The Settlers Read Online Free PDF

Oskar’s eyes. Now he looked at her in surprise.
    “I thought you had got used to living alone, Kristina.”
    “I don’t think one ever gets used to it . . .”
    She felt the tears in her eyes and turned her face away quickly.
    Petrus Olausson had listened with great attention; now he turned to Karl Oskar.
    “I’m sorry that Mrs. Nilsson feels so alone in America.”
    She asked him not to call her Mrs. Nilsson—she was no American lady, only a simple Swedish farm wife. “Please call me Kristina; and can’t I call you Uncle Petrus?” Sitting here, talking Swedish with a Swede, she felt he was almost a relative.
    “All right, call me Uncle! And now cheer up, Kristina! I’ll be living next door!”
    She rose suddenly. “I sit here and forget myself. I must put on the coffee!”
    The Helsinge farmer too rose from the table and again said a prayer:
    “All praise to you, O Lord, for food and drink!”
    Kristina, standing at the fireplace, her hands folded around the coffee mill, repeated the prayer after him. To her, today seemed like a Sunday in the cabin.
    —3—
    Karl Oskar was anxious to show Olausson around his claim, but Kristina wanted to keep him inside and talk to him. It was a long time since she had been so talkative, she was stimulated by the neighbor’s call. Eagerly she refilled his cup before he had emptied it.
    The Helsinge farmer said that very soon more Swedes would be coming to settle here. Two families would be arriving this spring, one from Helsingland and one from Östergötland, and he knew them both. In letters to his friends in Sweden, he had described this valley and urged them to move to this land of plenty. He was sure many people would be coming over from Sweden; soon it wouldn’t be lonely here any more.
    This was wonderful news to Kristina, who had felt they would have to live alone forever beside the Indian lake. But she wasn’t quite convinced; why would groups of people move from Sweden to this very region where only heathens worshiped their wooden images? She suspected their new neighbor was talking of arriving countrymen only to comfort her.
    “How many Swedes might there be in this valley?” queried Petrus Olausson.
    Karl Oskar counted silently. Their nearest neighbor toward Taylors Falls, he told Petrus, was Kristina’s uncle, Danjel Andreasson, whose place was called New Kärragärde; he was a widower with three children. His neighbor was Jonas Petter Albrektsson, also a farmer from Ljuder, who had arrived with their group. Jonas Petter had a woman from Dalecarlia, called Swedish Anna, keeping house for him. In Taylors Falls an Öländer, Anders Månsson, lived with his old mother; also a trapper named Samuel Nöjd. At Hay Lake, near Stillwater, west of Marine, three young Swedes, who batched in their cabin, had moved in last spring; he had never met them and did not know their names. And they themselves were two grown people and four small children. If he had counted aright, there were eighteen Swedish people in the St. Croix Valley.
    “And now we three families will settle here,” said the Helsinge farmer. “That makes more than thirty Swedes. We must start a congregation.”
    “What kind of congregation?” wondered Karl Oskar.
    “To build a God’s house! In Andover we started a parish with only twenty-two members.”
    “A church parish . . . ?”
    “Yes, we’ll build a church!”
    “A church!” exclaimed Kristina, breathlessly.
    “Only a little log temple, a God’s house of plain wood.”
    A silence fell in the cabin. Karl Oskar looked in surprise at his guest; the settlers out here had as yet not had time to build decent houses for themselves and their livestock. He had built himself a barn, but his stable wasn’t ready yet, and this summer he intended to build a threshing barn. All the settlers still had houses to build for themselves and shelters for their cattle and their crops. How could they manage to build a church and pay for a minister?
    “We