"Cather, Willa - O Pioneers!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

resourcefulness and good judgment. His boys
were willing enough to work, but when he
talked with them they usually irritated him. It
was Alexandra who read the papers and fol-
lowed the markets, and who learned by the mis-
takes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who
could always tell about what it had cost to fat-
ten each steer, and who could guess the weight
of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were in-
dustrious, but he could never teach them to use
their heads about their work.

Alexandra, her father often said to himself,
was like her grandfather; which was his way of
saying that she was intelligent. John Bergson's
father had been a shipbuilder, a man of consid-
erable force and of some fortune. Late in life he
married a second time, a Stockholm woman of
questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extrava-
gance. On the shipbuilder's part, this marriage
was an infatuation, the despairing folly of a
powerful man who cannot bear to grow old.
In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the
probity of a lifetime. He speculated, lost his
own fortune and funds entrusted to him by
poor seafaring men, and died disgraced, leav-
ing his children nothing. But when all was said,
he had come up from the sea himself, had built
up a proud little business with no capital but his
own skill and foresight, and had proved himself
a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recog-
nized the strength of will, and the simple direct
way of thinking things out, that had charac-
terized his father in his better days. He would
much rather, of course, have seen this likeness
in one of his sons, but it was not a question of
choice. As he lay there day after day he had to
accept the situation as it was, and to be thank-
ful that there was one among his children to
whom he could entrust the future of his family
and the possibilities of his hard-won land.

The winter twilight was fading. The sick
man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen,
and the light of a lamp glimmered through the
cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shin-
ing far away. He turned painfully in his bed
and looked at his white hands, with all the