Happy Hollow farm

HAPPY HOLLO

i

WILLIAM R. LIGHT

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM
WILLIAM R. LIGHTON

LIFE TOOK ON NEW SAVOES

Happy Hollow
Farm

By

William R. Lighten

Author of "Letters oj an Old Farmer to His Son"

Illustrated

New York
George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ILLUSTRATIONS

Life Took on New Savors . . . Frontispiece

PAGE

The Old Huntsville Road . . . . . 22

Here Our Life Began 34

For the Christmas Fire 74

Good for Generations to Come ... 88

Everything for the Table at Bare Cost of Pro-
duction . .102

Our First Crop 132

So We Bought a Set of Goats .... 146
Increase 172

There Was a New Glory upon Our Own Harvest

Field 216

We Were Making Our Acres Do Their Utmost 238
This Was Our Dream Come True 272

M513165

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

SUPPOSE you had wanted some big thing
with all your heart for all your life; and sup-
pose you knew that your wife had always
wanted just the same thing in just the same
way. Suppose that in the fullness of time,
when you were in the very prime of your years,
with the joy of life at its strongest, this fond
dream should become reality ; and suppose that
after half a dozen years of actual experience
you should find the reality better beyond com-
pare than the dream ever dared be. Suppose
all this, and how do you suppose you'd feel?

Well, that's the story of Happy Hollow
Farm.

Maybe I'd better say right at the beginning,
and have it over with, that ours is different
from the general run of back-to-the-land

9

10 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

stories. There was no harsh or bitter fact in
our lives that drove us to farming as a last
hope. I hadn't lost my job in town. I wasn't
facing a nervous breakdown after long years
of faithful service of an inhuman employer.
We hadn't been worn to desperation trying to
make both ends meet. Nothing like that. The
plain, unromantic facts were that no man could
have desired a kinder, better tempered, more
considerate boss than I had. I was my own
boss. For a long time I'd been making a
pretty fair-to-middling living for my family,
writing stuff for the magazines. Income was
growing better and better as the years passed.
We were getting our full share of the enjoy-
ment of books and music and the rest of life's
refinements. We were seeing something of the
world between whiles ; we were making friends
worth having; we were steadily widening our
circle and getting good out of every minute of
it. Besides, we were getting ahead a little. As
for the health part of it, there wasn't a doctor
of our acquaintance whom I couldn't have
worn to a wilted wreck in a day's cross-country
hike or a long pull at the oars.

I'm telling you this so frankly, not by way
of bragging, but just to let you know that it

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 11

wasn't a sense of failure or weakness or im-
pending evil that set our minds toward our
farm. We were faring uncommonly well. If
we fussed a little now and then, wishing for
something we hadn't, the fussing wasn't seri-
ous. The long and short of it is that if carking
care had sought a roost on our roof in those
days she'd have been driven to startled flight
by the sounds of jocund well-being that over-
flowed the place.

Yet with so much happiness we hadn't
reached the supreme content, the sense of
crowning completeness. It's not easy to make
that feeling plain. To be happily satisfied
with life's richness, and yet to be possessed by
great desire — there's something of the idea.
We had our vision, Laura and I, and it was al-
ways with us.

The vision was not of great possessions, nor
of great fame and high place, nor of any other
of the fair, false lures to disappointment. It
was a vision of Home. So that you may un-
derstand the rest of what I'm to write, I must
try to make you see that vision as we saw it.

Laura and I were married in 1890. From
the first our ideals of home hadn't a hair's
breadth of difference. You might say that our

12 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

idea took form before we were born; for each
of us came of a long line of home-makers. It
was in our blood. We might differ about
other things, but never about that. For both
of us home was life's one great essential. It
wasn't merely a pretty sentiment; it was a
ruling passion.

We were agreed in this, too: We would
never compromise our vision; we would never
let life offer us something "just as good" and
accept it as the real thing. We should know a
counterfeit when we saw it. We might have to
accept postponement and maybe ultimate de-
feat; but we'd go down with our colors nailed
to the masthead. Talk about fixed ideas 1 We
certainly had one of 'em.

Before ever we set pencil to paper with the
first scrawled sketch, we had the picture in
our minds. Wide spaces — that was the es-
sence of it. It wouldn't answer at all that we
should have just any sort of roof over our
heads and then let the spirit of contentment
do the rest. It wouldn't do at all that we
should just "take a house," live in it till we
were tired, and then swap it for another, on
the chance of by and by finding something
that would suit us well enough. We didn't

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 13

have to do any blind groping toward our re-
ality. We knew from the very beginning what
it must be.

A beautiful setting, somewhere, with hills
and woods and clear water and far vistas —
that's what we must find. We had never seen
that spot; but we had faith. It must exist.
There our house would stand, nestled safe in
the heart of soft delights.

And such a house! For eighteen years it
grew in our minds, taking form slowly, slowly.
A wide-spreading roof of beautiful lines ; and
beneath the roof wide, generous spaces. There
must be nothing cramped. Our idea expressed
itself in spaciousness, not in luxury. We must
have lots of room. The living center of the
whole thing would be a great, massive fireplace
of stone, wide, deep-throated, fit to hold a
roaring winter fire of huge logs of oak and
hickory. Do you remember that Christmas
scene in Pickwick Papers, with the jovial old
Wardle and his friends gathered about the
blaze? In our first years together Laura and
I read that story. After that, do you fancy
you could have induced us to plan for steam
radiators or a furnace in the basement? Right
from that minute that fireplace was ours.

14 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Around this our thoughts grouped them-
selves, opening out, broadening, room by room,
space upon space, with nothing grudged and
no mean subterfuges. We were to build, not
for ourselves alone, but for generations. We
dreamed of a home that, not in our lifetime
alone, but through the generations to come
after us, would slowly, slowly grow richer and
richer in all life's sweetnesses and gentle mem-
ories. We would build an abiding place for
the spirit that endures.

Most likely you can understand, without
more telling, what we were driving at. Most
of us, at one time or another, have nursed that
fond notion. Laura and I clung to it as the
first-born inspiration of our life together. Bit
by bit we watched it grow. For years upon
years we kept a portfolio of pictures and
sketches and scraps; and now and then, when
our life seemed to be halting a little, as if to
catch its breath, we'd get these out and look
them through and talk them over. That
helped, no end.

There was one thing we always carefully
avoided in our talks — the perfectly plain im-
possibility of actually doing this thing we were
dreaming about, as matters stood with us. We

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 15

lived at Omaha in those days. To make the
barest beginning on that home of ours up there
would have taken a small fortune. We had no
fortune, and there was no chance of our ever
getting one. Laura knew that as well as I
did. I don't know why that didn't make us
disgruntled or melancholy; but it didn't.
Eighteen years is a long time to wait for the
thing you want, as we wanted that home.

It was worth waiting for. Fulfillment of
great desire is always worth waiting for. We
have found fulfillment of our desire.

As I'm putting these words on paper, it's
midnight. Excepting the lamp on my desk,
lights are out in the house. Laura and the
children went to bed an hour ago. It's early
May, but the nights are still cool here. I
built up a fire at sunset; a fire of oak and
hickory logs banked against a big blackjack
backlog. After supper we sat around the
hearth, and I held little Peggy on my lap and
read to her out of the Jungle Books until she
grew drowsy. After that, Laura and I sat
together for an hour or so, not talking much,
but looking into the red flare and flicker of the
flames, thinking. By and by she told me

16 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

good-night, and I came over to my own room
to write for a little while.

The fire still burns, softly. From where I
sit I can see it glowing in the deep stone fire-
place down the length of the big living room,
and watch the ruddy, warm shadows on the
walls and the high arched ceiling. It's very
beautiful. There's a brilliant full moon in
mid-heaven. The living-room floor is check-
ered with golden light falling through the
small square panes of the long doors and win-
dows. Looking out, I can see the long, soft,
moonlit slope of the land toward the river, a
half mile away; and beyond, the full rise of
the spring-clothed, mist-crowned Ozark hills.
It's very beautiful. One of my windows
stands open, and on the slow air the odor of
sweetbrier comes in. There's the smell of
moist earth, too, and now and then a whiff of
the pungent tang of wood smoke from some
big brush fires that were set this afternoon.
If I listen, I can hear the low chuckle of a
brook a little way from the house.

This is fulfillment. This is the home of our
dreams come true, just as we saw it through
those eighteen years of waiting.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 17

How did it come about? Well, that's the
story, of course.

Maybe there's no better way to put it than
just to say that our idea wouldn't wait any
longer to be born. Ideas are a good bit like
other living things ; when the birthtime comes,
you can't put it off just because you think
you're not ready. That's the way it seemed
to work with us.

It was in the early spring of 1908. Laura
was away from home on a visit. While she
was gone, one night I got out paper and pencil
and set to work. Until that time we hadn't
even tried to make a finished plan; we had
only sketches and scraps, here a little and there
a little, on vagrant sheets. I began putting
them together. Before I went to sleep that
night I had sent to Laura my completed drafts.

They came back to me with only two words
of comment: "Simply perfect!" That gave
me plenty to think about until Laura got
home.

"Well," I said then, "if that house is aU
right, let's go find a place to put it, so we can
be getting started on it."

Laura laughed. I'd known that she would.
She had always said that she was the "practi-

18 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

cal" one. She isn't a bit more practical than
I am, if you get right down to it; but never
mind that now. The point is that she laughed.
No doubt it did sound funny.

"All right!" I said. "But we're going to
build that house, just the way it lies there, be-
fore the end of this year. We're going to
spend next Christmas in that very identical
house."

"Why, old man!" Laura chided. She
thought I was fooling. We had never got into
the way of joking about that home of ours;
we'd as soon have jested about an ailing child.
By and by, when I kept on nagging, she knew
she'd have to deal with me.

"Why, how are we possibly going to do it?"
she asked. That's the sort of question that
some people call "practical."

"I don't know," I said; "but we're going to
start right off now and find out. We can't do
it here ; that's true enough. It isn't a town-lot
proposition. A suburban acre or two won't
do. We must have lots of land. That home
is going to need a big farm to go with it. It's
going to be an old-fashioned homestead sort of
thing. I guess we're agreed on that. Well,

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 19

then, the thing to do is to go and hunt up our
farm."

That brought on more conversation. Laura
didn't want to hurt ; but she had to say it sooner
or later. "Have you forgotten that it takes
money to buy a farm?" she asked. "You know
how much money we have."

I knew, well enough. By shaking out and
cashing in all our resources we could have in
hand in real money something less than four
thousand dollars. I'll admit that that made
me feel a bit uneasy. If it had been forty
thousand I'd have felt better. Even forty
thousand in Omaha wouldn't have let us "get
by" with what we meant to do.

"No matter," I said. "Just listen to this,
now : We want that place, wherever it is. It's
ridiculous to suppose that it doesn't exist
somewhere, when we've wanted it so long and
so faithfully. We've never really tried to find
it. That's what we're going to do now."

"But if we had a big farm, what should we
do with it?" Laura persisted. "We're not
farmers." It beats all how very practical a
practical person can be if she puts her mind
to it.

I'm bound to own that Laura was right, on

20 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

the face of things. Neither of us was even
distantly related to a farmer, except by mar-
riage. That part of it didn't strike me as
hopeless, though. We were used to keeping a
cow and a few hens ; our town-lot garden had
always been the envy of the neighbors ; for the
last five years I'd been tending an acre of
small fruits with uncommon success. We had
the knack of making things grow and thrive.
As the Frenchman says, we had "the smell for
the soil." Besides, for years upon years we
had been tireless readers of the literature of
modern farming; we knew a lot of the theory
of it. No, that part didn't appear hopeless,
not by a long shot.

"Anyway," I said, "we can learn. That's
not worrying me now. The point is to find the
farm. We'll start so soon as you want to pack
your suitcase."

Do you believe that the great gods ever give
us mortals a "hunch"? Maybe we might as
well believe it. If we don't, then we have to
believe in luck, which isn't a speck more scien-
tific.

Something or other, by whatever name you
call it, led us straight to our dream-farm. I
bought railway tickets to Fayetteville, Arkan-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 21

sas. There wasn't any reason in it; ordinary
human intelligence had nothing whatever to
do with it. We didn't know a blessed thing
about Arkansas ; indeed, we shared a very com-
mon prejudice against her. You know how
folks have always felt about Arkansas — that
she's nothing but a dead spot on a live map.
If we had tried to reason it out, we shouldn't
have come to Fayetteville. But we didn't rea-
son. A few days before I'd happened to get
hold of a "farms-for-sale" list sent out by a
Fayetteville real estate man. We'd read thou-
sands of such circulars. There was nothing se-
ductive about this one; it was indifferently
written and badly printed, as if with an eye
single to cheapness. I'll never tell you why;
but on that list I'd checked a farm. There was
nothing alluring in the description: "120
acres 2^ mi. from town, part cleared, no im-
provements, $2400. Part Cash." The rest of
the circular let us know that Fayetteville was
in the heart of the Ozark mountain country,
and that here was the seat of the state univer-
sity. That's all we had to go by.

It was the middle of a March night when we
got to Fayetteville and went to bed. We
waked in the morning in a blaze of crystal and

22 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

golden glory. I didn't know quite what to
make of it. Did you ever have your senses lit-
erally stunned by a flood of delights? It
needed a little time to understand that this was
the sunrise breaking in upon us. We stood
together by the window, looking out. Before
us lay a picture that just stubbornly won't be
put into words. There were tree-arched roads
and the white houses of the town. Beyond
we could see the somber-toned buildings of the
university. Below us, through a winding hol-
low, ran a shining river; and then again be-
yond, rolling miles on miles into the mist-sof-
tened distance, spread the billowy hills of the
Boston Range, flushed with spring. Over all,
mellowing it, suffusing it, melting it into liquid
beauty, was that wonderful flooding light.
"The light that never was on sea or land" —
do you remember that? That's what it made
me think of.

We walked the streets for an hour after
breakfast, not saying much, but looking, look-
ing. Wherever we looked, through every open
space, there lay our hills, misty blue and misty
green and misty gold — wonderful, wonderful!
We loved them. I think we both felt, right

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 23

from that first hour, that we had come to the
end of our rainbow.

"Well," I said, after a while, "we might as
well go and have a look at the farm." There
was only one farm in our minds. Think what
you will, say what you like about it, the thing
was already settled. We hunted up our real
estate man, told him what we wanted, and
showed him our checked copy of his list. "We
want a place quite in the rough," I explained;
"one that we may improve for ourselves. You
understand."

He took a good look at us, to make sure that
he understood. No doubt he had us sized up
about right, as a couple of crazy enthusiasts.
He didn't try to argue us out of our notion.
"Yes," he said, "I guess maybe that place
might suit you, if you really want one in the
rough." Without more talk we drove out of
town.

It was an old, old road we traveled; the
Huntsville Road, it's called. Settlement of
this Ozark country began a full century ago,
in a day when rude trails were the only trav-
eled ways. The Huntsville Road survived
from the old times. It showed its age. Gray,
tottering stone walls and gray, rotting rail

24 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

fences meandered on either side, grown over
with wild blackberries and thorny smilax and
sassafras bushes. Here and there a huge elm
bent over, its buds just breaking into frothy
green. The rare farms along the road wore a
shaggy, unkempt look. The road itself was
rough — oh, yes, quite rough! Up hill and
down it wandered, rain-rutted, twisting back
and forth in quest of a smooth place it seemed
never to find. We bumped quite a lot as we
rode ; if the driver tried to dodge a stone in the
wheel-tracks, he was sure to drop into a "chug-
hole."

"They'll be working these roads when spring
opens up a little more," our real estate man
said. He needn't have bothered to say any-
thing about it. We weren't really minding
the bumps ; for ahead of us, with a fresh reve-
lation at each new turn of the way, opened the
White River Valley, rimmed with the hills.
We gazed and gazed, and couldn't get enough
of gazing.

By and by, turning off through a narrow,
stony lane, we came to a rude wire gate in a
crumbling rail fence. Just inside the gate the
carriage halted.

"This is the place," our real estater said; and

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 25

then, like a wise man, he sat waiting. I think
he had his doubts. We found out afterward
that this farm of ours had been for years a
standing joke to the real estate folk of Fay-
etteville. Nobody wanted it — its owner least
of all. That's how it happened to be waiting
for us. We had no doubts. That farm was
ours!

What we saw was a rough, untidy expanse,
a half mile across, stretching from point to
point of a deep crescent of low wooded hills
that opened toward the south. Here and there,
at broken intervals, lay a tiny irregular patch
of ground under plow; and in between these
were deep, tangled thickets of wild growths,
dense as a jungle. In the depths of this wil-
derness, somewhere near us, we could hear a
brook making sport in a stony bed. Along
the banks towered giant sycamores and feath-
ery-limbed elms and stately walnuts. Count-
less plumed heads of dogwood bloom were
thrust out of the greenery, and we caught the
odor of hawthorn and honey locust.

"Come!" Laura said; and we got out of the
carriage and walked down into the heart of
the wild hollow, pushing the tangle aside that
we might get close to the water's edge. The

26 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

brook ran clear and free and cold. A little
way up the bank we found a deep flowing
spring, walled in in some old day, and brim-
ming full. The ground was smothered in a
very riot of spring bloom. Away up in the
very tip-top of a sycamore, straight over our
heads, a mocking-bird began singing, fit to split
his little throat. I looked at Laura, and Laura
looked at me; a smile passed between us —
and it was all over!

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "That's
no way to buy a farm." Well, don't I know it?
But this wasn't a farm. It had been a farm
once, long ago, and it would be a farm again
by and by; but just then it was simply acres
and acres of raw, untamed beauty, inviting us.

We walked around a little. The place lay
in the form of an L — eighty acres across the
south front, with forty acres of woodland on a
hill at the back. There were three brooks wan-
dering through the land. We stood at the
edge of the woods and let our eyes follow their
courses. Wherever we looked, Possibility was
written large.

"There's wood enough right here," I said,
"to run our big fireplace for a thousand years !"

The agent's circular had spoken solemn truth

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 27

in saying that the place had no improvements.
Nobody would have thought of giving that
name to the weather-beaten old log house
standing on the hill-slope, sheltering the tenant
farmer and his family. The walls were mud-
chinked, the doors hung awry, the broken win-
dows were patched with paper and stuffed with
faded rags. The house-yard was an ugly litter
of refuse of unnumbered years of shiftless liv-
ing. Near by was a tumble-down stable of
thatched poles. Down below, by the big
spring, stood a log-walled granary — without
any grain in it. No, there weren't any im-
provements.

The tenant, a lean, listless man of the hills,
came up and joined us presently.

"You-uns thinkin' of buyin' thish-yere
farm?" he wanted to know. "It ain't worth
nothin'. It's a tumble sorry farm. You-all
could starve plumb to death on thish-yere
farm."

Even the real-estater showed signs of emo-
tion when we told him we were ready to talk
turkey. The price was twenty dollars an acre ;
we might pay one-fourth down and have any
time we liked for paying the rest. We didn't
try to dicker. If we had but known it we

28 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

might have shaved several hundred dollars
from that price by holding out and whip-saw-
ing a while. We found that out afterward.
If the agent had but known it, he might have
doubled the price on us and we shouldn't have
turned a hair. So maybe we're even. We cer-
tainly wanted that place — and we certainly
got it. The trade was closed that afternoon.

"Well, we've bought something," I said to
Laura when we were back at the hotel, slicking
up a little for supper. To tell the truth, I was
just the least trifle dismayed, now that it was
all over and the tension relaxed and I could
think deliberately of what we had done. I
think Laura had something of that feeling,
too.

"Yes, old man," she said. It seemed to me
that her tone lacked gayety; but maybe I was
wrong about that.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I went on.

"Perfectly beautiful!" she said. There was
the ring of enthusiasm this time. "But did
you hear what that tenant said? He said we
could starve to death on that farm."

"Oh, well!" I joked. "We could starve to
death anywhere, if we wanted to."

There was a silence. The silence drew out

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 29

and out. When I stole a glance at her she was
standing at the window, looking away across
the hills, touching her lips with a finger-tip —
a little trick she has when she's thoughtful.
She has never told me what she was thinking
about, all to herself, in that minute. I've won-
dered. When she turned from the window
presently she was quite herself, smiling, game
for anything.

"Could you see where the house is to stand?"
I asked.

"Yes!" she flashed. "On that little knoll at
the edge of the oats field, by that big wild
cherry tree."

"That's the place!" I said. We stood to-
gether then and watched the sunset color fad-
ing; watched till there was nothing to see but
the dull flush of the afterglow. "Come!" I
said then. "We must get supper and be ready
for the train home."

"Home!" Laura said. "Why, this is
Home!"

I've told you some rather intimate things;
for I've wanted you to know the state of mind
we were in when we began our life of farming.
We weren't driven to it, you see ; we didn't go

30 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

at it in fear and trembling, as a last hard re-
sort. We went at it with fine, strong zest, as
to our life's crowning adventure. I think that
promised pretty well for happiness.

II

OUR farm was bought in March of 1908.
Six weeks later, in early May, we had cut loose
from our old life and had come to Arkansas
to begin the new.

Nothing would satisfy us but to go at once
to the farm. Thinking back, I have to laugh
at our impetuous temper. There wasn't a
building on the place fit to live in; besides, the
tenant's lease covered that year, to the end of
the cropping season. We had no rights at all
upon the land, save by sufferance, until the
new year's crop would be gathered. There
was some satisfaction, though, in thinking that
this tenant was our tenant now. We had ac-
quired him with the farm. He was farming
"on shares," and was to give one half of what-
ever he harvested, by way of rental. We dis-
covered after a time that this share of the crop
had almost enabled the former owner to keep
the taxes paid.

No matter about that. We had a tenant;
31

32 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

and he would be in possession of the farm,
under a perfectly good contract, for the next
seven or eight months. We had to negotiate
with him for the privilege of coming upon the
land to live in the meantime.

We discovered at once that we weren't go-
ing to be riotously fond of this tenant. He
was very fussy, very jealous of those rights of
his. He grudged the permission he gave us to
pitch camp in the thicket down between the
empty granary and the big spring. That was
the only available spot, and we took it. It
really suited us first-rate.

We got into town in the early morning of
that May day. By noon we had secured a big
tent and had bought camp tools and supplies
— laundry soap, and rope, and salt, and
matches, and an ax, and some canned toma-
toes, and a bottle of witch-hazel, and coffee,
and oilcloth, and flour, and a couple of water
buckets, and baking powder — a wagon-load of
truck. Right after dinner we went out with
this stuff. By the middle of the afternoon we
had the tent set up and our beds laid out for
night. I brought wood and water then, and at
sunset we had our supper, holding our plates

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 33

in our laps, sitting on the ground around an
open campfire.

