking at him now,--"for I love you, and--and--I'm a woman." They said no more; and though Ichabod went back to his team, it was not to work. For many minutes he stood motionless, a new problem of right and wrong throbbing in his brain. Fall came slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection was no more. Winter followed, and they, who had thought the earth quiet before, found it still now indeed. Even the voice of the prairie-chicken was hushed; only the sharp knife-like cutting of spread wings told of a flock's passage at night. The level country, mottled white with occasional drifts, and brown from spots blown bare by the wind, stretched out seemingly interminable, until the line of earth and sky met. Idle perforce, the two exotics would stand for hours in the sunshine of their open doorway, shading their eyes from the glare and looking out, out into the distance that was as yet only a name--and that the borrowed name of an Indian tribe. "What a country!" Camilla would say, struck each time anew with a never-ending wonder. "Yes, what a country," Ichabod would echo, unconscious that he had repeated the same words in the same way a score of times before.