Book excerpt: Spring Came on Forever is a lovely romantic tale about two American characters who head out West into the Nebraska Territory. The two, a German-speaking Lutheran girl and a blacksmith's apprentice, fall in love but their plans for marriage are thwarted by circumstances. Excerpt: "Matthias Meier was twenty-one in that year of 1866, tall and stalwart of form, with only a healed red furrow across his upper left arm to show for the last day's fighting of his Illinois regiment. We find him, now, sitting on a high stool before a sloping desk in the office of his uncle."