There were six of us: Laura, and my
mother, and Dorothy, our daughter of fifteen,
and Louis, who was twelve, and little Peggy,
not yet three, and I, coming forty-two in the
summer. Oh, yes, and there was Lee. I wish
you might have known Lee. I don't know
how old he was ; but he was a pronounced bru-
nette with a trick of showing the whites of his
eyes and his shining white teeth when anything
tickled him. Something was always tickling
him. We'd found him in Kansas and had
brought him with us to Arkansas. Truly, he
was a jolly soul. He's doing a life sentence in
the Kansas penitentiary now, poor chap. I'll
tell you more about Lee as we go along. It
turned out that he was just no good at all for
work; but while he lasted he was the Br'er
Bones of our enterprise.

While I live I shan't forget that first night
at Happy Hollow. We dawdled over supper,
talking and laughing, making happy jests at
our own madness. Then the dusk came on,
and slowly the darkness settled about us and
shut us in. Somehow that darkness subdued
our merriment, quieted us, set us to listening.

34 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Queer, eerie sounds were pulsing through the
thickets. There was an intermittent flicker of
fireflies, back and forth. Whippoorwills were
calling in the gloom, and from back in the hills
came the tremolo note of a little owl. There
had been a breeze at sunset, but it had fallen
away to a soft sighing. It was all mighty dif-
ferent from the sort of evening song a town
sings. There was no faintest murmur of the
sound of human life ; the only voice we heard
was the voice of the wilderness. It wasn't un-
friendly, but it was strange. I wondered what
Laura was thinking of it — but I didn't want
to ask.

Little Peggy dropped asleep in my arms
and I put her to bed in the tent. After that
we got to talking of to-morrow's plans and of
what we would do first in the morning; but the
talk lagged lamely and petered out. To be
perfectly frank, for just a minute or two I was
bothered. Had our plunge been too headlong?
Life, particularly for the women, gets a good
deal of its meaning from familiar things and
intimate contacts and established relations.
The friendships and loves of years are more
than habit, particularly with the women. For
a minute or two I pondered whether we had

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 35

done well. With the unfamiliar night about
us, Omaha seemed just then very far away. I
threw an armful of dry wood on the fire, to
make it blaze up more cheerfully.

We heard the voices of people coming up
the lane. They went through our camp pres-
ently, staring with curious interest — three sol-
emn-faced hill folk, each with a gun hanging
in the crook of his elbow. They didn't stop,
but passed with a drawled "Ha-owdy!" The
inflection can't be set upon paper. They went
up to our tenant's house on the hill ; and after
a half hour or so they returned — not through
the camp this time, but through the thicket on
the far side of the hollow. When they were
across from us a voice called:

"You-uns git that nigger out of hyarl Git
him out to-morry, too, or he'll git killed!"

Wouldn't that have dashed you? Lee was
rolled in a blanket, lying on the grass beyond
the fire.

"Did you hear that, Lee?" I asked.

Lee chuckled. He was certainly a master
hand at finding things to chuckle about. "If
a nigger got killed," he said, "every time a pore
white trash talks biggity, this worl' would be a

36 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

bad ba-ad place. It sho' would!" He chuck-
led himself to sleep over that.

We never heard anything from our first-
night visitors. They never tried to pester our
brunette. Maybe it's just as well they didn't.
There's a sort of grim irony in the fact that
Lee is "doing time" now for murder. Those
night prowlers were merely making a little
cheap noise; but that was our first taste of
neighborliness in the new home. We didn't
exactly like the flavor.

Morning came in a burst of brilliance, dewy-
fresh, wonderful. You know how such morn-
ings affect you; they make you forget how
queerly your mind behaved in the night.
When we talk about the Resurrection Morn-
ing, maybe it's a lot more than a figure of
speech. The curl of blue wood-smoke from
our breakfast fire rose unafraid in the sun-
light ; the birds that flitted and fluttered about
sang a tune that was mighty different from the
melancholy whimpering of the whippoorwill
and the owl. We laughed and felt good.

After breakfast, Laura and I walked around
here and there, stopping to loaf now and then,
and talking. After all, though it chafed us
sometimes like the mischief, it was a good thing

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 37

for us that the place was in the hands of the
tenant that summer. That gave us time for
getting acquainted with our land and letting
the acquaintance ripen. Our eagerness would
have led us into some follies, if we'd had a free
hand. Some of those follies would have been
expensive; and if we had tried cropping our-
selves, knowing as little as we did of conditions
and methods, we must have ended our first
year with something of disappointment on the
practical side of things. Since that time hun-
dreds of back-to-the-landers, seeing our later
success, have asked us for advice that might
help them along in ventures of their own.
When we advise, we rather insist upon one
point. I may as well give it to you here :

If you've had no experience in running a
farm, take your time through your first year.
Don't plunge with your eyes shut. You'd bet-
ter find a man to work with you. He needn't
be a first-class farmer, though of course it's
all the better if he's that; but he ought to be
strong-backed, willing, tolerably good-tem-
pered, and familiar with local conditions.
Even if he isn't a genius, he'll teach you a lot
of little tricks and handy ways. He'll know
something about your neighbors, too; and

38 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

when they come at you — as some of them
surely will — trying to make a horse-trade with
you, or sell you a second-hand wagon or some
other piece of junk, your man will most likely
be able to speak a quiet word in your ear that
will save you no end of disgust with yourself.
Besides, there'll be lots and lots of times when
you'll be mighty glad to have a man around to
talk to, a man who speaks in the vernacular of
the farm. The chances are that, even with
good luck, you won't get very far with actual
farming in your first year. You'll really need
that time for doing as we did — getting over
your feeling of strangeness and making delib-
erate plans.

Laura and I sat upon the topmost rail of an
old worm fence that morning for an hour or so
and watched our tenant at his work. He was
in his cornfield. Corn had been planted two
or three weeks ago. We could see the pale
green lines of the young seedlings zigzagging
across the field. The crop was getting its first
cultivation this morning. ^The man had no
cultivator; he was working with a plow. A
dinky little plow, it was, built pretty much on
the lines of those you see in pictures of farm-
ing in the Holy Land or in barbarous Mexico.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 39

I never could find out what a plow like that
was supposed to do. It wasn't doing much of
anything just then — merely bobbing and jerk-
ing and bumping along over the stones. One
lean mule was pulling it, and the plowman
clumped and stumbled in the rear, yanking on
the lines and swearing in a hurt, despairing
sort of way. The plow-point would strike a
bowlder buried just under the surface, go slid-
ing and scraping over, then ram beneath an-
other stone and stick there, pitching the han-
dles into the air. Nine times in ten, when that
happened, the handles would poke the plow-
man viciously in his short ribs. That seemed
to make him very angry. How that does hurt I
That's what he was swearing about; but his
swearing sounded pitifully impotent, as if he
was all out of breath.

"Oh foot!" he'd gasp at the mule in an ex-
asperated treble. "You old fool you!" Then
he'd yank at the lines, pull his plow-point from
beneath the stone, and go jolting and bobbing
and bumping along till he hit the next one. It
was a continuous performance.

He'd used poor, cheap seed in planting his
field, dropping it all by hand and covering it
with a hand hoe. He'd got a very poor

40 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

"stand." On the other side of the field his
wife and three or four kids were replanting
the vacant spaces — chopping little holes with
heavy hoes, dropping a few grains in each hole,
and chopping the earth back over them. It
was very primitive, terribly laborious. Across
the width of the field we could hear the clink
and rasp of the hoes against the stones at every
slow, painful stroke. It wasn't much like the
farming we'd been used to watching up in the
prairie country. It appeared as if time had
turned back a hundred years under our eyes.

When we had looked on a while, Laura gave
a little exclamation. "Can that land ever be
really farmed?" she said.

I laughed. I've found out that there's noth-
ing better than a laugh for disguising dismay.
"Oh, yes!" I said. "We'll have to get some
of that stone picked up first. We'll need the
stone, anyway, when it comes to building."

You'll notice that I've mentioned stone sev-
eral times. That ground was certainly stony.
Exceedingly stony — pile up the adverbs to suit
yourself; you can hardly overdo it. On some
of the field the soil showed through the stones
only in spots. Truly, it was a tough-looking
piece of ground.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 41

After a year or two we discovered that it
wasn't nearly so bad as it looked. You ought
to see that same field to-day, with the straight,
smooth lines of the young corn ribboning
across it. I'm not joking. If you wanted a
stone to throw at a marauding pig or a stray
pup, you'd have to hunt around. But there's
no use talking; that cornfield did look rocky
on that first morning.

When we got down to it, the cause of the
trouble wasn't hard to find. The farm had
been homesteaded in 1847, and since that time
it had led a Jif e of vicissitudes. That's a tough
old word — vicissitudes; but it's no tougher
than the facts. Once in its history, and only
once, it had been a pretty well-kept farm; but
that was fifty years ago. Since that time it
had suffered absolute neglect, or worse. Yes,
there is something worse than downright neg-
lect. The farming of tenants like ours is a
sight worse. This farm had known years and
years of such mishandling with crude tools and
still cruder understanding.

That surface stone was an accumulation of
half a century. Year by year, little by little
it had been turned up from the subsoil. The
rains of year after year had washed the loose

42 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

soil from around it, leaving it bare. Once in
a while, when the bowlders absolutely blocked
plowing, the largest of them would be thrown
up into piles at ragged intervals through the
field ; and there the piles would lie. After that
the plowman would work around them; and
gradually a tangle of wild growths would con-
vert them into ragged, unsightly mounds. Be-
tween the mounds the shallow scratching of
the plow over the uneven surface left a multi-
tude of little runways for the waters of oc-
casional flooding rains — and there were the
three brook-channels, waiting to bear away the
tons upon tons of earth that every torrent
washed down to them. I hate to think of the
wealth of good soil that's been washed off these
fields and lost in the course of fifty years.
Since we began picking up the stone and using
it to build walls for saving the washed soil —
but let me get to that after a while, when the
time comes. I'm crowding things.

Besides the vast litter of stone, the field held
a ragged army of huge stumps — walnut and
oak. They were so big and so burly that in
half a hundred years they had only half rotted
out. Sitting on the fence that morning, we
counted forty or fifty of them standing around.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 43

With their spreading roots, every one of them
took up at least a hundred square feet of
ground — enough ground in the total to sup-
port four hundred hills of corn. There isn't
one of those stumps left to-day; we got rid of
the last of them two years ago, with dynamite.
Our tenant that year harvested his oats in part
with an old-fashioned hand "cradle," and in
part with a fussy little sickle. Stones and
stumps forhade the use of any modern imple-
ment. We're harvesting our grain on that
very same land with sure-enough farm imple-
ments. Working between whiles, in idle times,
it has cost us about five dollars an acre to bring
that land from the old state to the new; and
that cost has been paid back to us, many times
overt in increased crop yields.

I've halted my story to tell you this, because
this seemed to be as good a place as any for
saying it. On that May morning six years
ago, as we perched on the fence and watched
the circus our tenant was making for us, it
needed cheerful optimism and something of
clear vision to look across the time to come and
see a real farm where all that ugly disorder
lay. Laura is one of these natural-born op-
timists. Do you know how to recognize one

44 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

of them? Let me tell you: When they face
an apparently hopeless state of facts, they
don't put on an air of forced resignation and
begin to talk in pretty platitudes about keep-
ing up a good heart and trusting in Provi-
dence. None of that. They start to humming
a saucy tune and begin to talk about something
else.

Laura hummed a bar or two of "Rock-a-bye,
Baby," and slipped down from her seat.
"Come on," she said, "let's gp and have a look
at the place where the house will stand."

If you want to know it, that spot was a hard
looker. In the old days, long ago, this had
been the site of a big, comfortable farmhouse.
Later, as we got into our work of cleaning up,
we came upon broken heaps of brick and stone
from the ruined walls and chimneys ; but there
was nothing of that showing at a hasty glance.
For a long, long time this had been a waste
place. It was littered with the inevitable stone
piles, grown up in a wilderness so dense that a
cottontail could hardly have worried through
it. Do you remember the Kipling story of
"Letting in the Jungle"? That's what had
happened on this hillock. Wild growths in-
numerable— blackberry canes and hawthorn,

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 45

oak and elm and hickory scrub, wild plum bush
and buck-brush, grapevines and thorny smilax
- — seemed to have worked themselves into a
frenzy trying to smother out and hide every
vestige and token of the home that had once
been. To-day we have that spot looking like
a park ; but it certainly did look like Billy-be-
Blowed that morning.

"Let's see," I said: "The house measures
seventy-two feet across the south front. We'd
better mark the southeast corner first, where
your room will be."

Very gravely Laura stooped, groping in the
matted growth. She found three smooth, flat
stones and laid them up, one upon the other,
as a monument. By and by, when we built
the house, we put the southeast corner exactly
there.

"Now," I said, "that's all right. Now let's
see if I can sort of run the lines for the rest
of it."

Scrambling over stone-heaps, thrusting the
brush aside, crushing a way through, I worked
across to the western side, measuring it by
paces as well as I was able. Standing at the
extreme ends, we could barely see each other
through the tangle. I was out of breath; my

46 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

hands and face were scratched and bleeding.
I worried my way back to Laura's side.

"It's going to be a fine, large house !" I said.
"I swear, I didn't know that seventy-two feet
could take you so far from anywhere."

She laughed and began to help me pick the
thorns out of my hands. "And it's sixty-six
feet from front to back," she reminded me.
"Do you know what we're going to build our
fine, large house of?"

"Why, yes," I said. "We've talked that all
over, haven't we? Heavy stone foundations
and stone chimneys, and heavy log walls. I
haven't changed my mind about that; have
you?"

"Can you tell how much material it's going
to take?" she asked.

"Why, no," I said. "Not exactly. Pretty
soon, when we have time, we'll get somebody
to sit down with us and sort of figure it out.
Anyway, there ought to be stone enough right
here; and there ought to be logs enough up
there on the woods forty."

"We'll need a few boards, too, besides the
logs," Laura said. "And the house ought to
be shingled. And we'll need a barn, and some
chicken houses, and a well, and some fencing,

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 47

and a few odds and ends like that. Have you
any idea what it's going to cost?"

She wasn't talking like that just to show a
mean disposition. Practical people have to
talk so, every once in a while, to keep from
seeming too much like other people.

I hadn't the least notion as to what it might
cost. "Never mind," I said. "We'll start to
figuring around on that, so soon as we get set-
tled."

There the proposition stood for three
months. I don't mean to say that we didn't
do some thinking in that time. We thought
and schemed and planned, and gathered data,
and discussed ways and means every day and
every hour; but at the end of the three months
we were apparently not a step nearer to a final
settlement of the matter than on the day we
took possession of the place. What do you
think about that? If you happen to be a cau-
tious, conservative business man, instead of one
who has spent most of his life writing fiction
and making things come out right on paper
for the people in his stories, I dare say it strikes
you as utterly ridiculous. But if you were on
the place to-day and could see how it has
worked out, just exactly according to that

48 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

first fond vision, you might take a notion to
do your pooh-poohing under your breath.

If home is no great shakes without a mother,
neither is a farm without a cow. Our tenant
had no cow. He argued that a cow would be
a needless extravagance; for he and his folks
ate sorghum molasses on their bread, and they
drank creek water instead of coffee. But we'd
grown used to keeping a cow, and we wanted
a cow now. We argued with the tenant that
every farm ought to have a cow on it for dec-
orative effect, even if the farmer didn't use
milk or cream or butter. He gave his consent
that we might keep one, if we'd keep her tied
up somewhere along the creek-bottom and not
let her muss up his crops. So that afternoon
we went over to a neighboring farm and
bought a cow.

We gave thirty-five dollars for her, and she
was a good one for sure — we knew enough
about cows to be able to make sure of that.
She was a black Jersey, three years old, eligible
to registry, gentle as a plump kitten. After I
got her home, I spent the rest of the afternoon
with an ax, clearing out the undergrowth
along the creek, to make a place for pasturing
her on a tether. Bluegrass and clover stood

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 49

knee-deep on that low ground; it hadn't been
pastured at all before our coming. Within
twenty-four hours of the time we pitched our
tent we had something started — an animal
converting waste into something of value. It
didn't strike us in just that way then; we
hadn't thought so far ahead ; but there, in min-
iature, was the whole scheme of our later work
in farming. What we thought about then was
just the solid satisfaction of having a gallon
of yellow milk to drink for supper, with a
couple of gallons more set away in the spring,
making cream for breakfast. We would have
chickens, too, in a day or so; we had shipped
our flock from the old home. And so soon as
we could find a little space for it somewhere
we meant to start a bit of garden, just to keep
our hands in.

It rained that night. When it rains in the
Ozark country in the springtime, it rains.
There was no stormy wind, no uproar, but only
a' steady, sluicing downpour that set our little
corner all afloat in no time. The tent wasn't
proof against it ; it spattered through upon us
in a thick, fine mist, drenching us. We tried
making canopies of the bedclothes, sitting up
in bed and holding them over our heads ; but

50 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

that didn't work at all. Everything was
wringing wet. In the middle of the night we
turned out and ran for the empty granary.
That shelter was just a degree or two better
than none. The chinking was gone from the
rough log walls, and the roof was shingled with
homemade oak "shakes," now pretty well
rotted away. The place wasn't dry, not by a
long chalk. We sat on bundles of old corn
fodder laid upon the floor where the leaks were
least, drew our knees up under our chins and
held umbrellas over us. It wasn't the least bit
like living in town. If we had only thought
so, we'd have been very uncomfortable ; but it
didn't seem to occur to us. In her corner I
heard Laura making jokes with little Peggy.
They were laughing together and "making
believe" under their umbrella. Pretty soon
Laura began to quote verse: ". . . and the
cares that infest the day shall fold their tents
. . ." Then Mother told us some stories of
the days of her girlhood in the Cumberland
hills of Pennsylvania — tales of real hardship
bravely borne, in a time when that country, too,
was half wild. There was no going to sleep
any more that night.

It didn't matter. We didn't want to go to

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 51

sleep, anyway. We were feeling pretty rol-
licky. It isn't all of life to be under a water-
tight roof. If you happen to have the slant of
mind that lets you take things as they come,
just as if you believed they were meant to be
that way, you can have a lot of fun that other
folks miss.

Ill

You mustn't get it into your mind that our
intentions weren't serious as to actual practical
farming at Happy Hollow. There are spots
in what I've written that might lead you to
mistake us for a happy-go-lucky pair of ama-
teurs, interested mainly in doing some artistic
tricks on our land, but not deeply concerned
over the matter of turning the land into a suc-
cessful, profit-making farm. I haven't been
dwelling much upon that part of the proposi-
tion.

Our first desire was to make our ideal home
at Happy Hollow; but we were bent also upon
making a real farm. To put it bluntly, we had
to make our acres do something for us, in a
substantial way, or we couldn't afford to keep
them for very long. Running a farm that
doesn't pay, just for the fun of it, is pretty
expensive sport. If there's a balance on the
right side at the year's end, though it's only a
little, the farmer may hang on hopefully; but

52

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 53

if he has to rustle to make up a deficit every
year, though it's only a small one, he's on the
anxious seat. Running a farm is exactly like
any other business in that particular: Once it
has started downhill and has begun to eat up
more than it produces, it's time to consider. A
badly managed farm can produce a deficit with
greater ease than the average farmer himself
seems to understand.

We weren't going at our farming indifferent
to the outcome. Neither did we intend to trust
to luck. We meant to make farming pay if
we could, for we needed the money; and we
knew well enough that to get the result we
wanted we should have to practice good farm-
ing. To get results that would appear to us
satisfactory, we should have to beat the aver-
age farmer.

We had taken the precaution to study a
soil-survey map of the Fayetteville section.
The map showed that our land was naturally
of a good type — not of the highest fertility,
but a good sandy loam with a strong red clay
subsoil. The abuses of bad farming had put
it in a condition that would make it hard to
handle for a while, until it might be smoothed
out; but abuse could not altogether destroy

54 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

its usefulness. After the fashion of tenant
farmers everywhere, the tenants on this place,
in addition to slovenly methods, had exhausted
the natural supply of decaying vegetable mat-
ter in the upper soil, so that the surface would
bake and "crust" badly after rains. Besides,
this humus is, as even the kindergartens teach
nowadays, quite necessary to plant growth.

There are many ways of getting humus into
a depleted soil; but they all simmer down to
one easy rule: You must put it there. It's
like the kids' saying: "What goes up must
come down." If you waste humus by allowing
your soil to wash, by burning refuse instead of
plowing it under, or by persistent cropping,
and do nothing to renew the supply, the time
is bound to come when you won't have any
humus. That's just a little more obvious than
the well advertised fact that two and two make
four. That's practically the sum and sub-
stance of the "worn out farm" bugaboo, north
or south, east or west. This isn't the place for
an argument about the theory of it.

It would be hard to find a "worn out farm"
anywhere that couldn't be made as good or bet-
ter than it ever was by patience, perseverance
and prudence. It's not to be accomplished

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 55

overnight. There's no get-rich-quick way of
doing it. Nature will do it herself if you'll
give her time and let her alone. You may beat
Nature's time if you'll put your mind to it;
but you must follow her methods. Nature has
a patent on the manufacture of humus ; that's
why.

Well, then, we had a naturally good farm
that had become unnaturally poor. Two
things were to be done in reforming it. We
had to clean up the surface, getting rid of stone
and stumps and such-like litter, so that we
might really cultivate our fields. That would
take time and muscle. Then we had to get
humus into the soil. That would take time and
muscle — plus some thinking.

The state university at Fayetteville includes
the Arkansas Agricultural College. We went
over there and began to pester the professors.
We talked with the chemists, and the horti-
culturists, and the agronomists, and the animal
husbandry men, and every other man who
looked or acted like an expert in anything. If
we missed anybody in those interviews it was
because he saw us coming and hid. They were
certainly a fine lot of men. If the farmers of
the United States, whose work is all at sixes

56 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

and sevens, only knew of the help that awaits
them at the great schools of farming, there
would be another story to tell of husbandry.
Little by little, during that summer, our prob-
lem was simplified and the rough draft of a
definite plan was made. The tangled mess of
fractions we started with was reduced to its
simplest terms ; the rather vague confusion of
enthusiasms and questionings and uncertain-
ties we had at the beginning was boiled down
to a concrete idea.

