driven to America.

Martha Stoltzfoos was speaking Hausa better than she'd spoken English since grade-school days, and she kept busy in the little bacteriological laboratory on her sunporch, keeping fresh the skills she'd learned at Georgetown and might some day need in earnest; but she still grew homesick as her child-coming day drew nearer. It was wrong, she told Aaron, for an Amishwoman to have heathen midwives at her lying-in. For all their kindness, the Murnan women could never be as reassuring as the prayer-covered, black-aproned matrons who'd have attended Martha back home. "Ach, Stoltz," she told her husband, "if only a few other of unser sart Leit could have come here with us."

"Don't worry, Love," Aaron said. "I've eased calves and colts enough into the world; man-children can't come so different."

"You talk like a man," Martha accused him. "I wish my Mem was just down the road a piece, ready to come a-running when my time came," she said. She put one hand on her apron. Chuudes Paste! The little rascal is wild as a colt, indeed. Feel him, Stoltz!"

Aaron dutifully placed his hand to sense the child's quickening. "He'll be of help on the farm, so strong as he is," he remarked. Then, tugging his hat down tight, Aaron went outdoors, bashful before this mystery.

The little creek had thawed, and the light of the sun on a man's face almost gave back the heat the air extorted. Waziri had gone to town today for some sort of Murnan spring-festival, eager to celebrate his hard-earned wealth on his first day off in months. The place seemed deserted, Aaron felt, without the boy; without the visitors he'd played ball and talked crops with, striding up in their scarlet-trimmed rigas to gossip with their friend Haruna.

Between the roadway and the house, Aaron knelt to rake up with his fingers a handful of the new-thawed soil. He squeezed it. The clod in his hand broke apart of its own weight: it was not too wet to work. Festival-day though it was to his Schwotzer neighbors, he was eager to spear this virgin soil with his plow blade.

Aaron strode back to the barn. He hitched Rosina—the dappled mare, named "Raisin" for her spots—to the plow and slapped her into motion. Sleek with her winter's idleness, Rosina was at first unenthusiastic about the plow; but the spring sun and honest exercise warmed her quickly. Within half an hour she was earning her keep. Though Aaron was plowing shallow, the compact soil broke hard. Rosina 

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