cheeks, made him look older than he was. He was barefoot, but
he wore a clean shirt of unbleached cotton, open at the neck. He
always put on a clean shirt when Sunday morning came round, though
he never went to church. He had a peculiar religion of his own
and could not get on with any of the denominations. Often he did
not see anybody from one week's end to another. He kept a calendar,
and every morning he checked off a day, so that he was never in
any doubt as to which day of the week it was. Ivar hired himself
out in threshing and corn-husking time, and he doctored sick animals
when he was sent for. When he was at home, he made hammocks out
of twine and committed chapters of the Bible to memory.

Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself.
He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the
bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown
into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of
the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses
than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would
be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for his wild
homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If
one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough
land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight;
if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of
the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one
understood what Ivar meant.

On this Sunday afternoon his face shone with happiness. He closed
the book on his knee, keeping the place with his horny finger, and
repeated softly:--