When we talked with one of the professors,
I asked a question that had been lingering in
the back of my head since our first encounter
with our tenant and since we had first watched
him at his work:

"The man who's working that farm now says
we're bound to starve to death if we depend
upon farming it for a living. He looks pretty
lean himself. We've never tried it; but we
know that starvation would have its drawbacks.
What about that? Is there a fighting chance
of making a farm like that support a family
decently?"

He met the question gravely, as if that
proposition had long since lost any suggestion
of humor for him.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 57

"If that land of yours is properly farmed,"
he said, "it can be made to produce more
pounds of pork or beef to the acre, at less cost
per pound, than the best farm in Nebraska or
Iowa. That difference isn't all in the soil,
though. It's mostly in our longer growing
season and the greater range of crops we're
able to use in meat production. We've shown
that in our demonstration work here. That
ought to answer your question."

That did. Just to clinch the matter, he
showed us the facts and figures in the demon-
stration. There was no getting away from
them. They must have satisfied anybody.

"Well, that's all right, then," I said. "Now
I'd like to visit some of the farmers around
here who are doing that sort of thing in prac-
tice. I'd like to see how closely they're follow-
ing your methods in getting their results. If
you'll give me the names of a few of them,
we'll go to see them." And I got out my note-
book and pencil.

He hesitated for a moment. "Put up your
book," he said. "There aren't any names to
give you." If he'd been anybody but a teach-
er, I think he'd have looked discouraged; but
teachers have no business with discourage-

58 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ment. He contented himself with a mild-
sounding reflection: "We can tell what's go-
ing on in the soil, but we can't tell what's go-
ing on in the minds of the farmers. They
don't seem to be even interested in what we're
doing, to say nothing of being interested in
trying to do the same things themselves. Take
the matter of clover, for instance. Come over
and see our demonstration patches." We saw
as fine clover as a bee ever buzzed over. "Yet
you'll hear the farmers saying that clover can't
be grown here," our professor said. "I doubt
if there's one farmer in fifty, right in this dis-
trict, who's ever so much as seen our clover,
though this is a public institution, conducted
for the farmers' special benefit. It's the same
way with alfalfa, and the vetches, and soy
beans, and all the rest of that list. They grow
cowpeas a little; but there isn't one acre of
cowpeas planted where there ought to be a
thousand. The item of greatest importance in
farming these soils is altogether left out of the
farmer's practice. That's why the farms look
so lean — and a lean farm makes lean farmers."
After those talks we would go out home and
sit on the fence some more and watch our man
at his job, figuring him out. One thing was

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 59

very plain: His trouble wasn't bodily laziness.
Every day and every day lie was out in the
morning early; and aD day long; tfll darkness
stopped him, he worked at the very limit of
his strength. No man could have put in longer,
harder hours. Yet, as the season advanced, it
was plain as print that he wasn't getting any-
where; he seemed to he just standing on (Hie
spot and turning dizzily round and round. By
the middle of the summer he was buying chops
and baled hay for his mules, going in debt for
the stuff, expecting to pay the debt out of his
half of the crop. But there wasn't going to be
any crop worth mentioning, though the sea-
son had been an extra favorable one, with
plenty of rain falling at exactly the right times.
The cornstalks were dwarfed and pale, with
half their ears mere "nubbins"; the patches of
wheat looked like the patent-medicine pictures
of "before taking." The wheat harvest was in
mid-June. Those patches harvested six bush-
els to the acre, and the yield of straw was
hardly enough to stuff a bedtick. Everything
else on the place figured out in just about that
way.

The tenant sold his half of the wheat at har-
vest for seventy cents a bushel. That gave him

60 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

two dollars and ten cents an acre. Counting
only his own labor at one dollar a day, and say-
ing nothing of the "keep" of his team or the
cost of thrashing, that wheat crop spelled a
net loss. His corn gave him twelve bushels to
the acre — six bushels for his share. His own
labor on the crop at a dollar a day more than
ate it up, to say nothing of the time of his
mules and his wife and kids.

That didn't appear very satisfactory to us.
And only occasionally, as we rode around the
country that summer, did we see a farm that
was making a much better showing. Shiftless-
ness might account for some of this, but it
wasn't the only nor even the chief explanation.
Nine-tenths of the farmers working within
rifle shot of the agricultural college were doing
no thinking, making no plans for any improve-
ment in their methods. Some of them knew
much better, but they stuck to the outworn old
ways stubbornly. An ox in a treadmill is no
more a victim of routine than these workers
seemed to be.

One day I repeated to our professor-friend
the impression I'd received when I first looked
on at our own tenant's work — that I felt as

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 61

though I were looking on at something that
might have happened a century ago.

"You might as well make it forty centuries,
while you're about it," he said. "Except that
their tools are made of iron and steel, instead
of wood and stone, the work of the farmers
hasn't changed much in that time. I'm not
hopeless about it, though. We're getting hold
of the youngsters, a few at a time. They're
learning; and when they go to farming they'll
teach the others better than we can. It'll come
out all right in the end."

But we didn't want to wait for the end. So
bit by bit through that summer, as we had seen
our house plans grow through the years, a plan
was made for the farm. We have stuck to
that plan. Some of the details have changed
from time to time, as our understanding has
been broadened by experience ; but the idea re-
mains to-day as it was six years ago.

The essence of it is this: First of all, the
farm must furnish food for our own table —
not in a roundabout way, mind you, but di-
rectly. Ninety per cent, of the farmers in our
neighborhood were supplying their tables from
the "store" — buying canned stuff, buying flour
and meal and potatoes and salt meat, buying

62 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

practically everything they ate. The only way
they had of paying their store bills was by
selling their corn and wheat — which they had
grown at a considerable net loss. Only a few
of the farmers knew how to put up sugar-cured
ham and bacon. Gardening seemed to be a lost
art. Dairying on the farms, for the sake of se-
curing abundant home supplies of dairy prod-
ucts, was next to unknown. If there were hens
on a farm, the surplus eggs were exchanged
at the store for meat; or if there happened to
be a little "jag" of potatoes, this was swapped
for butter. In all our going about we didn't
run across one farm that was doing for itself,
at first hand, all it was able to do in feeding
the farmer's family.

We intended to change that. No matter
how much of our land it would take, we meant
to make the farm furnish our table directly
with milk and cream and butter, the best of
meat, poultry and eggs, fruits and garden
stuff. Our land must do that for us in the end ;
so, we argued, why not let it be done directly?
In quality and cost we could do better for our-
selves in that way than if we got our food sec-
ond-handed. The largest item in the cost of

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 63

living must be taken care of first, and in a way
that insured the greatest possible economy.

The rest of our land — if there happened to
be any left — we planned to devote to the grow-
ing of grain and forage crops to be fed to live-
stock on the farm, so that whatever we might
have to sell, in the course of time, would leave
the farm in the most highly finished form.
When you figure it all out, taking everything
into account — labor, interest and taxes, loss of
fertility, and the rest of the items — the average
farmer who raises hay and corn to sell loses
money by it. Hogs and cattle were to eat our
crops at Happy Hollow.

There was the plan we made, talking it over
between ourselves and with the college folk,
and reading everything we could find that
would help us toward our end. The further we
got into it, the clearer it became to us that we
had undertaken a life-size task. Next year
wouldn't see much of a change, nor maybe the
year after that, in our yields of field crops.
That was bound to take time. But at any rate
we'd have the farm established on the right
basis.

That first merry month of May was a
mighty moist month. Night after night it

64 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

rained and rained. After a week or so it be-
came just the least bit in the world monotonous
to sit up all night with umbrellas over our
heads to keep off the drip of the leaky roof —
and monotony, you know, grows tiresome by
and by. You can stand for a lot of disagree-
able things if there's the tang of variety in
them; but when that's gone they become flat
and stale and unprofitable. We began to
hanker for a tight roof over us and a dry bed.
We weren't yet ready to figure on the big
house; but we built the henhouse and moved
into that for a while. It was well made, roomy,
screened, and comfortable — a sight better than
any of the homes on the farms surrounding us.
We got leave of our tenant to build this house
on the knoll where our real home would stand
after a while, if we wouldn't let it lap over on
his cleared land. We had to hack out a place
for it in the heart of the thicket. I did that
myself, working with brush-hook and ax, and
then Lee and I did the carpentering. Neither
of us knew beans about framing a building, but
we got along. It beats all what you'll think
you can't do till you try. Since that time I've
done all sorts of things around the farm, from
well-digging to practicing obstetrics in the pig

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 65

lots, till now I'm ready to tackle just any kind
of a job offhand, with serene confidence in the
outcome. To my way of thinking, that's the
best thing about farm work — you've got to be
prepared for all manner of emergencies that
you can't possibly prepare for. Maybe that
sounds like an absurdity, but it isn't.

Well, anyway, we built our chicken house.
We took our time to it; but when it was fin-
ished we had a kitchen, a dining room, and a
big bedroom; and the roof didn't leak — much.
Instead of a campfire, Laura had a kitchen
range to do her cooking. We set up our tent
under a big tree for a sitting room or an over-
flow bedroom; we cleared the undergrowth
from a few square rods of ground beside the
house and put up a big swing; we cleared out
a temporary shelter for the chickens in a wild-
plum thicket near by ; we staked out our cow —
and there we were! Happy? Yes, we were
happy. We'd secured a foothold.

The jungle came right up to our doors. Sit-
ting in the house, we couldn't see anything at
all but a wall of matted growths. Inquisitive
little gray and brown birds would come flitting
out of the tangle, teeter on the long, swaying
blackberry canes, and peek in at the windows,

66 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

scolding us. They grew friendly before the
end of summer. Little green lizards would
flash about the walls or lie basking in the sun-
light on our very doorstones, cocking their im-
pudent heads slantwise and studying us with
gold-rimmed, jewel-bright eyes. We scraped
acquaintance with cottontails and pretty
striped snakes that sought the warmth of our
clearing; and once we found a fat 'possum
curled up snugly in a hen's nest. All through
the summer we rubbed elbows with wild things.
From that first lodgment we widened our
circle, clearing and cleaning up, fighting the
thickets back. It was slow work and raw work,
work that took us right back to first principles.
There are no compromises in that kind of an
undertaking. If there's a big stone to be
moved, there's nothing else to do but to move
it; if there's a tree to come down, you must
simply go to work and chop it down. I liked
that ; I haven't yet got over liking it. In a day
like ours, with life made up so largely of ex-
pedients and subterfuges and makeshifts,
there's real value in tackling a rough, primitive
task. When you've won out at it, there's no
discount on your winning. There's no least

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 67

element of luck in it; it shows for just what it
is. It's real.

Lee wasn't passionately fond of it, though.
He found it humdrum. His genius didn't run
that way. In those days all the genius he had
was spent in inventing innocent-seeming ways
of getting out of my sight in the brush, so that
he might lie down and sleep. When he was
gone, by and by I found a sleeping nest he'd
made for himself, back in a clump of scrub
oaks, screened in by thick hawthorn bush and
lined with dry sedge grass. Sleep was with
him an obsession. In the middle of a warm
day when I'd see the little beads of sweat start-
ing out on his forehead, I'd know to a moral
certainty that he'd be drowsing off presently,
no matter what he was doing. Once, when we
were setting fence posts around a little clear-
ing we wanted to use for pasture, we took turns
swinging the big post maul — one driving and
one steadying the post under the strokes.
When his turn came to drive, I give you my
word he managed to snatch a nap between
strokes. When I went to the pile for another
post, I found him stretched out on the grass
and snoring; and when we'd set the sharpened
nose of the new post and I hauled off for the

68 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

first lick, he rolled over on his back and slept
again, taking the post with him, holding it
clasped in his arms. He was right good at
that.

I had other help from time to time — some of
the "hill billies." There were lots of them liv-
ing around us then, in little huts cuddled down
in sheltering nooks on the hillsides. Do you
remember Charles Egbert Craddock's stories
of the Tennessee mountaineers? They might
have been written of our people. We got
along with ours first rate, on the whole, though
we looked at the shield always from opposite
sides. My definition of Work wasn't in their
dictionary at all. Their notion of a day's work
consisted in leaning on an ax handle and con-
versing, or squatting on a fallen log and con-
versing, or settling their shoulders comfortably
against a tree trunk and conversing. If I came
within talking distance of one of them in the
clearing, I had a conversation on my hands
forthwith. They couldn't make us out at all —
couldn't understand what folly we were up to.
Those of them who linger in the country to-day
— there are only a scattering few of them left
? — can't understand what we've been driving at
all these years, even with the visible signs be-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 69

fore their eyes. Happy Hollow is a rank vio-
lation of all native traditions.

As we worked with the clearing through the
spring and early summer, we were thinking of
the big house. I had made up my mind that it
would be built, somehow, before winter. One
fact disturbed me a little: We knew we had
stone enough at hand for every use in our build-
ing, and we had expected to find that our forty-
acre woodlot carried timber enough for logs
for the house walls. We were disappointed
there. The lumbermen had raked these woods
clean of sound timber before our day, and the
new growth wasn't yet far enough along for
use. We had to give that plan up.

As things turned out, we were better off for
that seeming disappointment. Our standing
luck had brought us a builder — a man who
sensed exactly what we were after. Shivers
run through me sometimes when I think of
what might have happened if we hadn't stum-
bled upon that chap — but, then, we did! He
not only understood; he sympathized, which
was worlds better. We had long sessions with
him, sitting in the shade of our big wild-cherry
tree, working out bills of material, discussing
details. Our man was engaged for the job be-

70 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

fore the discussions were over. It was not to
be a "contract" job, with a lump sum in pay-
ment. I was to buy all materials and pay for
all labor by the day; our builder would find the
men and engage to keep them at their work,
seeing that we got our money's worth. We
trusted him. The work went through from
first to last without a bobble.

The bills of lumber bashed me a bit, remem-
bering the cost of lumber at the retail yards at
Omaha. The log walls of the house alone,
which were to be six inches thick, would take
the equivalent of 22,500 board feet; and there
were a couple of carloads of other stuff to be
got — sills, and joists, and framing material,
and flooring and roofing, to say nothing of
shingles ; and our idea called for a multitude of
oak and cypress doors and windows which
would have to be built to our order. If we
had to buy all this from the trade, even at the
lower retail prices that ruled in Arkansas, our
money wouldn't see us through. We had to
find some other way.

I went into the pine country in the lower
part of the state, two hundred miles below Fay-
etteville, and began rooting around through
the woods, scraping acquaintance with the saw-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 71

mill men. I found lots of little mills scattered
around — free lances in the great lumber world.
The men who owned these mills made a living
by buying a scrap of timber too small for the
big fellows to bother with and selling their cut
to the larger companies. It was precarious
business, for they had to squeak through on the
narrowest margin of profit that would let them
keep a-going.

With one of these men I spent some time,
camping with him, figuring with him. He
agreed to cut my logs and timbers and rough
lumber at the price the big mills were paying
him — nine dollars a thousand feet, delivered at
the nearest railway station. A small free-
lance planing mill at that station would sur-
face my stuff and load it on cars for one dollar
a thousand feet. Pine lumber could be shipped
from there to Fayetteville on a fifteen-cent
rate. The surfacing, by reducing weight,
would save more than its cost in freight. I
would get what the lumbermen called "mill-
run" stuff, taking it just as it came from
the saw, with the culls and "shakes" thrown
out. That is to say, I would get about forty
per cent, of what the trade knows as Number

72 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

One, and sixty per cent, of Number Two.
That's what I did get.

I made my contract for everything our
building would require that that mill could cut
— three carloads. Those three carloads cost
me $588.71; the freight charges to Fayette-
ville came to $235.35. The funny little mill
was tearing and snorting away at top speed on
my stuff before I started back home. I had my
"feet wet" now, for surel

IV

WE kept Christmas in our blessed farmhouse
at Happy Hollow, before our great stone fire-
place that was banked high, from hearth to
throat, with a roaring blaze of huge logs from
our woodlot. It needed the strength of two
men to carry in the backlog. I had helped to
cut those logs, working with crosscut saw and
heavy ax in the woods; I had helped to load
them on the woodrack and haul them down to
the house over the rough, stony road. Every
stone in the massive front of the fireplace Laura
herself had found for the hands of the builders,
tramping over the hills, choosing them care-
fully. The finished work was very beautiful
in its rich, soft grays and browns and reds and
in its appearance of fine, solid strength.
What's more, it was ours, achieved at last after
eighteen years of waiting. When I'm an old
man, by and by, and sit basking in the warmth
of that hearth, brooding, I'll remember the
fierce exultation that thrilled me as I knelt and

73

74 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

kindled that first fire on that Christmas eve,
watching the little golden flames leap into life
and flicker and crackle and rise at last, roaring
up the chimney. It was the lighting of our
altar fire. We loved it.

After that, when little Peggy had been
tucked in bed, my boy and I brought in her
Christmas tree and set it up — a shapely cedar
we had found near the house. Its slender point
stretched up to brush the rafters of the high
arched roof. We hung it thick with tinsel
strings, and silver and gold stars, and gay
cornucopias, and pink-sugared homemade
cookies, and all manner of little gifts. When
that was done, we sat before our fire and were
content.

The house was an accomplished fact. It was
the desire of a lifetime realized. It seemed to
have been wrought as by a sort of magic. In
two months from the time the builders began
their work, the walls had risen and the roof had
covered them. There had been not a hair's
breadth of change from our plans — no com-
promise for depressing economy's sake. Back
of the house, at the foot of our knoll, stood a
huge barn, sheltering our farm horses and our
half dozen cows ; and the chickens and the pigs

FOR THE CHRISTMAS FIRE

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 75

were comfortably housed. A storm blew that
night, with a driving snow that drifted and
curled about the house. The ground was white
in the morning when we looked out of the win-
dows across the swelling hills. Oh, it was a
great Christmas!

Our builder had done his work with rare
judgment and skill, as no man of hidebound
understanding could have done it. It was not
a case for following traditions of the trade;
our plans violated more traditions than they
kept. A man without understanding might
easily have ruined us in trying to carry them
out ; but as it was we had kept within our limit
of cost, and we had got exactly what we
wanted.

The logs for the walls had been squared on
the saw to a uniform size of six by eight inches.
Three sides had been surfaced on the planer,
leaving the fourth side rough. With simple
framing and strong mortising at the corners
the logs were laid in tiers with "broken joints,"
each tier being tied to the one below it with
twelve-inch spikes driven through. The chinks
between the logs were filled with cement, so
that when the walls were completed they were
as one solid piece. Two huge stone chimneys

76 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

rose above the wide-eaved roof, providing an
open fire in every room in the house but the
kitchen. After more than five years there is
nothing we would change.

Don't misunderstand. The house wasn't
finished in all its detail. It isn't yet finished.
Even with unlimited money we shouldn't have
tried to hurry full final accomplishment. Pur-
posely many things had been left for the slow,
deliberate, thoughtful after-touch. Walls and
ceilings were to be done in solid paneling of
native hardwoods by and by, when we had
time to study out the effects we wanted — and
money to pay for the work. There must be no
incautious haste in determining the lines of
arch and nook and corner. Wide porches were
to be added, too, and a pergola was to be built
at the south. The lines of these must fit har-
moniously with the lines of roof and wall.
Driveways and walls were to be laid out, flow-
ing into harmony with the house and its sur-
roundings. There was no end of things to be
done in the fullness of time. A home must
grow and ripen. No amount of money,
though it be spent with any degree of mad im-
patience, will do the work of time in that
growth and ripening. We knew that. Our

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 77

children's children will find their part of the
work awaiting them in giving beauty to Happy
Hollow. That's our idea of the making of a
home. We had made no more than a begin-
ning; but we were content, for the beginning
was flawless.

Labor cost in this building had been just
next to nothing. To write the figures seems
to be making a jest of the matter — as if the
job must have been "scamped" and crude. It
wasn't. Our master builder drew three dol-
lars a day — and he worked as one of the car-
penters. The other woodworkers were paid
two dollars a day, and the mason four dol-
lars. Sometimes, when he could use them
to advantage, the boss would have half a
dozen men working with him; at other times
he would use only two or three. He knew
how to keep his crew keyed up and every man
interested in what he was doing. There wasn't
a "grouch" amongst them. Most likely Laura
was responsible for the unvarying good tem-
per of the men; she cooked for them while they
were at work. You know how that helps.

I doubt if our performance might be dupli-
cated, in the matter of low cost, in any other
state on the map ; but the long and short of it

78 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

is that materials and labor for our building
cost us all told only about $2,000. For this
money we had our big house, our huge barn, a
three-room cottage for a farm hand, a log
storeroom and laundry building, our poultry
houses, and some odds and ends of sheds and
shelters. We certainly got our money's worth.
But for our defiance of some of the traditions,
the cost might have been three or four times as
great.

Plans for our first season of real farm work
went ahead through that winter with no end of
eagerness but with a finger always on the throt-
tle to check wasteful expenditure. The more
we studied our proposition the more clearly we
understood that we must go slow for a year or
two in building up our fields and getting them
fit for real farming. We had no money to
waste through letting our eagerness run away
with our prudence.

Looking over the accounts of that first year,
I can't put my finger on an item of real loss.
Had we been experienced farmers of the old
school instead of book farmers of the new or-
der, we'd have spent our money differently, to
be sure; but as I see it we shouldn't have got
so satisfactory a return upon our outlay. It's

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 79

the disposition of the old fanner to spend no
money in farming unless he thinks he'll get
it back again out of the current year's harvest.
That's what you might call slot-machine farm-
ing. A plan of operations that postpones
profits for two or three years, even though it
makes profits more certain in the end, isn't
popular with the old-time practical farmer.
But that was our plan.

Our idea, carefully worked out, was that
every dollar spent in cleaning up and smooth-
ing out our land would not only guarantee bet-
ter crop yields in the years to come, but would
give us our money back through increased
value of the land itself. The cost of hauling
a load of stone from the fields and building it
into a retaining wall to check the washing of
our soil we looked upon as a part of our perma-
nent investment. Besides, we argued, the effi-
ciency of labor applied to crop-growing on the
cleaned fields must be greatly increased. We
should have the greater efficiency of modern
implements, which couldn't be used on those
stone patches ; and we must inevitably get bet-
ter harvests. It wasn't a one-year game we
were playing; but we couldn't see how we could
possibly lose.

