But this time the well-known endurance of the active horse was not put to the test. He had scarcely trotted two hundred yards and was beginning to enjoy it, when his master, with a sudden jerk, held him up, and at the next moment sprang out of the saddle.
"All well. Conrad did not want to go to bed before he had seen you."
They walked on along the bank side by side, leading Hans by the bridle.
"Are you yet thinking about it?" said Catherine.
Lambert did not need to ask about what he should be thinking. One does not forget things like that. It seemed as though it had occurred but yesterday.
And yet there had been great changes since that evening. Where they then walked along the seldom-trodden meadow-path they now went through waving grain fields on a well-beaten road in which a deep, firm wagon-track was cut. There were fields with suitable buildings in all directions, as far as the edge of the woods, which in many places had been cleared far back. Where portions of the old wood pasture showed themselves between the cultivated fields, there large gates had been put, over which here and there a colt or a heifer coming up looked with large, languid eyes, while farther on in the pasture the rest were feeding in the rank grass. On through meadows and fields were seen the shingle roofs of large farmsteads, beside which the old barns which had been burned down would have looked very mean. On the place where the block-house was, there now stood forth a stately stone-house in whose gable the windows were glowing in the evening sun.
Yes, there have been great changes since that evening which to Lambert seemed like yesterday, as though he had never lived without his wife and children.
They had put Conrad to bed, and Catherine with her soft voice had sung the wild boy to sleep, while the other two little ones, with their red cheeks, were slumbering quietly in their beds. They sat before the door in the honeysuckle-arbor, through which the soft, summer evening wind was murmuring.
Lambert told his wife the events of the day, and about Mr. Brown, and they discussed Mr. Brown's plan of extending the German settlements farther up the creek, over to the Black River--if possible to Oneida Lake--and that Mr. Brown, Nicolas Herkimer and himself were to buy the land, and that he was to be the leader and patron of the new settlers. He also told Catherine what the old man had said about the future of the Germans in America, and how the Englishman feared that this hardy, industrious race would yet surpass the English and take from them their dominion over the continent.