and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although
they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit
stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies.

John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a good
housewife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable
about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household
order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit
was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to
repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done
a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and
getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for
instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.
She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer
she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to
fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to
load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing
herself.

Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert
island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden,
and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with
Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of
Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild
creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid
ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon
peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She
had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could