80 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Judge whether we judged well. Fanned in
the old way through the old years, the value
of this land — its selling value, I mean — had
stood stock still for a generation; its intrinsic
value — its fertility value — was growing stead-
ily less and less. If the old conditions had per-
sisted, the land wouldn't sell for a nickel more
to-day than we gave for it six years ago. Han-
dled according to our early plan, the market
value has jumped from $20 to $100 an acre.
If we wanted to, we could sell out to-day for
$100 an acre, plus the cost of our buildings.
The increase in intrinsic or cropping value of
the land has been still more marked; our crop
yields now are half a dozen times what they
used to be at their best — and the limit of that
increase isn't yet in sight. Of course crop-
ping methods have had a great deal to do with
making the increased yields; but the point is
that the better methods wouldn't have been
possible on the old fields.

You can see that it's pretty hard to separate
the money we've spent into operating expenses
proper and permanent investment. I doubt if
that's possible on any farm; the two are so
closely interwoven that they react one upon
the other in a hundred ways. No matter about

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 81

the bookkeeping part just now. However the
charges may be sifted out, you will see that
our dollars have come back to us, over and
over again. It's just as plain that some of our
dollars had to be put in with no expectation of
getting them back again from this year's har-
vest, or next year's, or the next. All we could
feel sure of was that they would come back to
us in good time, many fold.

This sounds a little bit over-sure, maybe, as
if we claimed to have made our plan with a
sort of infallible foresight, free of all error.
Don't take it that way. Our work has been
marked by nothing so much as freedom of
change in details. We've changed in matters
of detail as often as we've found we were mis-
taken— and that's been very often. It's only
our central idea that has persisted, unchanged.
That's not subject to change, because it's right.

Through the first winter, whenever it was
possible, we were cutting brush and cleaning
out fence-rows and corners, to square up our
fields. When we got the farm the fields were
shapeless; wherever one of them edged up to
a rough place, there it would stop. The farm
was gashed and torn with unsightly hollows
and steep banks and rain-washed gullies; the

82 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

old rail fences yawed and zigzagged drunk-
enly back and forth. We tore out all the
fences at the beginning of our work, to
straighten their lines; and we changed from
rails to woven wire in rebuilding. It was a
rough, heavy task, that first one. Between
whiles, for variety, we hauled stone.

Hundreds and hundreds of wagonloads of
stone went off those fields in their first clean-
ing. Just for the fun of it, I'd like to know
how many tons of stone we strained and
grunted over in the course of those months.
I felt as if it must be running well up into the
millions. It was the first time in my life that
I'd pitted myself against a job that called for
sheer brute strength and that seemed to have
no end. Week after week I couldn't see that
we were making any headway at all; I was
almost ready to believe that stone breeds and
multiplies by some uncanny process. We
strained and grunted and hauled, and still there
was stone. It didn't strike me so just then,
but that was mighty good discipline. It begat
patience, and it begat thoroughness. Once
we'd started on the job, we doggedly wouldn't
quit till it was finished.

The hardest part of it all was in finding help.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 83

I'd been used to thinking of the farmers'
plaints about hired men as just one of the
standing jokes — like the mother-in-law joke.
Let me tell you, it's no joke at all. The only
real loss we've had at Happy Hollow is repre-
sented by the stubs of my checks that went to
pay the wages of lazy dawdlers who palmed
themselves off on me as farm hands. Lee, my
Kansas brunette, had petered out so soon as
the real work began. After that I tried out a
string of others; and one after another they
too petered out. There was nothing in par-
ticular the matter with any one of them ; there
was just a general indisposition to work. I've
never been a fussy boss; and I was offering
better wages than any other farmer in the
neighborhood was paying; but I drew blank
after blank. The idea of putting in a full six-
day week at farm work, summer and winter,
was shockingly new. Generations of practice
here in the hills had bred a habit of "laying
by" a little jag of a crop in midsummer and
taking the rest of the year easy, with an odd
job now and then under pressure of extreme
need. My notions were to my "hands" only
vanity and vexation. They couldn't see the
sense of working all the time when three days'

84 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

pay a week would keep them in cornmeal and
salt meat ; so three days' work a week was about
all I got out of the best of them — until Sam
came along, by and by.

Sam didn't belong in this part of the coun-
try. He just "blew in" from the hills of South-
ern Missouri, where farming conditions are
pretty much like the conditions of the Fay-
etteville section. He was used to rough land,
used to stone and timber, and used to handling
the tools that would bring order out of such
chaos as our farm was in. He wasn't of native
stock; he was an Irishman with a fine set of
arms and legs and shoulders — a big six-footer
with a back of oak, an ineradicable grin, and a
fairly unhuman passion for work. He's been
with me a little more than five years now.
My hat's off to him. He's been a sort of god-
father to Happy Hollow.

With Sam's coming, the problem of our
stony fields was solved. Sam looked at them,
and grinned ; he listened to my talk about what
I wanted to do with them, and grinned; and
then he went to work, grinning. While he
worked, he, too, did some talking. I liked the
temper of his talk. He wasn't figuring on lazy
makeshifts ; he wasn't arguing that all this ex-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 85

tra labor would cost more than the land was
worth; he wasn't talking of the shiftless ex-
pedients of farming from year to year. He
talked of next year, and the year after next,
and the long future. He saw exactly what I
was trying to get at. I think he was honestly
pleased at having a job that gave him oppor-
tunity according to his strength. He flew at
the stone-moving as if he'd found at last the
very sort of task he'd been looking for all his
life.

Before he came, we had been putting stone
into rough walls along the creek bottoms, plan-
ning to save the soil that would be washed
down from the fields. My theory of it was all
right, though I'd had nothing in the way of
practice for a guide. Some of my results made
Sam's grin broaden into a laugh. He attacked
one of my walls and began to tear it out,
though it had a good fifty wagonloads of stone
in it.

"We'll move this down to the edge of the
creek, instead of putting it here at the foot of
the bank," he said. "If we leave it here, all
that overflowed creek bottom is waste. Next
winter I can clear the brush off the bottom
and move the stone off the bank; and then if I

86 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

keep turning the edge of the bank down when
I plow, pretty soon we'll have it smoothed off.
In a few years you'll have three extra acres
of the best land on the farm on that bottom,
instead of a piece of swamp."

We have those three extra acres planted to
corn this year. Last year we made a bumper
crop of millet on them. They're rich as cream
— they are the cream skimmed off the higher
lands by the beating rains. The added value
of those three acres and of the crops we've
taken from them has just about repaid the cost
of all the rock-hauling Sam has done in the
five years of his service.

We planned things in that first winter that
must take another five years to accomplish.
If we ever get to a point where there's no new
conquest to be undertaken, I think Sam will
quit me. There lies his genius. His grin
would fade forever and he'd settle into con-
firmed melancholy if he had to work on the
place after it's all smoothed out.

When the early spring came, I bought plows
to match my man's disposition; and for the
first time since the Year One these fields had
a real breaking. The tenant farmers had been
only fooling with plowing, drawing trifling

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 87

little furrows that didn't go four inches deep
at the best. That was the rule hereabouts ; but
it was all wrong. It did no more than loosen
a thin sheet of soil over a packed "plow pan"
of clay, leaving it as if by deliberate design to
be washed and guttered by the summer rains.
If it didn't happen to wash away, it was sure
to dry out entirely between rains, for no water
could enter the compacted subsoil. With our
big plows and strong mules we tore into the
tough "pan," ripping it up, mixing it with the
surface soil. It was a rough looking job when
it was finished ; it didn't promise much for the
year's cropping. With the stiff clay, more
stone came up; in spots, after the first rain,
the fields appeared just about as stone-littered
as ever. There was another winter's job of
hauling ahead of us. We didn't care about
that, though; we had given the land its first
touch of real high life. I meant to be satisfied
if we harvested anything at all that year.

While our plowing was going on, some of
the neighbors got into the way of dropping
their own work to look on at ours. They had
thought us crazy before; now they were sure
of it. If our building had put a crimp in the
rules, our farming burst them wide asunder.

88 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

In all good faith, with the very best of neigh-
borly intentions, they cautioned us that we
were not only inviting disaster but making it
certain. It did no good to retort that slow
starvation by the accepted neighborhood meth-
ods of farming smacked strongly of disaster.
It's a thankless task to try to talk any man out
of devotion to ancient usages when you have
no proofs to show on the side of your innova-
tions. We had nothing to show as yet more
convincing than a statement of what our work
had cost. There was nothing for us to do but
persist. We weren't sure enough of that year's
harvest to venture any daring prophecies. It's
disconcerting to make prophecies which don't
fulfill themselves ; it's better to say nothing and
saw wood.

If our work in the fields was to be a waiting
game, there seemed to be no good reason why
we should not get quicker results with our
kitchen garden. As I have told you, we meant
to make the garden count for all that was pos-
sible in supplying our table from the first, so
that needless outlays might be cut off.

Special care was given to the preparation of
the garden acre near the house. Stone was
cleared away early in the fall, and the land

GOOD FOR GENERATIONS TO COME

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 89

was broken and harrowed thoroughly, again
and again. Around the old pole stable our
tenant had used lay a waste of old manure,
the accumulation of years. We moved this
down and spread it over our patch, turning it
under. In late winter it got another breaking,
and still another before the first planting. We
had a strong, deep seedbed, as well prepared
as one season's handling could make it.

We began our gardening early and kept at
it through the summer. We were on familiar
ground there. For years before we came to
the farm we had done successful gardening for
our own needs. We were just as successful
on the farm. There was nothing unique in
our methods or our results ; but we were doing
something that none of our neighbors was at-
tempting. The gardens around us, on the
farms that had any at all, held nothing more
than a few poor potatoes and maybe a weed-
grown patch of turnips. Most of these folks
got their "greens" from the fields and waste
places — "poke" sprouts, sour dock, lambs-
quarters and dandelions. That's not bad eat-
ing, if you want to know it ; but to depend upon
that supply isn't exactly thrifty farming. Our
garden gave us a great variety, with the choic-

90 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

est of everything. We weren't trying to do
market gardening; we were aiming only at
supplying our own needs. We've stuck to
that, and we shall keep it up. It pays. No
equal acreage on the farm pays nearly so well,
judged by its effect upon our household econ-
omy.

We set out asparagus beds that spring. We
planted a vineyard of six dozen vines and a
dozen varieties that were selected to give us
choice grapes fresh for our table over the long-
est possible season, from early summer to late
fall. We planted an orchard on the same plan
— a hundred and fifty trees of plum, peach,
apple, apricot, cherry and pear — thirty or
forty varieties. None of that was done for
commercial purposes; it was all planned for
the home. In time, of course, we would have
a surplus to be sold; but that would be inci-
dental. Our own dining-room and pantry and
storeroom made the center of this scheme.

The townsman's habit of taking care of his
trees and his garden patch clung to us. On our
acre of orchard at Omaha I had nursed my
trees like so many babies, feeding, trimming,
cultivating, keeping every one like a show-
piece. The trees on the farm were handled in

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 91

the same way. The grapevines were formed
on an intensive renewal system. Part of this
work was done for the sake of keeping up ap-
pearances around the house, and part for the
better returns we were sure to get by and by
in fruiting. Nothing need be said in defense
of that extra care. I speak of it only because
it was a radical departure from the way such
things had been done on neighboring farms.
Farmers are proverbially careless of their or-
chards everywhere. That's a part of the
short-sighted habit of slighting everything that
does not promise quick returns. Here in the
hills if a farmer set out a few trees for home
fruit they would be left to shift for themselves
afterward — he would forget all about them for
three or four or five years, until it was time
for them to come into bearing. There's been a
mintful of money lost on the farms by that
thriftless trick. A follow-up system is just as
necessary in bringing a farm to the profit-
making point as in any other business. Lack-
ing such a system, a farm springs a hundred
leaks. The hardest work I've had to do with
my farm helpers has been in persuading them
of the wisdom of keeping things up. With
neglected holes at the bottom, there's just no

92 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

chance at all for an overflow of abundance at
the top. If those wastes would be stopped,
you'd hear far less sorrowful complaining that
farming doesn't afford a decent living.

Our poultry flock took a jump that spring
from the townsman's couple of dozen to the
farmer's couple of hundred. I shall have more
to say about the hen proposition after a while.
Also we were laying the foundation for high-
grade dairy and pig herds.

We had made one of our mistakes with our
cows. In our first summer, seeing acres and
acres of luxuriant wild grass going to waste
on the uncleared lands among the rocks and
the scrub growths, I had bought a dozen cows
and a cream separator. The cows were good
animals; each of them passed a satisfactory
test at our university station. The station was
taking cream from farmers at a very satisfac-
tory price for butterf at* There was potential
profit in our herd; indeed, for several months
they gave a net profit of twenty-five to thirty
dollars a month over everything, besides fur-
nishing our table abundantly with milk and
cream and butter and an unlimited quantity of
skim milk for the young pigs.

Before the end of the summer, though, we

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 93

ran against a snag. Our wild pasture had
been overstocked. The native grasses of the
Ozark country are not to be depended upon
throughout a season; they are sensitive to oc-
casional drought, and they are not of a high
type at best. In the late summer we were up
against the necessity of buying feed or cutting
down the herd. We cut it down, keeping the
best animals as a basis for later rebuilding.
From the university stables I had bought a
fine blooded Jersey bull calf — he's "Billy For-
tune" in the herd books. We kept him, of
course. He's a lordly fellow now, with a fine
string of youngsters to his credit on our own
farm and over the neighborhood. In the end
we were far better off for that trimming back.
The mistake had entailed no loss. Indeed, we
were left with a snug little balance on the other
side. Just the same, we had misjudged con-
ditions. We had discovered that dairying on
any considerable scale must be a part of the
waiting game. That was a part of the price
we had paid for taking a run-down instead of
a "going" farm. We should have to let our
herds grow slowly, watching carefully, letting
their growth keep pace with the increasing
ability of the farm to feed them. We entered

94 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

our second summer with only half as many
cows as we had bought to start with. That
may look like a setback ; but it didn't strike us
so after we had thought it over. We had
gained some invaluable experience, and we had
made a little money at the same time. That
wasn't so bad.

V

As our first summer of real farming slipped
by, we had plenty of proofs that ours was not
bonanza farming. If you were to judge our
enterprise for the first two or three years by
the figures on our books representing income
in dollars and cents, you would be bound to
call it a conspicuous failure. A skilled book-
keeper with his conventional notions could
have argued us inevitably into the poorhouse,
without any trouble at all. He could have
proved that, the way we were going, with our
limited resources, we couldn't possibly escape
catastrophe.

I used to stand rather in awe of bookkeepers
and their nice, methodical, exact work; but
since we've been at Happy Hollow I've re-
joiced a thousand times that we hadn't ac-
quired the bookkeeper's habits of mind. A
retired bookkeeper taking a farm like Happy
Hollow and carrying his professional habits
with him must be a desperately unhappy man.

95

96 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Who was the man that said figures can't
lie? They're the most shameless of liars. Lots
of other folks have found that out. You can
prove any proposition you are bent on proving,
if you'll only devise a complicated hard-and-
fast system of accounting.

Here's one point the bookkeepers always
overlook in judging a venture like ours: The
operation of a farm home is radically different
from the mere cropping of a tract of land for
direct profit. If we had bought Happy Hol-
low as an investment pure and simple, intend-
ing to run it purely and simply as a business
that must pay profits in dollars and cents re-
alized from the sale of products, then the book-
keeper's arguments would be sensible enough
and worth heeding. The non-resident farm
owner who is cultivating his land by the tenant
system or with hired labor, growing the staples
for market, is in that case. He may consider
his land as he would consider a bond or a bunch
of bank stock. At the year's end his book-
keeper can show him to a nicety whether he has
had a satisfactory return upon his investment.
Whether it will pay to keep on at the business
is a question to be settled by plain, cold busi-
ness judgment.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 97

That's all right. But when you begin to
consider the farm home, with the farmer and
his family living on the land, then you bring in
a hundred and one new and elusive factors that
simply defy any inflexible system of business
reckoning. I'm not talking about purely sen-
timental factors, but of those things that will
appeal to the most intensely practical of men
who hasn't a fiber of sentiment in his make-up.

During our first summer of actual farm
work, we couldn't even guess how long it would
take us to get the place built up to the point of
yielding satisfactory field crops; but in the
meantime we were continually taking stock of
conditions, making curious appraisal of our
life.

Naturally enough, we made our first com-
parisons with the life we had known before we
took to farming. Leaving out enthusiasms
and keeping strictly to those items which may
be written with the dollar mark, this is the way
the matter stood in our understanding:

The money we were spending on the land in
clearing, stone hauling, wall building and in
such-like ways, and in the first deep, thorough
breaking of our cultivated fields, was money
invested; the increase in value that was surely

98 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

following these improvements gave a greater
profit than we could possibly have secured on
any other sound investment. Every dollar we
put in was doubling itself. We had nothing
to worry about on that score. Our one care
was to plan this field work so as to have it in-
telligent, and so as to keep within the sum we
felt free to use in that way. I've touched upon
this point before; I refer to it again because
of its bearing upon our summing up of things
at this time. Our field work in the first year
or two wasn't chargeable to expense, as on a
"going" farm. The crops we got in those
years would suffice to feed our work team at
least ; so we would "break even" there. I think
we could have induced even the fussiest of
bookkeepers to see the matter so.

Our table living was costing us nothing at
all, even at that stage. That's literally true.
In town our outlay for groceries and meat had
been about $600 a year, and we were getting
no more than any townsman gets for his money
— stuff that at its best was only fair-to-mid-
dling. At the end of our first year of work,
when Laura balanced her housekeeping ac-
counts, she dared me to guess what we had
spent in that year for table supplies. It

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 99

amounted to only a few cents over $100. That
had gone for coffee and sugar and flour and
the few things we couldn't grow for ourselves.
Surplus sold from garden and dairy and poul-
try yards, now a little and then a little, had
more than offset the sum spent for these sta-
ples. The difference paid the cost of our
gardening. Poultry and cows were paying for
their "keep" in the increase of flocks and herd
and in the value of manure that went out, care-
fully husbanded, to our fields and orchard and
garden. The supplies that went upon our
table from all these sources stood as profit
earned and paid. I'm not talking figuratively
when I say that our farm was already saving
us $600 a year as compared with the cost of
living as we'd known it in town. We'll get to
a closer analysis of some of these figures by
and by; I'm just lumping them now.

To put it another way, we had to use in that
year only $100 in money in the business of
feeding the family, to effect exchanges that
couldn't conveniently be made directly. That
narrow margin deceived some of our friends
who weren't used to our way of doing things.
I had done some talking in the earlier months
One of the bankers of Fayetteville, with whom

100 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

of our work, joked me about the result of the
year's work.

"It hasn't come out very well, has it?" he
asked.

"The best ever!" I said. "I'm perfectly
satisfied." He thought I was doing some jok-
ing in my turn.

"You didn't sell anything this fall off the
farm," he said. You see, he'd grown accus-
tomed to the practice of the farmers of selling
a crop of grain at harvest and using the pro-
ceeds to pay store bills that were run up dur-
ing the year.

"No," I tried to explain, "we're not selling
anything, except some surplus butter and eggs
once in a while. What the farm produces
we're eating ourselves."

He laughed at that, as a banker may laugh
at a customer's not-too-humorous jest. "Hom-
iny and hay, eh?" he returned. "How do your
folks like it?"

"We never lived so well in our lives before,"
I said. I went into detail a little then, trying
to make our theory plain. "If we're not selling
much," I contended, "you'll notice we're not
buying much either. We're making our farm
do for us what the grocer and the commission

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 101

men and the traders do for most of these farm-
ers, and so we're saving the profits and rake-
offs on a lot of exchanges back and forth, don't
you see?"

He saw but dimly. "Oh!" he said. "You're
not intending to do commercial farming,
then?" Fixed habit of mind is hard to break.
I've talked with other men, farmers included,
who held the same opinion of our enterprise.
One business man in town solemnly argued
that we couldn't possibly be making a success,
for the reason that the farm wasn't showing
any "turn-over." To his way of thinking, the
couple of hundred dollars' worth of stuff we'd
sold represented all the business we had done
for the year. Even if that was all profit, he
contended, it was a starvation income.

"Starvation be jiggered!" I said. "We're
living on the fat of the land. Here's the point :
Our 'turn-overs' are being made inside our own
farm fence lines, instead of in town. We're
turning our grain and hay and forage into milk
and eggs and butter and meat, instead of sell-
ing them and buying milk and eggs and butter
and meat. You simply can't beat our system.
It would have to come to the same thing in the
end, wouldn't it — just feeding the family?

102 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

And this way we keep all the profits for our-
selves."

He shook his head over it. He's still shak-
ing his head over it. With all his business
training and sagacity — and he's a successful
business man — he couldn't make out that we
were doing anything better than silly trifling.
The small amount of money we had changed
from hand to hand, which to our understand-
ing was the greatest strength of our proposi-
tion at that stage, to his understanding stood
for a vital weakness, a weakness that must
bring us to disaster pretty soon.

"You aren't making trade!" That's the
fault folks found with our scheme. Neverthe-
less, our system was our salvation in our first
years. We must have "bumped the bumps"
if we had taken the way our friends urged
upon us. That's the simple truth.

When I say that our table living cost us
nothing, to be sure I haven't set a price upon
the time we spent on the garden and the chick-
ens and the rest. I don't see how that can be
done, in making a comparison with our town
conditions. We spent no more time here in
the new ways than we had spent in town at our
housekeeping and at keeping things up around

EVERYTHING FOB THE TABLE AT BARE COST OP PRODUCTION

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 103

our home. We had changed the uses we were
making of our hours, that was all; we had just
about as much leisure as ever,, Besides, the
abundance of everything, and all of first qual-
ity, was to be considered.

Then there was the matter of rent. I don't
quite know how to get at that, so as to satisfy
everybody. A house like our farmhouse
couldn't have been hired in town — one afford-
ing such ample room, I mean — for less than
$100 a month. We had never paid any such
rent; but there's the fact. We were living as
we had always wanted to live, though we hadn't
been able to afford it. If I credit Happy Hol-
low Farm with rent at $100 a month, that
would repay the whole cost of the house in
sixteen or seventeen months — which doesn't
seem exactly reasonable, does it? I'll tell you
what I'll do with you: I'll call it $50 a month
and let it go at that. So there's another $600
a year to the good.

Then there's the cost of fuel. To heat our
house in town used to set us back $150 to $200
every winter, the cost varying according to
weather conditions and fluctuations in the price
of coal. At Happy Hollow we've burned ten
cords of wood a year in heating and cooking.

