612 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDIN AVIAN REVIEW 
“ ‘Oh, to be sure!’ she cries. ‘I am certainly glad for that. I 
was so afraid you might be old both in body and soul. I have always 
dreaded that. After the years went by, I even dreaded the thought of 
your coming home again because you would not be my little Karl- 
august any more. When I gave up hope of ever seeing you again in 
this world it was easy to console myself with the thought that although 
there is a man in far-off America who is my son, yet he is not my little 
Karl-August. ‘He is old and changed in body and he is old and 
changed in soul, that man!’ I kept telling myself, so it wouldn’t make 
so much difference whether I saw him again or not. ‘It will be easier 
for me not to.’ That is the way I talked. It is not so much the body, 
it is the soul. Souls that grow old are hard to recognize and harder 
to welcome. It is a great sorrow for a mother not to have the soul of 
her boy when he returns. It is as though he did not come back at all. 
But you, my little Karl, have come back young in soul! Do you 
know, it is as if you had been away only for a few minutes; down to 
the washing-pier to sail your paper boats, or out on the moors to pick 
red whortleberries, or over to the old pastor’s to read your catechism. 
It has been forty-one minutes and not forty-one years!’ 
“ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is good to be young in soul. It makes it easier 
to return and easier to part again than if I had been old all the way 
through.’ 
“We are deeply affected, the Spirit moves to pray, and we fall on 
our knees and thank the Lord God for letting a man be young in soul.” 
Karl-August Akerbrand wiped his running eye and the other 
one, too. He snapped shut his snuffbox, slapped his leg, and let out an 
emphatic little quirk of a whistle. “You are off to Smaland, Karl- 
August,” said he. 
He set about unhitching the horses from the plough. 
“The farm I shall rent out for a year. And as for you,” he ad¬ 
dressed the plough, “I leave you in the furrow till I come back.” Karl- 
August, like most people when they make the big decision of their 
lives, wanted to get all the drama possible out of the situation. 
He took up the reins and said “hee-hoopla” to the horses. They 
only turned their heads wonderingly towards him and flicked their 
ears. 
“So-ho, you are quite right; I am still in America. Well, then, 
my beauties, gid-dap /" 
He chuckled as he walked along behind the team. “I have not 
said hee-hoopla to a horse in forty-one years, but I shall again this 
spring, tra-la, O, I shall again this spring, fa-la. . . .” 
As he let down the bars he thought of how surprised the whole 
county would be to hear that Karl-August Akerbrand is going to pay 
a visit to the old country at last. 
“Let me see. . . . First we shall have a great party with dancing 
