"I think I can get his vote," I said, after thinking it over for a while--and as I thought of it, the Dubuque ferry in 1855, the arrest of Bliven in the queue of people waiting at the post-office, my smuggled passenger, and the uplift I felt as the Iowa prairie opened to my view as we drew out of the ravines to the top of the hills--all this rolled over my memory. Roebuck looked at me like a person facing a medium in a trance. "Yes," I said, "I believe I can get his vote. I'll try." CHAPTER XX JUST AS GRANDMA THORNDYKE EXPECTED I was surprised next morning to note the change which had taken place in the weather. It had been cold and raw when I was crossing the prairies to my farm, with the wind in the southeast, and filled with a bitter chill. In the night the wind had gone down, and it was as still as death in the morning. For the first time in my life, and it has happened but twice since, I heard the whistles of the engines on the railroad twelve miles away to the north. There was a little beard of hoar frost along the side of every spear of grass and weed; which, as the sun rose higher, dropped off and lay under every twig and bent, in a little heap if it stood up straight, or in a windrow if it slanted; for so still was the air that the frost went straight down, and lay as it fell. I could hear the bawling of the cattle in every barnyard for miles around, and the crowing of roosters as the fowls strutted about in the warm sun. It was thawing by ten o'clock. The temperature had run up as the wind dropped; and as I now know, with the lowering of the pressure of the barometer, if we had had one. "This is a weather-breeder!" This was my way of telling to myself what a scientist would have described as marked low barometer; and he would have predicted from his maps that we should soon find ourselves in the northwest quadrant of the "low" with high winds and falling temperature. It all comes to the same thing. Instead of going to see Virginia before her school opened in the morning, I went to work banking up my house, fixing my sheds, and reefing things down for a gale as I learned to say on the Lakes. I made up my mind that I would go to the schoolhouse just before four and surprise Virginia, and hoped it would be a little stormy so I could have an excuse to take her home. I need not have worried about the storm. It came. At noon the northwestern sky, a third of the way to a point overhead, was of an indigo-blue color; but it still seemed to be clear sky--though I looked at it with suspicion, it was such an unusual thing for January. As I stood gazing at it, Narcisse Lacroix, Pierre's twelve-year-old boy, came by with his little sister. I asked him if school was out, and he said the teacher had sent them home because there was no more fuel for the stove; but it was so warm that the teacher was going to stay and sweep out, and write up her register.