104 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

It has cost us about eighty-five cents a cord to
cut this wood and bring it down to the house
from the hill — $8.50 a year. In getting out
this supply we're cleaning up the woodlot, tak-
ing out the dead-and-down, the broken and the
too-old trees, leaving the young and thrifty
timber to grow. That is increasing the value
of our woods many times more than the work
is costing; but let that go. Say we're saving
$150 a year on fuel. That makes a total sav-
ing on the three principal cost-of -living items
of $1,350 a year. Mind you, we were living
better than we had ever been able to live on
that amount of outlay.

And then there's the matter of health. We
had always been tolerably sane livers, and none
of the family had any leaning toward invalid-
ism ; but in town I was always paying doctors
for something or other. I don't remember
what those bills amounted to in the course of a
year, but they came in as regularly as the gro-
cery bills. As nearly as I can figure it, $100
a year would be about right. That was cut off
short when we came to the farm. What they
say about fresh air, fresh food, vigorous exer-
cise and sound sleep must be true. For two
solid years there wasn't a doctor on the place,

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 105

except once when my boy was bucked off a
horse and had his collar bone broken. The
gain in health can't be measured ; but the sav-
ing can. We'll leave that out of the reckoning,
though; you may think I'm bearing down too
strong on this part of the matter, trying to
make out a case.

Seriously, can you find any flaw in that way
of looking at things? I can't. Maybe it
wouldn't altogether suit our friend the book-
keeper; he might want to apportion some of
the items differently, so as to make them gee
with his own theories of accounting; but he
couldn't escape the conclusion that even at the
beginning we were on a secure footing.

The charges to be made against the enter-
prise— interest on investment, taxes, insurance
and depreciation of machinery and equipment
— amounted to $400. In that year we paid
$500 for labor on the land. Those two items
were counterbalanced by increased value. So
it boils down to this : Life at Happy Hollow
was saving us at least $100 a month the year
round as compared with life in town. I
couldn't get away from that if I wanted to.
And we were living in a dream come true I
Don't overlook that.

106 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Our field crops in that first year didn't turn
out so badly. Our college friend had said that
good farming ought to let us get seventy-five
bushels of corn to the acre on our land, once
the farm had been brought up to normal. Of
course we hadn't expected to do so well as that
in the first season. Our harvest gave us
twenty-six bushels to the acre. As that was
more than twice as much as our tenant farmer
had been getting, we managed to feel pretty
well satisfied. The average corn crop in all
the states over a ten-year period was just
twenty-six bushels to the acre. We had
nothing to complain about. We had saved
a pretty fair crop of hay — cowpeas, millet,
sorghum and oats cut "in the milk"; and
there was a lot of corn fodder. Our new clear-
ings had brought into use several acres of wild
grass pasture. That wasn't nearly so good as
the pastures we could make by and by; but it
had carried our few cows over seven or eight
months with only a little extra feeding.

When cold weather came on, we put up our
next year's supply of sugar-cured hams and
bacon. That was new work, but we did every
lick of it ourselves, according to directions
given us at the university experiment station.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 107

Five pigs of two hundred and fifty pounds
weight were put through their paces; twenty
plump hams and shoulders and twenty strips
of brown sweet bacon hung in our smokehouse,
in the smudge of green hickory chips. Don't
you like that smell? I used to go out in the
chill of the early mornings and hang around
the smokehouse for a while and sniff, to
get up an appetite for breakfast. There
were big cans of sweet lard in the store-
room, too. For a while, at butchering
time, we lived, let me tell you! Rich spare-
ribs — no butcher shop ribs, with a thin shred
of meat discovered now and then between the
bones, if you're lucky; but ribs with real meat
on them, coming to the table crisped and odor-
ous, so that for all one's town-learned manners
he couldn't to save his life keep from oiling his
face from' ear to ear. And home-made sau-
sage, seasoned with sweet herbs gathered fresh
from the garden and dried between clean
cloths! Honestly, I'm sorry for the man who
hasn't experienced real farm sausage. Ple-
beian? Is that what you think of it? Indeed
and it's not! I wish you might sit down just
once to a Happy Hollow breakfast in Janu-
ary, when a hot platter comes to the table filled

108 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

with thin sausage cakes, cooked to the perfec-
tion of a deep brown turn, and a dish of golden
corn-cakes to dip the brown gravy over. Ple-
beian? Fudge! Why, the great gods in their
most divine longings couldn't beat it. There
ought to be a poetry of sausage; plain prose
has such pesky limitations.

Not a little of the sub-conscious satisfaction
of eating such food lies in your having been
intimately acquainted with the pig that pro-
duced it. Butcher shop eating, the best you
can make of it, is a sort of catch-as-catch-can
business. It's a lot better if you have it in the
back of your head that your pig was brought
up as a gentleman — a very Chesterfield of the
pig family, fed on clean pastures and skim
milk and sweet grain. There's a Fifth Avenue
as well as a slumdom in pig life. If you're
running the pig nursery yourself, you can be
comfortably sure that you're not eating a Billy
the Dip. You'd rather like that, wouldn't
you?

We weren't living on pig alone. There were
the chickens, too. We had fancied we knew
something about chicken-eating before we came
to Happy Hollow. We had eaten chicken
clear across the continent, from Boston to San

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 109

Francisco, and from Canada to the Gulf;
chicken Creole, and chicken Maryland style,
and chicken in casserole, and chicken in pot and
pan and kettle ; chicken fried, and roasted, and
broiled, and stewed, and boiled; chicken soup,
and chicken with dumplings, and chicken with
rice, and chicken with chili; chicken in every
style in the books, from just plain chicken on
up to chicken fixed so fussy it's own mother
wouldn't mourn for it. Yes, sir, we thought we
knew all about chicken-eating.

But we didn't. The fact of it is that there's
only one real way to fix up a chicken for eat-
ing, and we hadn't known a blessed thing about
it till we had an inspiration and did it for our-
selves.

It's a particular job. If you're a quick-
lunch fiend, or one of those dull fellows who
insist upon having dinner on the table at twelve
sharp and then fight your way through with it
with both hands furiously, so you can get the
empty dishes stacked up and go back to your
work in a hurry, you won't understand what
I'm talking about. There are others who will
know. John Ridd would sympathize. So
would old Sam Weller. I'd give a pretty
penny for the privilege of cooking a chicken my

110 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

way for one of the Nodes of Christopher
North and the Ettrick Shepherd and Timothy
Tickler. I sure would!

You know how the recipes start off in the
books: "Take a chicken." But that won't
do. You know what you're liable to get when
you just "take a chicken" — one of those
scrawny, blue-skinned caricatures that would
make a tramp feel he'd been cheated if he stole
it. The chicken that's consecrated to this
Happy Hollow cookery must be picked out
with as much care as you'd use in picking the
horse you expected to bet on at a Derby. We
pick 'em out from the flock in the yards when
they're half grown; and when they're selected
they go into training. It's not training down,
but training up. For the rest of their lives
they live in chicken paradise, fed on clean grain
and milk and green clover, so that they grow
lustily. A spring Orpington with that sort of
feeding will be an eight-pounder or better at
Holiday time, a perfect picture of what a
chicken ought to be — plump as a toy balloon,
with the plumpness in tender meat, and only a
little loose fat distributed around here and
there under his yellow skin. When he's dressed

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 111

; — I mean when he's stripped for action, hell
look mightily puffed up and proud.

This chicken doesn't come into the house by
the back way and stay in the kitchen till din-
ner's ready. He comes right on into the big
living-room and lies on the table in a deep pan,
so that folks may walk around him and admire
him and be getting acquainted with his points.
An hour or so before the real cooking starts
I've built up one of those roaring fires of hick-
ory and oak in the great fireplace, piling it
high, coaxing the brick lining to glow red with
ardent heat. When it can't get any hotter,
then the chicken is hung from the stone mantel,
head down, by a heavy string with a short wire
leader, as close to the blaze as possible without
touching it. A dripping pan, holding pepper
and salt, lies on the hearth beneath him. Stand-
ing at one side, with a big spoon tied at the end
of a long stick, I start him to turning slowly,
very slowly. I have to shield my face against
the heat ; but that's all right. Nothing less in
the way of a fire will do.

It's only a minute or two till the drip starts,
and in five minutes the yellow skin begins to
crisp and blacken. If you aren't used to any-
thing but those lean and thready chickens of

112 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

the markets, you'd think this one must take
fire and burn up. He won't, though, not with
all that wealth of juice in him. I'm trying to
sear the skin over thoroughly, so the juice will
stay in. As the fat trickles down into the pan,
I keep dipping it up over him, to hurry the
browning.

Now watch him. He's turning and turn-
ing. The first thing you know you'll see oily
yellow bubbles swelling under the skin on
breast and back and thigh. They swell and
swell till they're big as eggs; and then they
burst and jets of oily steam shoot out with a
sound like a penny whistle. Just sniff that
steam, now ! The room will be full of that odor
before we're through; you'll have to stand it
for an hour.

The fire may sink a bit, now that the skin is
crusted. All we have to do now is to turn and
turn, and keep dipping up the drippings, and
wait. It's no trouble to tell when he's done;
the tender meat begins to pull away from the
leg-bones, and his whole body takes on a sort
of ripe, finished look, and there's an unmistak-
able finished smell in the sputtering steam.
The best sign, though, is that you simply can't
wait any longer.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 113

Now, then, you take a shaving of that white
meat and a little slice off the thigh, piping hot,
and a brown roll with sweet butter and apple
jelly, and tell me if that isn't real chicken eat-
ing! Oh, man, dear! Some of these times I'm
going to write a cook-book, and there won't be
another thing in it but young chicken roasted
before a roaring open fire.

We really lived at Happy Hollow in that
second winter. For my own part, I was find-
ing sheer delight in every least scrap of the
experience. It seemed to me that this life
was as clear of the rubbish of living as any on
earth could be. That suited me, down to the
ground. I had never been strong for the frills
and fixings. Simplicity was the thing — not
the affected austerity of the ascetic who tor-
tures himself into that state of mind, but the
sort of plain living that lets a man keep his
time for the things he thinks essential — for real
work or real leisure. We had kept our town
life with our friends down to that basis as well
as we could; but you know how the odds and
ends of trifling "obligations" will pile up on
you. We had always disliked wasting time on
empty formalities that did nobody any good,
but we hadn't been strong-minded enough to

114 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

keep free of them altogether. We could have
that freedom on the farm. People who would
travel to Happy Hollow over that crazy coun-
try road would do it because they really wanted
to see us; and we would think twice before
we'd go bumping into town on a useless er-
rand. That's the way the matter sifted itself
out in my head.

I wasn't so sure of Laura's feeling, for we
had never thrashed it out together in plain
words. We had had a year and a half on the
farm before we got to that point. Then one
morning the chance came.

It was a gorgeous morning in December;
the sort of winter morning that comes to us
here in the Ozarks often and often, crisp and
tonic but without a trace of the raw cold of
the North. Sunrise acted itself out for us in
crimson and gold finery as we stood together
at our kitchen door, looking off across the hills.
A broad, curling ribbon of white fog lay over
the river, shrouding the valley, with great tree-
tops stabbing through here and there. The
sun touched the fog warmly; it lifted and
drifted softly up the long hill-slopes to the
southward, hung for a little time from the
peaks in rose-tinted plumes, then soared into

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 115

the high air. Far as we could see the valley
opened out and out in the crystal-clear light,
brimming with peace and beauty.

"Aren't those hills wonderful!" Laura said
by and by. "They're never done with sur-
prising me. I think this is the most beautiful
spot in the world."

"Is it good enough to pay you for being a
farmer's wife?" I asked.

Laura didn't accept the challenge to an ar-
gument. Her eyes were fixed on the distances.
"There isn't a thing there," she said, "that
doesn't seem worth while."

That was the very thing! I didn't press my
foolish question.

VI

WE had a diversion in our second winter at
Happy Hollow. In November one of the
members of the staff of the Saturday Evening
Post came out to visit us, on a hunt for "copy."
I had done some work for the Post in the days
before we took to farming, and the visit was
a renewal of old acquaintance. We fooled
around the farm and through the woods and
over the hills for a few days, talking; we had
a brace of young Orpingtons roasted before
the big fire; we argued about a number of
things. The sum of it was that I undertook
to write a little story of our farm and of the
fun we'd had in our adventure.

The story was printed in January of 1910.
It was the story of a transplanted townsman
who had found for himself some of the world-
old happiness of home-making.

The day that story appeared, letters began
coming to us. Within a week they were com-
ing by fifties in every mail; in another week

116

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 117

they were coming by the hundred. They ar-
rived from every nook and corner of the world;
from Cape Town, and Copenhagen; from the
Argentine Republic and from Northern Man-
churia; from New Zealand and Yucatan; from
Egypt and from the Arctic Circle. Within the
next three months, when we quit keeping
count, we had more than 3,500 of those letters
stacked up. Still they came. They're still
coming, for that matter, now and then.

Those thousands of letters were strung upon
a single thread of living interest: Was our
story fact or fiction? Was it actually possible
for a pair of average mortals in this mortal
life, without a special dispensation of Provi-
dence, to find what we had found, to do what
we had done? Would there be a fighting
chance that the writers might do for themselves
such a thing, having a little money and plenty
of courage and strong desire ? They were won-
derfully human, those letters ; wonderfully in-
timate; rich in revelation of feeling. There
wasn't a formal note in the lot ; some of them
covered close-written pages and pages. It has
been a lasting regret that we couldn't answer
them all as we wanted to. We tried, spending

118 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

long hours at it every day; but we couldn't
keep up.

People began coming to see us, too; a few
at first, and then more and more. When
spring opened, on some days we'd have a score
of folks on the place, walking around, poking
into things and asking questions. Like the
letters, they came from everywhere — from
every state in the Union, from Mexico and
Canada, and even from across the big water.
One man came straight from Manila to Fay-
etteville. They weren't merely curious; they
were vividly interested, for in the making of
this farm home they found something of their
own ideals wrought into tangible form.

During that spring and summer and fall we
had a couple of thousand visitors. Day after
day we didn't try to do anything but meet them
and talk with them. It was very interesting,
very illuminating. We enjoyed every minute
of it. It did us good in many ways. The con-
crete good of it was that it brought into the
country around Fayetteville scores of men and
women who had the daring to give their desires
a practical try-out. In the four years that have
passed, two or three hundred newcomers have
settled hereabouts. They have made a great

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 119

change in the face of the land and in all living
conditions.

Some of these people were practical farm-
ers ; most of them, and those who interested us
most, were townsfolk. There's no need to say
much about the farmers. They have suc-
ceeded according to their deserts, just as they
would have succeeded anywhere. Their ques-
tion was simply a question of change of loca-
tion. With the townsmen it was different.
They are worth considering a bit here, I think.
There are few spots on the map where within
so short a time so many people have actually
tried this back-to-the-land proposition under
conditions like ours. There has been a sort of
community spirit among us ; we have been able
to keep track of one another and to judge
of the reasons for success or failure.

There have been some real successes, and
some flat failures. Success hasn't seemed to
depend essentially upon the amount of money
a man might bring with him in his hands, nor
upon his age, nor upon his earlier training, nor
upon any early familiarity with the theory or
practice of good farming. Some have failed
though they had plenty of money to start with;
some have made it go though they had to bus-

120 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

band their two-bit pieces carefully. Some have
failed who could talk book- farming glibly;
some have succeeded who at the beginning
couldn't tell the difference between a "middle
buster" and a corn planter. Some have failed
who were at the height of youthful vigor; some
have succeeded who were gray and time-
seamed. At first glance there doesn't seem to
be any rule for it ; but when you think over it,
it has come out quite logically. Really there
isn't any mystery.

At the very bottom of success in every one
of these cases has been that gift of mind that's
called initiative. In spite of the load of abuse
it's had to carry lately, that word still has life
and meaning in it. In this case it means abil-
ity to slough old habits of thinking and to do
fresh, vigorous thinking to fit new conditions
of life and work. A preacher or a dentist or
a lawyer who turns farmer must quit thinking
in terms of theology or dentistry or law and
begin thinking in terms of the soil. He must
be able to adapt himself, not only bodily but
mentally. If he can do that, he's started on
the right road; if he can't, he's running up a
blind alley. This isn't the place for giving ex-
amples and illustrations. You'll just have to

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 121

take my word for it that I'm stating the fact
fairly as we've seen it here. Many of these
people had been successful home-makers on
their town lots, with gardens and chickens and
flowers; but they couldn't change their think-
ing from the square yard to the acre. Acres
overwhelmed them.

We've had another point well illustrated
here ; a point that ought to be obvious enough,
though it's too often ignored. The man who
said that poets are born, not made, didn't ex-
clude the other callings from his rule. The
rule is just as good for farmers as for poets.
That is to say, the man who succeeds at farm-
ing must have the flair for it. It isn't enough
to be convinced that farming may be made a
good, paying business ; one must be a thorough
convert to the soil. We've known men here-
abouts who came to their new farms with most
impeccable schemes of business management,
but who fell down disastrously because, when it
came to the critical point, they were hopeless
aliens to the land. I don't know any better
way of saying it than to use a rather vague
phrase: The successful farmer must love the
soil, feeling himself akin to it. Love of the
good earth makes a far better beginning than

122 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

an exact knowledge of soil chemistry. One
may learn his chemistry afterward out of the
text-books; but love isn't to be mastered so.
It's all well enough to pooh-pooh sentiment,
to say that sentiment has no place in business,
and all that; but that's poor talk. I've never
known a man who had made a conspicuous suc-
cess at farming or anything else without a sen-
timental attachment for his job. Sentiment's
the thing! Honest to goodness, I'd as soon try
to live with a wife I didn't love as to work with
an acre I didn't care for. With that feeling
left out, farming is no more than an expedient
— just a hard way of making a living. The
hardships and discouragements take on vast
proportions. That's been worked out before
our eyes here, many and many a time.

We've seen this, too : There comes a time in
the farming experience of every townsman
when novelty wears off and some of the rough
facts begin to loom large. Laura says it's just
like the critical "second summer" in the life of
a baby. The enterprise is past its first in-
fancy; it's cutting its teeth and learning to
walk; it's having a lot of knocks and bumps
and pains. In that period it needs some care-
ful nursing if it's to be pulled through — and

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 123

that's the very time when lots of folks make up
their minds that they've tackled too big an
undertaking. Success or failure is likely to he
settled right there. You can see how that may
be. Suppose you were the man in the case.
Suppose you had been spending a long string
of hot summer days in a new field, toiling at
unfamiliar work, coming in at night dead
weary and stained with earth and sweat and
with rows and bunches of blisters scattered
around over you. Suppose you weren't wise
enough to judge whether your year's crop
would amount to anything, for all this labor.
Suppose you sat out on the porch after supper,
brooding over the lonesomeness. Suppose
you'd forgotten to buy smoking tobacco the
last time you were in town. And suppose —
just suppose — that your wife had said some-
thing just the least bit fretful or peevish about
something that had gone wrong with her work.
It's just possible that you'd conjure up a pic-
ture of your old familiar town streets at night,
with the bright lights, and the picture shows,
and the tobacco shops on every other corner,
and all the stir and bustle and gayety you used
to know so well. If that keeps up, and if
something happens that puts a little crimp of

124 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

discouragement in you at the wrong moment,
it's supposable that you may come to a sudden
snap judgment and chuck the whole thing and
turn your face "back home." We've seen them
do that. We've seen many a case where suc-
cess might very well have come if the lightly
balanced scales of decision had only tipped the
other way in the critical hour.

I'm not writing mere abstract arguments
now; I'm giving the sum of scores of actual
experiences that have been lived out around
us. It comes to this: Success hangs upon
state of mind more than upon any externals.
In the last four years we have been much dis-
turbed by the spectacle of eager, hopeful men
and women surrendering to discouragement
and failure. But we have seen others achieve
happy success. If we tried to deduce from
these cases a rule that would prescribe how old
a man ought to be, or how much money he
ought to have, or what he ought to do upon his
land to make the game win for him, we'd have
to give it up. But if you want a rule, if you
must have a rule of some sort that will guide
the back-to-the-lander, here's one :

Get hold of your farm and then make violent
love to it and keep it up.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 125

There's a rule that will work. None otjier
will that we know anything about.

Mark: Though you're likely to take that
for a foolish theory, it isn't any such thing. It
isn't a theory at all; it's nothing but a plain
summing up of what we've seen going on
around us in the last four years. I can't state
that too emphatically.

Anyway, we got some fine new neighbors
that year, and many of them have stuck.
They're still coming in; and slowly, year by
year, we're changing the face of the land.
Happy Hollow is no longer a hidden nook in a
shaggy wilderness. The country is beginning
to look like something. The work doesn't go
swiftly. There have been no lightning-flashes
of accomplishment. A bit at a time we're
building up a fine, strong, happy community.

There's a wide lawn spreading around our
farmhouse — about three acres in smooth sward
and three or four more in park formed by
young trees that were saved from the first
clearing — oak, elm, hackberry, hickory, per-
simmon, wild cherry, black haw, walnut, locust.
Specimens were left of every native tree we
found in our jungle; and here and there stands
a close group of saplings bound together in

126 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

their tops by matted wild grape vines, making
little summer nooks. These house grounds
have given us no end of delight in the making.
We're working on them still, a little at a time.
The real work began in that spring of 1910,
after the first rough clearing was done.

For many years this spot had been a dump-
ing ground for all the refuse of the farm.
Stone heaps were everywhere; and between
were rusting and rotting piles of old cans and
broken tools and all manner of junk. We had
to clear all that away. There were tough old
stumps to come out, too, and a litter of loose
stone to be picked up. After that, with plow
and scraper and harrow, we smoothed the land
down, stopping between whiles to grub out a
mess of roots or buck-brush or to pry up a huge
bowlder. We've moved a train load of rubbish
from this corner. It was back-breaking work
— chopping, tugging, lifting, conquering a
square yard at a time, building the yards into
square rods painfully. We worked without
sympathy from our native neighbors. By that
time most of them had given us up as hopeless
imbeciles who were "wastin' money somethin'
tumble." To do anything on a farm to any

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 127

end but the most obvious utility wasn't justi-
fied to their understanding.

There was Jake. Jake lived on a rocky
little patch on the hillside back of Happy Hol-
low— there were three generations of a multi-
tudinous family in a squalid two-room shack
set on stilts, with a couple of pigs sheltered
beneath the floor. Jake was of the middle gen-
eration. Though he had lived here all his life,
almost under the shadow of the walls of the
university, neither he nor any of his folks
could read a word ; nor could any one of them,
by any toilsome "figgerin'," discover how many
quarters and dimes and nickels went to make
up a dollar. When he was paid for a day's
work, he liked to have his money given him in
one big, round coin. He knew what that was.

