The fish died by the hundreds and had to be gathered up from the shore and buried. Every day she saw large perch floating by, each a lost and golden dinner. Once she saw a sturgeon, a hundred pounds of wasted food, weltering to the parching wind. But these waters had been robbed of tens of thousands of sturgeon, making this wretched swollen thing almost the sole survivor. Out west the salmon were going the same way, and the Indians who depended on salmon would have to die out. She read in the papers that the same terrific heat was felt even in Europe. But she had no hope that such warnings would be heeded. The birth rate in all the European countries was rising rapidly. England had made a net increase even during the war, and Vienna—the hardest-hit of all the great cities—had recovered and was breeding plenty of rickety children. Such were her inmost thoughts during that burning summer of 1921, and not one of them did she breathe aloud. In fact the more terrific the heat, the more she seemed to flourish. When she was not cooking or working in the garden, she was mostly in the water. She would swim out as near to the steamers as it was safe to go, and sometimes nearer, and from the bubbling sapphire flirt like a mermaid with the deckhands. One luminous evening her astonished old parent saw her swim across the channel and land in Canada, half a mile away. The glass that he had used half a century since in the war now revealed her perched there upon the pier. Half an hour later she was dancing on the pier in her bathing suit with several Canadian lads and lassies. He rowed across for her and brought her home, a very bacchanal of laughter. Curious are the freaks of lightning. Chapter 83. Bismuth Her twenty-third birthday came, and with it a letter from Mrs. Hogg, who evidently wished to know when she would have to furnish that trousseau, though she did not say so in exactly those words. Also she seemed to think that Marvin had kept Jean informed of all things pertaining to Wickford and Chicago. She made references to her new grandson, Asher La Hogue, now more than a month old. She had not seen him yet, but understood that he looked like Gratia. This was the first that Jean had heard of Jimmy’s marriage or his transmogrified name, but her heart leaped up because the child was not Asher Mahan. She was willing to grant him the most beautiful boy baby ever born, with eyes of gentian and hair of gold, and enough latent business ability to manage the biggest factory on earth. Then to rebuke her wicked heart for singing within her she reminded herself that a baby more or less is of little importance. There in the presence of the Laurentians, which existed before any life arrived on earth, it was easy for her now to deride life. Life was merely an incidental product of thunderstorms and sunlight.