THE AMERICAN-SCANDIN AVIAN REVIEW 
609 
“Fy! but it is annoying to be old when the year is so young,” said 
Karl-August again to himself. 
He sighed, wiped his running eye, and brought out his snuff-box. 
It was a little, oval one of birch bark, decorated oddly with mingled 
Chippewa and Scandinavian symbols. He rapped it smartly with his 
knuckles, pulled the tiny thong on the cover, and took a pinch. Sitting 
there, between the plough handles, elbows on knees, he snuffed noisily 
and gratefully and dusted the stray grains carefully out of his beard. 
He always fell to thinking when he snuffed. 
“Have you marked how old you are this spring, Karl-August? 
You are one and sixty years of age, man! Three score years and one! 
But, then, what difference does it make how old a man is in years, be 
lie but young in soul!” He slapped his thigh, it was such a good 
point. . . . 
Then suddenly he began to think how few springs there were left 
for him to see. 
“Hmn, that’s so! You haven’t very many more, Karl- 
August,” and he gazed hungrily about him as if he would get his fill. 
Then he reflected on the springs he had seen; forty-one here in 
America and twenty in the old country. It was strange how vividly 
he could remember his springs in the homeland just now. There were 
forty-one teeming, fruitful, epochal springs between him and his child¬ 
hood. Forty-one years of the American heyday had he seen, and yet— 
“O, to be in Smaland now that spring is here!” 
As soon as he said that he felt a pang of homesickness, the first in 
years. It surprised him. He tried to shrug it off. 
“Why, this is your home, Karl-August. You should not be home¬ 
sick. You—you have no right to be!” 
But the thoughts of the Smaland springs were most persistent. 
Almost against his will he was saying, “Everything is green in Sma¬ 
land now, the softest green. The white and yellow lilies lie open on 
Liljeby Canal. And the heaths! The heaths are as red as the Red Sea 
must be, for the heather is blooming now!” 
He kept the picture of the heaths before him a long time, because 
on the edge of the heaths he saw a tiny torp with pear trees all around 
it. His mother lived there. She could not have so very many springs 
left. 
“But still,” he mused, “the smell of the heather surely keeps her 
young in soul. If I could only see her once again! But that is impos¬ 
sible, of course. ... It is harder to part the second time, they say!” 
There! That was the reason Karl-August Akerbrand, the richest 
farmer in the whole county, never visited the land of his birth. That 
was why he never joined those jolly tourist parties that each year 
made a pilgrimage to attend the great midsummer fetes. The realiza¬ 
tion had grown upon him these last few years and he had learned to 