Jake used to work for us at odd times, ac-
cording to the philosophy of the neighborhood ;
that is, he didn't want a steady job, but he
learned to look upon our farm as a place where
he might come for an occasional day's work in
emergency, when his family would be "plumb
out of meal." Whenever we saw him come
moseying down the trail from his cabin we
could tell at a distance infallibly whether he
was coming as a laborer or to make us a

128 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

friendly visit. So long as we knew him he
wore only one suit of clothes. It must have
been a cast-off when he moved into it; for to
say that it bagged about his lean frame is to
make a poverty-stricken use of words. There
was extra room enough in his breeches for a
couple of his children. In the course of the
years that suit of his had become a fearful and
wonderful thing in its tailoring — patches upon
patches ; a great, rough square of gunny-sack-
ing set upon the original cloth, and a triangle
of faded blue denim on the bagging, and a
ragged oval of old plaid shawl on the denim.
Joseph's coat wasn't in it with Jake's pants.
Every patch in the lot flapped picturesquely
loose at one side or the other. The state of
those flaps betrayed his state of mind beyond
mistaking. If he came for work, their edges
would flutter free; but when he dressed for
Sunday or in his favorite role of gentleman of
leisure the flaps would be tucked in carefully.
That sign never failed. Just so surely as we
saw him come into the offing looking like a
yacht with all its bunting flying, we knew the
formula for what was coming:

"Ha-owd'y! You-uns all up?" Which was
a kindly inquiry as to the state of our health.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 129

"Ha-owd'y, Jake! Yes, we-uns are all up.
You-uns all up?"

"Yes, we-uns all up." And then, after a
decently dignified interval : "I reckon I better
be cuttin' you-all a little jag o' wood this
mawnin'. We-all is needin' coffee."

Jake could never sense the meaning of our
work for beauty's sake around the house. He
worked with us some times, doing what he was
told in the rough preparation; but he never
knew just what we were driving at. At the
last, when the scraping and rolling were fin-
ished and we began seeding our first acre with
Dutch clover and bluegrass, he stood by in
complete bewilderment.

"Hit 'pears to me," he said, "like you-uns
has done spent a heap o' money gittin' that
little patch o' land fixed for plantin'. What
fer a crop is that you-all are puttin' onto it?"

"We're planting lawn, Jake," I tried to ex-
plain.

The word went clear past him. "Lawn," he
echoed. "I 'most believe I've hearn tell about
lawn, some'eres. What kind of a crop is it?"

Even when he saw the finished work, smooth
and green and fair, his understanding held
aloof. "Hit looks to me like plumb waste,"

130 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

he criticized. "You-all's cattle could git a
heap o' pickin' off that grass. Ain't you-uns
goin' to use it fer nothin' at all?"

Good old Jake! He's dead now. We've
wondered what he thinks of the New Jerusa-
lem, with all its flagrant exhibit of glories that
the pigs and mules can't eat.

We've kept steadily at work upon our house
grounds through these years, grubbing, hack-
ing, trimming, setting hedges and rose gar-
dens, doing most of it with our own hands.
We've never found anybody to work at that
job comprehendingly.

Our field work, though, went ahead in that
year under full steam. Looking over the old
fields after the spring plowing, when the effect
of the last year's work could be judged, I had
my first real thrill of satisfaction as a farmer.
Even in a twelvemonth our handling of the
soil had told immeasurably. Instead of the
tenant's three- or four-inch furrows, that did
no more than break the surface into clods, we
had turned six-inch furrows last year, and con-
tinual timely harrowing and cultivating had
put our soil into far better mechanical condi-
tion than it had ever known. It wasn't as we
wanted it yet, by a long shot ; but we had some-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 131

thing to work upon by way of a foundation.
The new spring plowing went eight inches
deep, turning up a new layer of the subsoil.
The harrows, both spike and spring-tooth,
followed the plows forthwith, catching the clay
at just the right time, working it well into the
mass. New stone was brought to light with
the deeper breaking. We hauled that off at
once, and then flew at the fields with a heavy
log drag, pulverizing the surface thoroughly
and packing it into a firm bed so that it would
hold the last drop of its gathered moisture.
The tough old "plow-pan" was gone now;
there was nothing to prevent free circulation
of moisture. Since that time neither drought
nor freshet has bothered us. When the heavy
rains come, they sink deep, instead of running
madly away down the slopes with our soil,
leaving the surface guttered and torn; and if
a drought strikes us, there's a deep reservoir
to be drawn upon.

On the several smaller patches left us by the
tenant — those that were too small to let us use
the cultivator to advantage — we planted small
grain, oats and rye, to be cut as hay in May or
early June, and to be followed at once with a
thick sowing of cowpeas. Our first year of

132 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

experience had converted me absolutely to the
cowpea, though that experience had given me
only the merest foretaste of its value. Now,
after five years of use, I'm a cowpea radical.
I'd let go of any other crop on our list before
I'd abandon this. When our friend at the ex-
periment station told us of it, we had made al-
lowance for him as a zealous advocate, maybe
a little shy on the judicial temperament; but
we know now that he stopped short of the
whole truth. It's hard to understand why the
South has been so laggard in the use of this
great little old plant.

In our first year we had put cowpeas on
every one of those smaller fields, broadcasting
a bushel or more of seed to the acre, and cut-
ting the vines for hay in August or early Sep-
tember. That cutting gave us a ton and a
half to the acre of cured hay equal in feeding
value to the best alfalfa; in places, where we
had been able to break deeply, the yield went
to two and a half tons. When that crop was
off, a strong second growth came on from the
stubble. This was left upon the ground, and
in the fall some of it was pastured and some
turned under as green manure.

There was magic in its effect upon the small

OUR FIRST CROP

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 133

grains in the next season. Through years of
careless use, the soil had been stripped of just
about the last pennyweight of its available
nitrogen, so that every leaf and blade that tried
to grow upon the land looked bloodless — sick-
lied o'er, you might say, with the pale cast of
thoughtlessness. Our cowpeas had begun the
work of restoration, catching free nitrogen out
of the air and tucking it deep into the crannies
and crevices. Our oats and rye came on in the
next spring a thick coat of vivid green, vigor-
ous and hearty, the straw twice as tall as it had
stood the year we bought the place, and rich
with broad, succulent leaves. Most of that
change was to be credited to one good cropping
with the cowpea. So, when the grain was cut,
cured and hauled to the haymows, the land was
broken again immediately, and then we har-
rowed in a bushel and a half of cowpeas to the
acre. On some of the patches the peas stood
alone ; on one we mixed half a bushel of Ger-
man millet with each bushel of peas, and on
another half a bushel of amber sorghum, to
see if the stiff straw and cane would support
the vines and aid in the work of curing. We've
stuck to that system. Sometimes, when the
hay supply threatens to be short, we plant the

134 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

peas as a main crop, seeding as early in the
spring as the ground is thoroughly warmed up.
Always we follow small grain with peas, no
matter if the grain harvest is late ; for, what-
ever happens, we'll have a rich green crop to
turn under. Always we drill peas between the
corn-rows at the last cultivation, cutting and
feeding the vines with the fodder after har-
vest, or occasionally "topping" the corn-stalks
for a fodder crop and pasturing young cattle
on the stubble and pea-vines. The long and
short of it is that we plant cowpeas wherever
and whenever we have a vacant space on the
land. I'm persuaded that, barring only the
deep breaking and thorough cultivation, noth-
ing else has served so well to build up our soil
and our crop yields.

In that second year our corn, too, showed
the effect of the previous year's pea-planting.
That corn was good to look upon on our one
big field. We had bought good seed of a well-
bred white dent type, planning to have this
thoroughly acclimated to our conditions and to
build it up from year to year by careful selec-
tion. Its spring growth promised fulfillment
of the seventy-five-bushel forecast given us at
the experiment station. Not a hill was miss-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 135

ing in the field. But when the grain formed
we knew we should have to wait a while for our
full yield — another year, or maybe two, till
the new strain would have accommodated itself
to its new surroundings. That was all right
with me. It was plain that we would beat last
year's yield, anyway. So we did, with a har-
vest of a little more than forty bushels — more
than three times the yield our tenant had got
two years before. That was all satisfactory
for the present. Most farmers in this country
would have been content to let that record
stand, considering everything; but after har-
vest Sam and I had one of our talks about the
years to come.

"Sam," I said, "that's pretty good corn.
The quality's away up yonder. But does it
suit you?"

Sam grinned. "I'm an awful hard man to
suit, when it comes to growing corn," he said.
"I've never been just to say suited yet."

"Well, listen," I said. "They told me at the
station that we can get seventy-five bushels on
this land, if we know how to farm. We have
over thirty bushels to go yet. Let's make it
fifty, instead of thirty. Let's run it up to bet-

136 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ter than a hundred. Do you reckon we can
doit?"

Sam grinned again, with the frank delight
he always shows in any sort of a challenge.
"I'll go you!" he said. "We'll never quit till
we've done it!"

And that's the way it stood with us on the
corn proposition after our second crop was
gathered. We were undertaking to get nine
times as much grain to the acre as the tenant
had harvested! I wonder if the gods of sun
and wind and rain didn't chuckle quietly as
they harkened to that impudent defi of ours.

VII

As I read over this story, it strikes me that
I may not have been quite fair in my record.
I seem to have laid a very light accent upon
our difficulties, giving an effect as if we had
had none that counted — as if we had followed
a smooth and easy path that led straight from
one success to another. To give that impres-
sion is misleading.

We had our difficulties, rough ones, plenty
of them. Indeed, the whole job, from first to
last, has been a conquest of difficulties. I can't
remember a blessed thing we've done that
hasn't given us hard work or anxious thought,
or both. That was the only experience we had
any right to expect. There were times when
the frets came in flocks. Lazy incompetence
of the extra labor we were forced to hire some-
times in emergency was an unfailing source of
irritation. At first we had marveled that we
were able to get men to work for a dollar a day
and "find" themselves — less than half the price

137

138 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

of day's labor in Nebraska; but the marvel
swapped ends when we had tried out a dozen or
so of these dollar-a-day men. In our six years
we've had only two out of dozens who have
earned their dollar fairly, measured by any
standard of fairness you'd like to apply.

One foggy autumn morning, when tHe farm
was shrouded in white, Laura sent one of these
chaps across the farm to the pasture, to drive
up the cows for milking. He was gone for
more than an hour. I was strong for waiting,
just for the fun of seeing how long it would
take him to get back; but that grew tedious
after a while. When he was located, by and
by, he was burrowed snugly back into a big
shock of corn fodder, sitting on the ground
and calmly chewing his snuff-stick.

"I reckoned as how I'd be savin' time fer
me an' the cow-critters, too," he argued, "if
I'd wait till the fog riz."

Maybe the logic of that was good enough;
but we couldn't quite get used to having our
"hands" always sitting down at the farm work.
If one would be set to picking stone, he'd head
straightway for some sheltering hollow in the
field where he might sit down out of sight ; if
we set him to clearing, he'd burrow forthwith

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 139

into the thicket and sit down ; if we sent a cou-
ple into the woods with axes and crosscut saw,
they'd sit madly all day long. A neighbor of
ours, a newcomer, put the matter pretty well
into words when he said that the prevalent
disease here in the hills seemed to be the sitting
sickness.

We had trouble, too, with the newly cleared
ground. Did you ever try to keep a ten-acre
field "sprouted down" after you've hacked off
a thick growth of sassafras and black-jack and
post-oak and sumac and red elm? Well, you
ought to try it. I've heard prairie farmers
complain of the great hardship of making a
crop on virgin sod; but that's just old cheese
in comparison with cropping in a mess of green
roots and grubs and sprouts.

Talk about your hydra-headed monsters ! A
common little old sassafras bush has any hydra
in the zoo backed clear off the boards at that
game ; and as for a spreading-rooted red elm or
a thicket of sumac — oh, hush! Listen: You
take your heavy hoe and go out on a warm day
in spring, just when the blood of the earth has
got well into circulation and the sprouts are
booming, and you chop and chop and chop
your way across the length of the field, leaving

140 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

a clean six-foot swath behind you; and when
you turn at the fence to look proudly back over
what you Ve done, there the pesky things stand,
four times as thick as when you started. If
you think that's an exaggeration by way of a
joke, come on down here and try it.

"Why 'n't ye do yer sproutin' in dog days?"
the hill people used to ask of us. "If ye git
'em in the dark o' the moon in dog days, the
sop '11 sour, so's they won't come up no more."

So we tried it in the dark of the moon in dog
days, and they came up thicker than ever.
We tried it on Washington's birthday, and
Thanksgiving, and the Glorious Fourth, and
every other day on the calendar; and each time
we tried it they came up thicker than ever.
We'd get into a rage sometimes and try grub-
bing them out by the roots; but that was a
hopeless job. Do you know the story of the
little boy who was annoyed by the roar of the
ocean, and who set out to stop it by dipping
up all the water in his little pail and pouring
it out on the sand? Well, it was something
very like that with our sprouting. The little
boy's remedy for his distress was simplicity it-
self. So was ours. All we had to do was to
keep on chopping, and by and by there

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 141

wouldn't be any sprouts left. The virtue of
the theory was perfectly obvious — but it
wouldn't work.

And then in a fateful hour we got hold of a
government bulletin on the Angora goat.
That bulletin went into my consciousness as
summer rain soaks into a parched soil. There
were pictures in the book, pictures of broad
fields before and after — dense smudges of im-
penetrable tangles before, and unimaginably
fair, smooth expanses after. Angora goats
had wrought that wondrous transformation.
There was nothing to it: I just had to have a
set of Angora goats.

Well, I got 'em. It was in the fall of 1910
that I met a man who owned an Angora goat
ranch fifty miles back in the hills, across a cou-
ple of counties. Why, sure, he'd let me have
some, if I'd go over to the ranch and drive
them across country. I might have twenty-
five or thirty — more if I wanted them, for two
dollars and fifty cents a head. I'd have to be
satisfied with wethers, and I'd have to take
them about half-and-half grades and full-
bloods; but, man, dear, when I got them I'd
certainly have something that would eat up the
sprouts ! When he tried to tell me about that,

142 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

my friend's speech just went trailing off into
impotent stutterings. No, no, it wouldn't be
any trouble to drive 'em over ; all we'd have to
do would be to get 'em headed this way and
keep 'em a-comin'. They ought to make the
fifty miles over the woods trails in a couple of
days. And when I got 'em here and turned
'em onto a mess of sprouts, farming that land
after a year or so would be nothing but one
glad, sweet song. That's what the bulletin
said, too. There was no doubting it.

My boy and I went after our goats in No-
vember, going in the saddle across the hills to
Carroll County. Louis rode Dick, our big
gray work-horse, and I had Jack, the big gray
mule that was Dick's harness mate. Those two
beasts were the Damon and Pythias of the
farm; the mule's devotion to Dick was idola-
trous ; in pasture or stable he clung to the horse
like his shadow; he was quite unmanageable
if they were a rod apart. That made a nice
state of things for handling a bunch of goats
in a wilderness of ragged, unfamiliar hill coun-
try.

Never mind the preliminaries. Our goats
were delivered to us at the ranch gate in the
gray dawn of a crisp morning. The first thing

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 143

they did was to scatter to the four winds over
a perpendicular hillside. We started off right
and left to round them up, the mule plunged
and kicked and trumpeted his melancholy re-
monstrance— and that finished the scattera-
tion. It was noon before we had them gath-
ered. A couple of the kids were quite tired
out, and we had to lift them and tie them in
front of our saddles. While we were at that,
the band redistributed itself. We've never
seen them all together from that day to this.

We spent a week in getting our goats to
Happy Hollow, and turned into our sprout
patch. That was when the glad, sweet song
part began. We had fenced in the patch ac-
cording to the ranchman's directions, with
sixty-inch woven wire and a string of barbed
wire atop. That would hold 'em, he had said.
So it did, for a while — just while we were get-
ting the gate shut behind them. By the time
the latch clicked, every mother's son was stand-
ing on top of a fence post, getting ready to
jump. They've been jumping ever since. Oh,
yes, we still have 'em; but I do certainly wish
that somebody would come along and offer me
something for them. If he ever does, he'll own
some goats.

144 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

You know what the old farmer said about
the hog- tight fence: He said it was perfectly
easy to build one, but perfectly impossible to
keep the hogs from getting through it. Well,
there you are ! We've built fence that a giraffe
couldn't see over, and it's never given our goats
a single moment's pause.

Eat sprouts? I'd like to know who started
that story. They're fond of slippery elm when
it's in just the right stage in the spring; it's
quite good sport to watch them loosen a strip
of the tender inner bark and then peel it
smoothly off while the huskiest of the big
grades straddles the sapling and bends it down.
Also they like to nibble daintily at the sour
berries of the sumac when they redden in late
summer; and there are a few tidbits in leaves
and buds they'll take if they're starved into it.
But as for the real serious business of eating
sprouts, that's a canard. They'll eat anything
else first. They caught Sam's boy in the pas-
ture once and ate his little blue gingham shirt
off. A friend who visited us at Christmas
was butted down in the lane and held prostrate
while they ate up his necktie and the sprig of
mistletoe he wore in his buttonhole. They'll
fight for the privilege of eating a knot of dried

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 145

cockleburs out of the brush of a cow's tail.
The first shake out of the box after we brought
the beasts home an angry neighbor had me in
town before a justice of the peace because my
goats had jumped the fence and eaten his
young apple orchard clear down to the ground.
Once, when they got out and wandered up to
the house, they ate up most of a bundle of red-
wood shingles. One of them ate the tail off a
Leghorn cockerel that Laura meant to exhibit
at the county fair; and another stole a sack of
tobacco from my hip pocket and ate it up, bag
and all. They ate all the bright red paint off
the wheels of a brand-new farm wagon. But
when it comes to staying decently in their pas-
ture and eating sprouts, they simply aren't
there. I've thought of hobbling them with ball
and chain, but most likely it wouldn't do any
good; they'd eat it off. I've read lately that
some genius has invented a jumpless goat, but
I don't believe it. That's one of the things
that's too good to be true.

Do I seem to be jesting? Believe me, I'm
not jesting for the mere jest's sake. We've
fallen into the way of getting a laugh when-
ever we can out of our discomfitures, and I
don't mind telling you what we found to laugh

146 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

about in that goat business; but my real pur-
pose in referring to it is to point what it
taught us.

We bought our goats in the hope that we had
found a short cut through a difficulty. First
and last, the short cut has cost more in time and
labor and money than we'd have spent in gain-
ing the end by plain every-day hard work. I
don't want to try drawing an infallible con-
clusion for others to go by ; but that's the way
we've been served every time we've essayed a
short cut. We've just about made up our
minds that successful short cuts in farming are
a good deal like royal roads to learning:
There aren't any. We've had thirty goats
working for four years on a few acres of hill-
side brush patch ; and this spring we're paying
men to go over the land and clear up after the
goats — paying as much as a good job with ax
and grubbing-hoe would have cost in the first
place. We've lost four years' use of the land
as pasture, and we've spent unreckoned time
worrying with the fences and the goats.

We had only wethers, as I've told you.
That's contrary to the policy we've settled
upon for the farm; excepting the mules we've
really needed for the hardest work on the new

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 147

ground, we haven't intended to keep any beast
around the place that doesn't contribute some-
thing through increase. When I haven't any-
thing else in particular to do, though, I trem-
ble to think of the fix we'd have been in if our
goat herd had been multiplying on our hands
through these years.

Around the rim of the farm on three sides
lies a border of higher land, just like the rim
of a basin, sloping inward. For the most part
this slope is too abrupt to permit of cultiva-
tion ; the soil would wash too badly. That part
has never been in use ; its unkempt appearance
has made it always an eyesore. We wanted
nothing of that sort inside our fence lines ; yet
to keep up that twelve or fifteen acres for looks'
sake only was a luxury we couldn't afford.
We had natural leaning that way ; but we had
to keep drawing the reins sharply upon our
inclinations in such matters. The house
grounds really gave us indulgence enough; as
for the rest of the land, we were agreed that
we must make every possible acre count for
something. That encircling slope was quite
worthless when we got the farm. For years
the tenants had cut their firewood there; true
to their habits they had taken the lazy way,

148 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

leaving treetops and refuse scattered every-
where to rot, so we had a lot of extra work in
cleaning up the ground and trying to save the
best of the young timber. Figuring out the
use of that land, so that we might make it an
asset instead of a liability, was one of our diffi-
culties. The farmer who is working smooth
prairie land or a good bit of valley, with its soil
of a uniform type, has no problem of this sort;
but on a farm like ours, with conditions chang-
ing at every fence, every field invites individual
treatment. At first glance that may appear a
nuisance, but there are compensations. If the
farmer is inclined to be active instead of shift-
less, a hill farm keeps him spurred up to doing
his best. I think it's worth considering that
throughout Arkansas the farmers who have
bank accounts are found much oftener on the
hill lands than on the rich, level alluvial lands
where working conditions are much easier. I
heard this remarked once, with emphasis, at a
bankers' convention in the state.

Our first concern with that ragged strip of
land was to get it cleaned up so we could see
what it looked like. We began on the worst
part, cutting out the undergrowths and the
worthless scrub, leaving some of the young tim-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 149

ber that would have value some time. It has
been a continual surprise to us to find what
good stuff is smothered away in those thickets.
When the farm came to us it had been all but
denuded of mature and serviceable timber.
The sawmill men had taken their pick of it in
the earlier days, and the tenants had butchered
the rest ruthlessly; about all we had left was
fit only for firewood, beside the young growths
struggling in the ruins for life. So that we
need not blunder, we had studied with care
some good bulletins and handbooks on farm
forestry and the management of woodlots.
Save on that first clearing our foresting hasn't
gone far beyond the cleaning up stage, but it
will be made one of the permanent features of
our work.

Out of that first thicket we saved scores of
thrifty young post-oak trees — the straightest
and best, for after-use in fencing. We kept
also all the black locust we found, and all the
cherry and black walnut, with here and there
a shapely plume-topped elm. Where it did
not crowd, we left the best of the young hick-
ory, too, and the persimmon that was old
enough to fruit. It will be years before that
timber has commercial value ; but it will all be

150 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

worth something some time. Its gain in value
from year to year is paying a fair interest on
our investment in the land. It would never
have been worth a cent if we'd left it as it was.

