By this time it was nearly seven, and Calista Simms came across the charmed bridge as a despatch-bearer, saying that if Mr. Jim and Miss Jennie didn't mind, dinner would be suhved right soon. It was cooked about right, and the folks was gettin' right hungry--an' such a crowd! There were fifteen in the babies' room, and for a while they thought the youngest Hamm young one had swallowed a marble. She would tell 'em they would be right over; good-by.
There was another cheer as the three elderly and the two young people emerged from the schoolmanse and took their way over the bridge to the school side of the velvet-bottomed moat; but it did not terminate in three-times-three and a tiger. It was, in fact shut off like the vibration of a bell dipped in water by the sudden rush of the shouters into the big assembly-room, now filled with tables for the banquet--and here the domestic economy classes, with their mothers, sisters, female cousins and aunts, met them, as waiters, hat-snatchers, hostesses, floor-managers and cooks, scoring the greatest triumph of history in the Woodruff District. For everything went off like clockwork, especially the victuals--and such victuals!
There was quantity in meats, breads, vegetables--and there was also savor. There was plenty, and there was style. Ask Mrs. Haakon Peterson, who yearned for culture, and had been afraid her children wouldn't get it if Yim Irwin taught them nothing but farming. She will tell you that the dinner--which so many thought of all the time as supper--was yust as well served as it if had been in the Chamberlain Hotel in Des Moines, where she had stayed when she went with Haakon to the state convention.
Why shouldn't it have been even better served? It was planned, cooked, served and eaten by people of intelligence and brains, in their own house, as a community affair, and in a community where, if any one should ask you, you are authorized to state that there's as much wealth to the acre as in any strictly farming spot between the two oceans, and where you are perfectly safe--financially--in dropping from a balloon in the dark of the moon, and paying a hundred and fifty dollars an acre for any farm you happen to land on. Why shouldn't things have been well done, when every one worked, not for money, but for the love of the doing, and the love of learning to do in the best way?