The Reverend Dekker appeared late Sunday afternoon on his way to evening service. A dour dominie, the Reverend Dekker, and one whose talents were anachronistic. He would have been invaluable in the days when New York was New Amsterdam. But the second and third generations of High Prairie Dutch were beginning to chafe under his old-world régime. A hard blue eye, had the Reverend Dekker, and a fanatic one.
“What is this talk I hear, Mrs. DeJong, that you are going to the Haymarket with the garden stuff, a woman alone?”
“Dirk goes with me.”
“You don’t know what you are doing, Mrs. DeJong. The Haymarket is no place for a decent woman. As for the boy! There is card-playing, drinking—all manner of wickedness—daughters of Jezebel on the street, going among the wagons.”
“Really!” said Selina. It sounded thrilling, after twelve years on the farm.
“You must not go.”
“The vegetables are rotting in the ground. And Dirk and I must live.”
“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground without’—Matthew X-29.”
“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen.”
By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind between the