Once that rough cleaning up was done, we
had ten acres that didn't look at all bad. It
was rather steep and stony in spots, but there
was a lot of good land in between. What to do
with it was the next question. A German or
an Italian would have set it straightway to
vineyard ; slope and exposure and subsoil con-
ditions were all exactly right for that use. But
we weren't yet ready to attack commercial
grape-growing. I mean to get to that before
long; one of the things in the back of my head
is a plan for covering that hillside with Scup-
pernong vines. Meanwhile, that ten acres
ought to be doing something more than carry
its young timber.

The puzzle solved itself without definite in-
tention of ours. We had been perplexed over
permanent pasture. Experience had shown
that the native grasses had almost no value for
milk cattle ; those that grew in the denser woods
were sparse and uncertain. As we had thought
it over, we had decided against using our culti-
vable land in made pastures or meadows. The

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 151

length of our growing season — almost two
hundred and twenty days between killing
frosts in spring and fall — promised much
better returns if we would use that land
in the production of annual forage crops.
Conditions did not fit the northern farmer's
system of crop rotation, with clover and
grass as important items. We could do bet-
ter by double-cropping with small grains and
cowpeas, filling in at odd times with catch
crops of rape or sorghum or broad "succotash"
mixtures to be pastured down. We were aim-
ing at a system that would keep our cultivable
fields in use to the fullest possible extent
throughout the year, while allowing us to shift
plans quickly at any time to suit changing
seasonal conditions. Permanent pasture or
meadow would be too inflexible to go well with
such a system.

Yet, with the best we could do in manage-
ment, there would be times in the year when we
would have no crop ready for feeding to ad-
vantage. The use of the silo would settle that
difficulty by and by; but for the present, de-
spite our theory, good permanent pasture
would fill some awkward gaps in spring and
summer.

152 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Our clearing of the waste hillside helped us
out. So soon as the clearing was done, at once
the worthless wild grasses began to be replaced
by other growths. Bluegrass appeared on the
moist flats along the brook bottom ; and wher-
ever the sunlight struck upon the unaccus-
tomed ground, Japanese clover volunteered.
Within a year it had formed a heavy mat, tak-
ing firm foothold, crowding into every nook
and cranny between the stones. Every beast
on the farm took to it as a youngster takes to
candy. It is one of the first of the spring
growths, and it stands well into the fall ; in the
sheltered places it persists even through the
mild winters. The sprawling, pale-flowered
buffalo clover came, too, some of the myriad-
stemmed plants large enough to fill a washtub.
Not much seems to be known about that clover ;
it has had a minor place, as the germination
of its seed is said to be uncertain; but it has
taken a firm grip upon our hills. Our white
Dutch clover on the lawn had thrived well, and
this made its way little by little up the slope.
The bur clovers appeared, and the common red,
and some little patches of sweet clover, till we
had a mixture we couldn't have beaten with any
studied planting.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 153

On one corner of the clearing we gave Ber-
muda grass a lodgment, planting a few sack-
fuls of root cuttings brought from the town-
side of the mountains. There's the grass for
you ! It is spreading and spreading ; wherever
it's had a chance it has made a sward deep and
thick and smooth as velvet. It knows nothing
of discouragement or defeat; it's at its best
right in the middle of a hot, dry summer, when
almost every other pasture plant on the list has
bowed its head and surrendered. Year by year
it grows better and better; a five-year-old sod
will carry more cattle to the acre and for a
longer time than any other grass that grows.
It seems a mighty pity that northern winters
are too much for Bermuda. More than any
other single factor, Bermuda grass promises to
make the South into the great meat-producing
section of the Union. Supplemented with any
of the clovers, it makes perfect pasture for any
growing animal.

Native southern farmers have fought Ber-
muda grass as a pest because, once it has estab-
lished itself, it spreads and persists stubbornly.
It bothers the southerner in his cornfields. But,
if the farmers only knew it, there's more real
money to be made in the careful grazing of an

154 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

acre of good Bermuda grass than the average
southern acre of corn is worth.

Our rather aimless first work on that hillside
taught us something. The poverty of the so-
called pastures hereabouts isn't the inevitable
logic of natural conditions; it's chargeable to
the farmers themselves. The roughest of these
hill lands, which are habitually left as ugly
wastes, may be converted to profitable use at
small cost. We couldn't make a better pas-
ture than the one Nature made for us immedi-
ately we gave her a fighting chance. If there's
one complaint more often heard than another
among the farmers here it is that they can't
afford to keep "milk stock" that must be given
"boughten feed" all the year round. With a
pasture like ours for the summer, and cowpea
hay carrying a good crop of matured pods for
winter feeding, besides an acre or two of fall-
seeded mixed small grains and rape for winter
pasturing, milk and butter may be had here all
the time at as little cost as anywhere on the
map. It just isn't done; that's all. At this
time, late in May, our cows are in fine milk
and sleek as pet rabbits ; but they haven't had
an ounce of grain in the last two months save

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 155

an occasional "lick" of bran given them for
friendship's sake.

Our world-without-end hacking and chop-
ping and grubbing at thicket and bush and
sprout has been hard enough, goodness knows.
Sam says he has the habit so firmly fixed now
that he's going to be miserable when there's no
more of that sort of thing to do. Once we'd
set our minds to the job of cleaning up the
place and wouldn't relinquish it, we got good
out of it. We were taught the merit of keep-
ing everlastingly at it, which is the very rock-
bottom of successful farming; and we were
taught, too, that despite its forbidding first
appearance, we could set every acre of our
farm at work if we would. We needn't submit
to the waste of a square rod unless we chose.

There were other difficulties. Many things
were to be done on the farm that called for
machinery of price. We could have used ma-
chinery to great advantage many times; but
we couldn't afford all at once the investment
that would have been necessary. There's noth-
ing like having the right tool for doing hard
work. A cheerful temper helps some in get-
ting along without; but there are the aches and
the blisters!

156 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

The worst part of our work would have been
a sight easier if we'd had a good stump puller ;
but I didn't feel justified in putting the money
into it when we should need it for only a few
months at most. There was no chance of buy-
ing a puller by clubbing with the neighbors;
they had found it cheaper to let their stumps
rot out. We wrestled with those rough old
citizens of the field by main strength for a
while, trying this way and that — burning some,
and splitting out some with dynamite, and go-
ing after some with the ax. By and by we
found an expedient — not a lazy man's make-
shift, mind you; there's a lot of difference be-
tween the two. We cut a long, strong white
oak sapling with an eight-inch butt and bound
the butt end against a stump with trace-chains ;
then hitched our work team to the outer end of
the sapling, and started them to moving in a
circle. That twist must have uprooted a moun-
tain. It brought our stump out clean.

We found other expedients that helped us
through other difficulties. Some of them were
a little clumsy, maybe; but we don't hesitate
to use one of them on occasion just on that
account, if only they lighten labor and actually
cut down expense. Some of the men who have

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 157

begun farming near us in the later years
haven't been hampered for money to spend on
equipment — and they've spent it! It beats all
how much good money may be tied up in one
way and another when labor-saving becomes
an obsession. I'm rather glad we haven't had
all we might have liked to spend. We've
gotten along just as well, and we've learned
the worth of contriving.

We're agreed on one fixed rule, though, Sam
and I: No mere lazy makeshift "goes."

VIII

IN our six years on the farm we have sold
just next to nothing at all in the way of field
crops. Last fall, for the first time, we sent a
little surplus wheat to market — a hundred and
fifty bushels; and at the same time we let a
neighbor have a ton of baled wheat straw be-
cause he needed it. That's absolutely all that's
gone away from our land as raw material.
Not a bushel of corn nor a pound of hay has
gone out of our gates; on the contrary, we've
bought corn and oats in the neighborhood, and
tons of bran and shorts and other milled feeds.
We've bought and fed these feeds to cattle
and hogs sometimes when a prudent farmer
of the old school could easily have figured that
we were feeding at a considerable net loss. A
bookkeeper could have proved it to us without
half trying. Nevertheless we kept it up ; and
if you had been watching the farm as a whole,
as we've watched it, I think you could be con-
vinced that we've come out ahead on it.

158

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 159

If at the beginning of our work the farm
had been in condition for the production of
maximum crops of the field staples, we
wouldn't have grown such crops for direct sale.
Although we had no practical experience to
guide us, years of study of the farming history
of the northern prairie country had taught us
one point in farm policy, a point we might not
have learned in centuries of personal experi-
ence on any particular farm.

We had lived in Nebraska through the time
when her farmers and the farmers of all the
states around were grain-growers, producing
grains for market. We had been right on the
ground while those farmers as individuals and
in communities, by counties and whole com-
monwealths, had grown poorer and poorer
year by year at that business. We had seen
wide districts, each an empire in itself, loaded
with accumulating debt, mortgaged to the
limit, and then abandoned. There was just
one good reason. The farmers gave many, but
they all came to the same thing in the end:
Grain-growing couldn't be made to pay. And
by the same token, growing grain for market,
on the average showing made by all the farms
of the United States, doesn't pay to-day. It

160 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

never has paid. Oh, of course, you may pick
out individual farmers who have fared pretty
well at it under exceptional conditions, and you
may find records of exceptional years when
whole neighborhoods of grain farmers have
had a taste of prosperity. But I'm talking
about average returns the country over, taking
one year with another. For the average
farmer, under average conditions, to persist in
the business of producing and selling from his
farm the grains and the common staples of the
soil is to sink steadily into poverty until pov-
erty engulfs him. If the farmers of a com-
munity unite in that practice, the community
is impoverished and by and by abandoned for
virgin fields.

That's perfectly good history, and there's
perfectly good logic in it. Let's not bother too
much with the statistics. Since I've been farm-
ing, just for my own satisfaction I've dug out
and analyzed the figures covering the produc-
tion of the staple crops in all the states since
the beginning of official records. Barring some
occasional fluctuations which are unimportant
in proportion to the whole mass, the story of
all these crops shows pretty much of a same-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 161

ness. Just by way of an illustration, corn will
serve about as well as any of the lot.

For the years from 1866 to 1910, the corn
crop of the United States has had an average
farm value per acre on December first of each
year of eleven dollars. That takes the lean
years with the fat ones, the districts of low
prices with those of top prices. Only eleven
dollars an acre, on an average, over a period
of forty-five years! You'll agree there's not
much guesswork in saying that during those
forty-five years the average cost of plowing,
harrowing, planting, cultivating and harvest-
ing an acre of corn, together with the items
of seed, interest, taxes, depreciation of ma-
chinery, and such-like, amounted to more
than any man's eleven dollars. And that
list of costs includes only fixed charges; it
takes no account of extraordinary items of any
sort. There's no getting away from the propo-
sition that in those forty-five years of corn-
growing the average farmer suffered a net loss
on every acre of corn grown and sold from his
farm. That's just another way of saying that
the total crop of those forty-five years brought
the farmers less than it cost them to produce it.

There's just one thing that's kept all those

162 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

farmers at work through all those years grow-
ing all that corn; and that's the happy-go-
lucky way they have of keeping no accounts
with their business, so that they never know
how they stand in a profit and loss reckoning
with any crop. When the experts publish
their estimates, along in the fall, it's so very
easy to say: "My, but we're prosperous this
year! The farmers have raised $10,000,000,000
worth of stuff!" But what of it? That's only
about $800 apiece for the farmers; and out of
that they must pay the whole year's cost of
running their business. A bumper wheat crop
is needed every year for paying interest on the
farmers' debts — not the profit on that crop,
mind you, but the gross price. The cost of
producing that wheat the farmers have to pay
in some other way. A bumper corn crop, sold
at average farm price, gives the farmers of the
nation only $100 a head in gross returns. The
magnificence of totals that run up into billions
may be mighty misleading.

I'm not setting out to be cheerless in telling
the farmer's story in this way; I'm just trying
to tell you how our minds worked in figuring
out our theory for the management of our own
farm. As I've said before, we had it settled

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 163

that we didn't want to farm unless we felt
pretty sure that we could beat average farm-
ing.

We had lived through some years in Ne-
braska that were a lot worse than the averages
I've written of — years when the corn growers
got no more than twelve or fifteen cents a
bushel for their grain at harvest; when the
product of an acre would bring only three dol-
lars or less. Some of them sold for what they
could get; others let their crops rot on the
ground rather than fool with harvesting and
marketing. They made more money out of
their corn in the long run than those who sold.
There's the point I'm trying to get at. There's
an item in the economy of corn farming that's
been left out of the farmers' reckoning through
all the years.

The farmers of those days — and that's only
twenty years ago — who let their corn go off
their farms for fifteen cents a bushel would
have done better if they had turned cattle into
their fields to eat up the crop at harvest — and
then given the cattle away for nothing.

Every bushel of corn that's hauled away
from the land that grew it takes with it fifteen
cents in fertility value. If you're feeding that

164 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

corn to livestock and taking care of all manure,
to be returned to the land, you're saving most
of that fifteen cents. If you're not putting it
back that way, sooner or later you'll have to
put it back in some other and most likely a
more expensive way.

So, if you're feeding forty-cent corn to
growing hogs or cattle, and saving fifteen cents
out of that to go back to your land as ferti-
lizer, that part of the grain that's making the
gain in weight of your animals is costing only
twenty-five cents.

To put it another way: If you're selling a
fifty-bushel crop of corn to a neighbor, you're
giving him $7.50 that you're not figuring on;
and if you're buying the fifty bushels from him
to be fed to your own cattle and hogs, you'll
get that $7.50 for the enrichment of your land,
besides the profit you make in feeding.

Now suppose that's kept up for ten years.
Suppose you've raised fifty bushels of corn to
the acre for that time and have sold it at har-
vest. There's a total of $75 an acre that your
land has lost in fertility. There's no three-
shell trickery about it, either; it's clean gone,
and it's gone to stay. Perhaps you haven't
missed it yet; it may be that your methods of

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 165

handling your soil, with deep plowing and good
cultivation, have made available each year a
new supply of nitrogen and potash and phos-
phorus, so that you've been able to take off
fifty bushels of corn to the acre right along.
You may do it for a few years more. But you
can't keep it up indefinitely, not on the richest
soil outdoors. Take away fifty bushels of corn
from an acre of land every year, with nothing
put back to take the place of that fertility, and
the time's coming when, no matter how good a
farmer you are nor how good your land was to
start with, you can't do it any longer. There's
the whole story of the "worn out farms" that
everybody's talking about.

Liming a failing soil may put off the evil
day. But lime doesn't give you new nitrogen
and potash and phosphorus ; it merely helps in
"breaking down" some of the combinations al-
ready in the soil. The day will come when lim-
ing won't help any more. Crop rotation, too,
may postpone the reckoning, particularly if
you're using the nitrogen storers in your ro-
tation; but what about the potash and the
phosphorus? The long and short of it is that,
no matter what your rotation, if you're grow-
ing crops and selling them all away from your

166 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

land, one of these times you'll have to change
your system or take your place in the ranks
with all the rest of the careless farmers who
have played that careless game in that same
careless way.

It's plainer if we stick to corn for the illus-
tration. The plain English and the plain logic
of it is that if you've been growing corn per-
sistently on your fields and selling it away,
you'll certainly have to put hack that fertility
some time ; and if you put it back as commer-
cial fertilizer, it will cost you fifteen cents or
better to provide what a bushel of corn will
take off. Besides, you'll not be able to make
your soil as good as it was by using commercial
fertilizer; to do that, you'll have to change its
physical character. Feeding it chemicals won't
do it.

I seem to be trying to talk like a textbook,
making a lot of argument about a theory. I
shouldn't be doing that if the theory didn't
apply so perfectly, and illustrate itself so thor-
oughly by the past, present and future of our
own farm. Ours was an infertile farm when
we got it simply because the old practices had
been followed in handling it for so long.

Up in the prairie country we had seen farm-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 167

ing "come back" when conditions changed so
as to give the farmers handy and profitable
markets for livestock, and when hogs and cat-
tle were put upon the farms to eat the crops
there. That was the beginning of prosperity;
prosperity could continue only upon that basis ;
and only those might share in it who adopted
the new practice. Just about the best feature
of it was that the farmers who were feeding
livestock on their land and carefully putting
back the manure were providing a reserve fund
of prosperity whose value was all too little
known. Not many of them had taken the
proposition apart, wheel and spindle and screw,
to see just how it worked; so they were still
blundering a little ; but even at that they were
blundering along in the right direction.

Remembrance of that prairie farm drama,
as we had seen it, gave us plenty to think about
in planning our scheme here. The more we
thought it over, the more it appeared that
farming simply isn't and simply can't be made
a business of one year's crop-growing alone,
nor of the crop-growing of any number of un-
related years. That way lies failure. Through
the interlocking years of the life of the farm
there must run an uninterrupted, constructive

168 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

idea. The science of farming isn't merely a
hodge-podge of detached facts ; it's a big idea,
with the facts grouped around it. The indi-
vidual farm, if it's to succeed, must have some-
thing of that form. Why, you might just as
well pile up a lot of bricks hit-or-miss and ex-
pect to get a finished piece of architecture as to
stick to the old scrappy way of "working the
land" and expect to build a successful farm.

Our concern was to build a farm, to make a
farm that would grow richer and better and
more fruitful year after year. It would not
satisfy us merely to haul fertility upon the
land and distribute it around. We would do
that, of course, as one of the means to our end,
whenever it could be done to advantage in
hastening the work of putting our fields in
condition for cropping; but to rely upon out-
side sources of fertility was too crude to serve
as anything more than a temporary aid. If
the success of our farm must depend upon the
use of manure taken from our neighbors who
ought to be using it upon their own land, and
whose farms would be running down because
of their failure to use it, then farming as a
whole would show itself vitally weak. Do you

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 169

see the point I'm trying to get at? Well, let
me put it in another way.

We had a badly run-down farm. With no
great stretch of imagination you might liken it
to a man whose constitution had been under-
mined, his vitality left at low ebb, by dissipa-
tion, or overwork, or disease, or anything you
like. A man in that case might be helped over
an acute attack of the Trembling Willies by a
drastic use of drugs; but if he's ever to be a
real man again, with the constitution and use-
fulness of a man, that constitution must be
built up from within. The functioning of his
own organism must do the trick in really get-
ting him back to normal.

That's exactly how we looked at our prob-
lem on this farm. If there was any help for
the present and any hope for the future in the
new scientific farming, we must be able to
build this farm up from within, provided we
could hit upon the right methods.

Those methods, if they were right, must be
simple, practical, reasonable; and they must
render it possible to build up the farm to the
point where it would begin to return a fair
measure of profit upon investment and opera-
tion without too great an outlay of time and

170 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

money. That is to say, we must be able to get
a "going" business under conditions and at a
cost that would be justified under ordinary
sensible business principles. Anybody could
get the results we wanted by an unlimited use
of money. That would be a job for a wealthy
amateur bent upon a demonstration. Any-
body might get the results eventually after a
lot of experimenting with this way and that,
watching for mistakes and correcting them as
their effects cropped up. That would be a job
for a man who had retired from active life and
had taken to farming as an interesting way of
killing time. But to get good results with
minimum outlay of time and money — that was
what we were after.

Now I swear I'm done with argument about
the theoretical end of the matter. I wanted to
sum up the problem for you as we faced it after
a couple of years of work on the farm, when
the first rough jobs were pretty well done,
when our land was in condition to begin real
production, and when we had had time to get
ourselves past the green stage and were able
to think like farmers.

Here's the answer we gave to ourselves for
our problem, boiled down to the last word:

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 171

We would use thorough methods of han-
dling the soil, as a matter of course, in plowing
and cultivation, so that the texture of the soil
would be improved by every mechanical means
consistent with sound economy.

We would adopt a system of cropping and
of crop rotation making the fullest possible
use of those plants which store in the soil free
nitrogen gathered from the air. These plants
with their fine root systems would be of great
aid in improving the soil's texture, and they
would give us in abundance and at low cost
that element of plant food which is the most
expensive of all if bought in commercial forms.

So far as possible every cultivable square
rod of the farm would be kept at work pro-
ducing something at all times of the year.
Here was a departure from good farming as
we had seen it practiced in the North. Our
milder winters compelled a change if we would
make the most of conditions. Instead of hard,
prolonged freezes and heavy snows that would
lie for days or weeks, we would have light
freezes with long, mild intervals, and our win-
ter moisture would fall more often as rain than
snow. Fall plowing and winter fallowing
would only subject the fields to wash, with no

172 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

compensation. We would practice fall plow-
ing only when the fields would carry a winter
cover-crop of some sort — small grain, or rape,
or winter vetch, to be pastured in winter or
cut in the spring.

So far as possible, every blade and stem of
everything grown on the land, even the weeds,
would be turned to account — fed to livestock
on the place, or returned to the soil for humus.
We've had brush fires at Happy Hollow on
our newly cleared land ; but in all our six years
no man has seen a wisp of anything burned
that might be plowed under. But, oh, the fires
weVe seen on the lands up and down the val-
ley! I wish I had the money they've cost the
farmers since we've been here.

To the uttermost of our ability, everything
needed on the farm for food of man and beast
would be produced here. If at any time the
field crops of hay or forage or grain would
show a surplus above the year's needs of the
farm, new stock would be bought to consume
this surplus — hogs or young milk cattle by
choice.

And then, for the ultimate rule toward
which all the others tended, nothing would
leave the farm save in the most finished form

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 173

we could give it. That means that we would
sell nothing but farm-fed animals or animal
products. To the limit, every direct product
of the soil and every by-product of our feeding
would remain strictly at home.

There, we said, was a working plan that
ought really to work. It took us two good
years to evolve it, to convince ourselves that it
was right, that it was consistent with good
sense and with itself, and that in our particular
case, considering everything, it gave fair rea-
son to expect success. We weren't doubtful
of success, you understand; we were bound
we'd succeed with the farm somehow ; the open
question had been whether this plan was the
best we could fix upon for insuring success.

I think we had done mighty well through
those first two years in not running foul of any
of those rainbow enthusiasms — you can hardly
call them ideas — which so often allure the in-
experienced townsman upon finding himself
suddenly possessed of a bit of land. You
know what I mean — the visions of quick and
vast riches to be achieved on a fraction of an
acre devoted to growing zim-zim, or go-goo, or
some other of those marvels of the soil. We
hadn't been even tempted that way.

174 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Once, in my newspaper days, I had been as-
signed to write a series of spring-time articles
that would relate the happy experiences of
some of our townsmen who had made good
with such ventures — stories of back-yard cor-
ners that had made neat little fortunes. The
stories ought to be crisp and snappy, and they
must be literally true. My editor thought it
would be pretty clever to spring such a series.
Folks would be surprised, not to say startled,
to discover that such things were going on un-
suspected under their very noses.

So they might have been, if only we could
have found the material. I spent two weeks
looking for it. I found plenty of people who
had had the vision; I found any number who
had loaded up with the enticing literature of
these bonanzas; I found scores who would
shamefacedly admit having started a mush-
room bed in the cellar, or a ginseng patch out
beside the barn, or a planting of patent per-
petual-motion strawberries, or a garden of
high-priced herbs, or something or other; but
I couldn't discover a soul who had been able
to make any one of these ventures pay back
even the money it had cost him to start. Re-
luctantly we gave up that series.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 175

"Well, then," my editor said, "let's get some-
thing a little different. Get some stories about
some of the farmers around here who have
made big, quick money at farming. Some-
thing splashy and stunning and romantic —
that's what I want. Go to it!"

So I went to it ; but I couldn't find a single,
solitary story of that sort, either, though I dug
and dug and dug. I found well-to-do farmers
enough, and some who were comfortably rich ;
but the only story they could give me was one
of patient, persevering thrift, of difficulties
mastered by hard thinking and hard work and
— patience; always patience.

My editor abandoned his project, but that
experience stayed in my memory. I'm inclined
to believe it was that experience quite as much
as any native good judgment that restrained
me from attempting to do impossible things or
expecting impossibly quick results.

But I avow and shall maintain it was good
judgment that kept our energies concentrated
upon one central and definite plan of opera-
tion instead of scattered over many and vari-
ous ventures in quest of early cash income.

For instance, there's potato growing.
There's nothing visionary about the potato.

176 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Potato farming is solid and sound as a busi-
ness. In this hill country there are potato
specialists who have made good money on this
one product, year in and year out. We might
have justified ourselves easily in planting five
or ten acres to potatoes as a revenue producer.
But we didn't. We have contented ourselves
with growing potatoes for farm use and no
more.

And there's the strawberry. This is quite a
strawberry country, and the growers who have
gone about it right have found strawberry
growing quite profitable. We might quite
sanely have decided to cast an anchor to wind-
ward by setting out a few acres of berries. But
we didn't. With all the fruits we have held
ourselves down to just enough for home con-
sumption.

There's some land on the farm well suited to
celery. Well handled, that's a profitable crop,
too. So is duck-raising profitable if one goes
at it in the right way; so is tomato-growing; so
is flower culture. There are dozens of things
that promise and actually deliver profits to the
farmer who puts his mind to them. We might,
without being a speck visionary, have tried half
a dozen of these things all at once, on the theory

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 177

that we'd be likely to make something out of
two or three of them anyway. That seems like
a prudent line of conduct, doesn't it? But we
didn't tackle any special product on a com-
mercial scale. Looking back over these years,
I'm certainly glad we didn't.

And why? Because, once we had started on
such a program, before we knew it we'd have
found ourselves all "balled up" with a number
of wholly unrelated projects, each one calling
for special knowledge, special equipment, spe-
cial care, and each carrying, beside its promise
of possible profit, its own private and particu-
lar veiled threat of loss. The inexperienced
man who plunges on any specialty usually
must pocket losses instead of profit while he's
getting experience. The production of any
perishable crop in quantity for market calls
for skill in growing, and also it demands keen
attention to marketing. We have known many
an enthusiastic beginner to be overwhelmed
and utterly discouraged by having on his hands
a big perishable crop he didn't know how to
dispose of.

We don't intend always to leave such crops
out of our reckoning. Sure as shooting, before
long I'll start my vineyard of fancy table

178 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

grapes; and so soon as we have some of our
land in perfect condition for it I shall under-
take the production of fancy potatoes for high-
class hotel trade. There are two or three other
things I'd like to try on a commercial scale
by and by. But those will be projects stand-
ing each on its own bottom; and before I'm
committed to any one of them I'll make sure
of the marketing end of the business.

We didn't want our farming in its earlier
years to consist of a mixed lot of side-lines,
each independent of all the others. That is, we
didn't want the responsibility of managing
half a dozen farms until we had found out how
to manage one successfully. So we decided
to stick to our stock farming; and until we
would get that firmly established we would not
undertake the production of any crop not di-
rectly and intimately related to the central
idea of stock-growing. We saved confusion.
We lived in no fear of wastes through having
unsalable products on our hands; for every-
thing we grew would be staple at all times even
if we were not able to feed it all to animals on
the farm. Of great importance, stock farming
gave us a year practically free of periods of
high excitement and extraordinary demands

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 179

for labor and such-like. At Happy Hollow
we have been able to keep men and teams stead-
ily at work the year round, with no dull in-
tervals of idleness, and with only occasionally
a need for extra "hands."

Best of all, though, stock farming enabled
us to do exactly what we had set out to do —
to build up the farm from within itself, to re-
store its wasted vitality, to make its fertility
certainly and perpetually self -renewing.

IX

ONCE we had as a guest the junior editor of
one of the foremost farm journals of the coun-
try— a most delightful chap, alive with en-
thusiasm; and learned, too, in the science of
farming. He knew the literature of the new
farming from A to Izzard. In my talk with
him I picked up no end of good, solid, meaty
information; formulae, and field methods, and
suggestions about low-cost balanced rations for
growing pigs, and — oh, all sorts of clever
"wrinkles." I thought a great deal of him and
of his practical sense of things.

The first evening he was with us we had for
dinner green sweet peppers, stuffed with some-
thing and baked. You know how good they
are! Our friend liked them; he ate a second
and a third with his cloved baked ham.

"Fine!" he said. "You didn't know it, of
course; but you couldn't have done me a
greater kindness than by having these peppers.

180

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 181

I'm very, very fond of them. But how do you
get them, away out here?"

Laura pointed to the garden that lay just
outside the dining-room window. "We merely
go out and pick them," she said.

"Not— not here?" he questioned. "You
don't mean to say that you grow them your-
selves!"

Nothing would do but that he must leave the
table, right in the middle of dinner, and go out
to the garden to take a look at those peppers
growing. It wasn't "put on," either; he was
genuinely interested as he knelt to study the
luxuriant plants laden with their waxy-green
pods.

"It's ridiculous!" he said. "Why, I've al-
ways thought the pepper something exotic —
tropical — I don't know. I pay enough for one
when I have it on my hotel table at home. And
to think you can have all you want, grown right
here beside your house! But it isn't done
much, is it?" He was quite a little "bashed"
by the discovery. His mind kept coming back
to it again and again. After dinner, while we
smoked, he spoke without the embarrassment
he had shown at first.

"I ought to have known better, of course, in

182 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

my place. That was an inexcusable lapse.
But I'm not alone. We're all guilty of vast
ignorance about the commonest things; the
commoner and more familiar they are, the less
we know about them. It's taken us ages even
to observe some of the simplest phenomena, to
say nothing of trying to understand them.
For all our smartness, we're terribly ignorant."

I guess he was dead right about that, though
he'd been wrong in his notion about the pep-
pers. I've told you that little story, not for
the sake of poking fun at him for his mistake,
but because his afterthought makes such a
bully statement of the sum of our own experi-
ence in ignorance. It's very curious

Wait a minute, though ! While I'm telling
jokes on the professionals, there's another one
I must tell. If I don't tell it now, I'm liable
to forget it and leave it out altogether, which
would be a pity.

There used to be a "hoss doctor" in the coun-
try here. He wasn't a veterinarian ; he wouldn't
have known what that meant. He was just a
"hoss doctor" whose knowledge of his work
had been "picked up," a little here and a little
there and not too much anywhere. He man-
aged to get along pretty well with the general

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 183

run of spavins and ringbones and "hollow-
tail," taking in a dollar or two now and then,
and getting some of his pay from the farmers
in trade. No, he didn't do a land-office busi-
ness ; but it beat working, anyway.

Well, one day a farmer friend of ours had
an old horse fall sick — genuinely sick. As the
"hoss doctor" happened to be the only man
handy who might be able to help, he was called.
The case troubled him. By the time he got
there, the poor beast was down and out; he
was all in; he was gone up — that is to say, he
looked sort of scattered, which is a bad sign.
The doctor couldn't make out what was the
matter.

"Ef he was only swole up some," he said,
"it might be the colic. But he ain't. Nor there
ain't no thin' the matter with his feet. I've saw
'em ga'nted up like that with the milk- fever;
only this is a geldin'. I don't b'lieve I can
make out what's ailin' him. You might try
rubbin' him with turkentime; sometimes that
pearts 'em up a little. If he was mine, I
reckon I'd jest wait an' see how he gits."

They met in town a few days later. "Oh,
say, Mister !" the "hoss doctor" said. "I b'lieve

184 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

I know now what's the matter with that hoss
of your'n."

"Yes," the farmer returned grimly, "so do
I know what's the matter with him now. He's
dead."

"No, but listen!" the doctor urged. "I run
acrost a picture in the almanac that it said had
that same kind of a complaint. I don't know
how you'd pronounce it, but the way it was
spelled was d-e-b-i-1-i-t-y — de-bil-2/-ty, I guess
you'd call it. I'm tol'able sure that's what
ailed him!"

That struck us as funny when we heard it;
but it's not a speck funnier than many and
many a "break" we made in getting acquainted
with the land. It's just everlastingly interest-
ing to me to discover how stone blind a man
may be in his mind who has gone through life
with his two eyes open. Wasn't it Ruskin
who remarked that the gift of understanding
sight is the rarest of all — rarer even than abil-
ity to think? There's a lot in that. After the
experience of these years, I'd be willing to bet
money, marbles or chalk that I could take any
farmer I know into his own yard, only a couple
of rods from his own door, and lose him com-
pletely in a maze of familiar things. Just to

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 185

show you what I mean: I've asked a score or
more of commercial orchardists hereabouts if
they could tell me offhand how many petals an
apple blossom has, and they've guessed all the
way from four to a dozen. I've talked with
farmers who couldn't say for sure whether a
cow's hoof is split or entire. I've talked with
farmers who simply didn't know how a pea-
pod is attached to the vine. I've talked with
farmers who had been looking pigs in the face
all their lives but who couldn't tell to save them
how a pig's snout appears from the front.
Extreme cases? No, they're not. You try it
on the next farmer you meet. Ask him
whether the germ side of a kernel of corn on
the ear lies toward the tip or the butt. Ask
him to tell you, in feet and inches, about how
long a horse's head is from the base of its ears
to its nostrils. Show him a fake picture of a
potato plant in bloom and ask him to tell you
what's wrong with it. Let me tell you, you
have some surprises in store for you if you're
expecting accuracy.

What kept bothering me for two or three
years was the feeling of strangeness out of
doors under the unfamiliar conditions. Inas-
much as this is meant to be a perfectly honest

186 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

story, I might as well tell you honestly that it
was right here at Happy Hollow I first
learned to know fear — real Simon-pure, primi-
tive animal fear. You've felt it, most likely, at
one time or another. I felt it more than once
when I began to wander around over the farm
and through the woods on dark nights. Silly?
Why, of course it was silly; but that doesn't
change the fact. In my newspaper days I'd
had all sorts of face-to-face encounters with
fire and flood and disaster, earthquake and
wreck and sudden death, and the worst of it
all had never sent a quiver of personal fear
through me. I don't pretend to understand
the psychology of it. Maybe it was because
there was always "something doing" to keep
the mind busy — action, and excitement, and
bright lights, and such-like. But it was
mighty different when it came to taking a foot-
trail across the farm and over the mountain on
a still, dark night, alone. There's no wild
creature in our country bigger than a 'coon or
a red fox; but there were such queer, large
sounds in the thickets and the deep tangles —
breathings, and stirrings, and murmurings, all
the more eerie because they had no name. If
you've never been against it yourself, just

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 1ST

fancy that you're afoot on one of those rough
paths winding up a mountainside through the
deep woods, without knowing where you are or
just where you're coming out. There's no one
with you to talk to ; you're plumb alone. And
it's dark — not pitch-black, but a deep, murky
darkness that your eyes can get used to just
enough to let you make out dimly the gray,
ghostly line of the trail and the huge bulk of
the hill and the vaulted trees. There's no wind
stirring to make a ripple on the profound
quiet ; all you can hear is that pulsing, rustling
quiver that is more like silence than sound.

Writers of fiction always resort to the cheap
trick of making a twig snap to startle a body
in such a case. That's pure buncombe. Twigs
don't snap. I haven't heard a twig snap in all
these years in the woods unless I stepped on it
myself. I've wished sometimes that one would
snap, just to break the melancholy lonesome-
ness. I'll tell you what does happen, though.
Right at the instant when your senses are on
the keen stretch and you're stumbling blindly
along, more than half persuaded that you've
lost your way, some little critter that's crouch-
ing beside the path — a young cottontail, more
than likely — gives a sudden hop ; and then you

188 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

jump; and then the rabbit jumps and goes
scuttling away in a panic of wild alarm, and
then the short hair at the back of your neck
gets that cold, crawly feeling — and you're
scared. You needn't tell me you're not, be-
cause I know better. It's all the same if it
happens to be a baby-sized gray owl that sets
up a sudden mocking, elfish chuttering on a
low branch close overhead — you're scared.
I've been scared badly enough to make my
heart skip a couple of beats when a fat old toad
that was squatted in the middle of the trail
bounced up from between my feet and plopped
off into the weeds. It's not a nice feeling; it
makes a man ashamed of himself when he
thinks about it; but being ashamed won't stop
it. That takes time; time enough to get over
being an alien.

The same feeling — not of fear, but of
strangeness — crept into our relations with our
soil in the earlier years. I dare say every
townsman who takes to farming goes at his
work with a firmly fixed notion that he's going
out to meet Goliath in combat — that he's pit-
ting his intelligence against some rude, primal
force in Nature that's opposed to him and that
will overpower him if it can.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 189

That's ignorance. There's nothing friend-
lier in all this world than the good brown earth
itself if only you can rid yourself of the feeling
that its forces are fighting against you.
They're not. If you persist in thinking so, and
persist in fighting back, you're in pretty much
the state of mind of the man who stays awake
all night trying to drive the little green monkey
off the foot of his bed. You're seeing things
that don't exist. Do you suppose that feeling
may be just a survival of the old time when
men believed in a tribe of gods and demons
who rode the wind and the clouds and the sun
and trifled with human affairs in a reckless,
devil-may-care sort of way? I shouldn't won-
der. There's a lot that's primitive still alive in
the best of us. But maybe it's only the skit-
tishness of plain ignorance.

There's a mighty good way to exorcise those
irresponsible spirits, if they beset you and
you're afraid they're going to put their spell
on your land. Beat them to it! Just go cou-
rageously and serenely out, set your feet
squarely on the soil and put your own spell
upon it by doing some plain, every-day think-
ing judiciously mixed with some plain, every-
day hard work! That's all there is to it.

190 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Does that talk seem too hifalutin? I guess
not. Most of you will get the gist of it, any-
way. It's natural enough, I dare say, that a
man should feel odd and awkward and doubt-
ful in the first stages of a new life ; but it's bet-
ter to get over that feeling so soon as you can.
Your work doesn't really begin until that mood
is past.

All your soil wants from you is a sign that
you're inclined to be friendly and that you're
honestly trying to understand. Take this from
me: Once that sign is given, once you do
really put your mind upon your work, forth-
with all the kinks have begun to straighten out.
After that, you may do just what you like with
your land. The soil isn't stubborn ; it isn't the
least bit inclined to hold back on you and to
yield its secrets and its fruits grudgingly. The
clay is not more plastic to the hand of the pot-
ter than the soil is plastic to the mind of the
thinking farmer. He may do just what he
wills with it.

There were spots on our farm that had long
ago been given up as hopeless, not worth the
effort of reclaiming them. No raw townsman
could be more timid than our tenant had been
about making those spots of some account.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 191

He'd made up his mind that it couldn't be
done, and so he didn't try.

One of those spots makes a part of the wheat
field — a twelve-acre piece that was sown last
fall to a fine beardless variety of red wheat.
The field has been harvested to-day. On the
older part, the part that was cleared and in
use before we bought the farm, the yield will
be twenty-seven or twenty-eight bushels to the
acre; on the new part, the part we've added,
we'll get ten bushels better.

The first work in clearing that neglected
corner I did with my own ax, three years ago
last winter. Part of it was stony, and part
formed a low basin where the water would
stand through the spring; but the character of
the wild growths — blackberry and sumac and
tangled wild grapevines — showed that the soil
was rich. It was no slouch of a job to get the
rank stuff cut and piled for burning, for it
stood upon the ground almost as thick as the
wheat itself. But it was done by and by, and
then Sam came to help with the rock-hauling.
We lost count of the number of loads we
moved, but when we were through with it we
had a rough, heavy rock wall built along the
bank of the near-by creek that had been catch-

192 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ing the wash from this field for years and
years.

The first year's use of the new corner didn't
amount to much. The land was so wet that we
couldn't give it its first plowing until early
summer was upon us, and even then the break-
ing wasn't what you'd call a good job. Roots
and snags were too thick. We did the best we
could, crossing and re-crossing it, taking every
chance to let the plow go deep, tearing at the
subsoil. Most farmers I think would have
taken the easier way of ditching or tiling, to
be rid of the excess water. Wherever we've
come across such spots, though, we've tried
thorough subsoiling first. Invariably we've
found a clay "pan" beneath the surface that
might be turned up and worked into the soil,
making it possible for water to sink into the
subsoil. I'd rather have it stored there for
midsummer than to let it run away through a
ditch in the spring. Without laying a foot of
tile on the farm, we've reclaimed ten or a dozen
acres here and there that the tenant hadn't
tried to use at all.

In the first year we made a late sowing of
sorghum and cowpeas on that recovered cor-
ner, sowing heavily so that the growth might

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 193

serve to check the sprouts from the old roots.
We fed a lot of that green through the sum-
mer, and in October we got about three tons
of fine hay to the acre. There's one of the
happiest of hay combinations. Sorghum alone
by its rank growth makes a heavy draft upon
soil nitrogen and so tends to impoverishment;
but if you put two or three pecks of sorghum
with four or five of cowpeas, nitrogen is com-
ing in faster than it goes out, so your soil is
growing better. And when you cut your hay
you have something — a well balanced ration,
the cane supplying the carbohydrates which
the pea- vines lack, and the vines supplying the
proteids which the cane lacks. You can't
beat it.

The first crop helped that new land no end,
and the hay we cut was worth here about $15
a ton. For the second year we plowed again
across and across, going deeper than before
and tearing out wagonloads of roots and small
stumps. Our cowpea-sorghum crop was re-
peated, but we were able to plant much earlier,
as the surface water bothered us very little.
And then last fall, when the hay was cut, our
wheat was sown after a new breaking and a
thorough harrowing and dragging. This

194 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

spring, though we've had uncommonly heavy
rains throughout the winter and the early
spring months, the trouble with standing water
wasn't worth mentioning; and on that re-
claimed spot the wheat is heavier and finer
than on any other part of the field.

We made that "go" mostly because we re-
fused to believe, as many of the neighbors said,
that the conditions were all hostile and that we
couldn't fairly hope to win in a fight. In par-
ticular they told us we were all wrong with
our deep plowing, that the way to handle wet
land was just to "skin" it with the plow. But
we knew of one example in the neighborhood
of a low, wet field that had been "skun," and
we didn't like the looks of it. Tenant farmers
have been handling the land for years, with
corn and corn and nothing but corn. It's a
long time since the plow has gone deeper than
three inches — just deep enough to allow of
dropping the corn in a shallow bed. Almost
invariably the seed is planted in thick mud.
Though the soil is of a high type, that sort of
treatment makes it bake badly; and the culti-
vator, instead of making a powdery mulch,
tears it up into tough clods that bake hard as
bricks. Cultivation must be abandoned before

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 195

the beginning of summer; and of course the
corn has a hard fight for it through the rest of
the season against heavy grass and weeds.
There's no help for it with that manner of
treatment. If good farmers ever get hold of
that field, they'll have harder work reclaiming
it from the tenants' abuse than if they tackled
it quite in the rough.

We've taken great pride in working out half
a dozen or more of those ugly waste places,
and in doing it we've learned to waggle our
fingers at all the hostile powers of earth and
air. The tenants on that cloddy field below,
if they're inclined that way, might easily be-
lieve that the gods are against them. The
crops they get ought to go far to confirm them.
What's that you say? No great harm in nurs-
ing that belief if it pleases them? Yes, but
there is, though. The man who thinks that
way is going to slacken his arm, and the gimp
will go out of his step, and his mind will lose
its bounce, and right in the middle of summer
he'll own himself beaten. I'll leave it to you
that that's no way. If there is any such thing
as a rule for good farming, it is that the time
never comes to relax effort to make something
out of a growing crop.

196 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Another of the waste corners now carries
our best asparagus bed. Here ran one of the
old rail fences, grown up with briars and per-
simmon bushes and pokeberry and careless-
weed. When we had the row cleaned out it
was manured and plowed as deeply as the
plows could be sunk, then trenched and ma-
nured again and worked over and over. Laura
set the young crowns — a quarter of an acre;
a space larger than a town lot. She wouldn't
have help, for that bed was to be one of the
permanent assets of her housekeeping.

That was four years ago. Are you fond of
asparagus? Did you ever have all you wanted?
Let me ask you this : Did you ever try to keep
it eaten as fast as it can come up on a well-
tended quarter of an acre? You haven't done
any real asparagus eating till you've tried it
that way. That store asparagus — shucks!
Pale, listless, stringy stuff, spindling and
wilted, with only a little nubbin at one end
that's fit to eat, and you have to make a nui-
sance of yourself at the table sucking even that
little bit of "goody" out. That's no way.

When we have asparagus for dinner, it's cut
late in the afternoon, so it may go on to cook
before the fresh, snappy crispness has gone

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 197

out of it. Cutting the mess is my job. The
thin, thready sprouts don't go into the basket ;
they're left on the ground. What I'm after is
the lusty, vigorous shoot, thick as your thumb,
that's made its six or eight inches of growth
since morning and is standing straight as a
soldier. I don't thrust my knife clear down
to the crown in cutting as the market growers
do, but cut close to the surface, well above all
woody fiber. To the last fraction of an inch
it's brittle and tender as a lettuce heart, and so
full of juice that it drips. Now, you take
asparagus like that, and let it be cooked just to
the careful turn where it loses its raw taste
without losing its firmness, and then let it come
upon the table well drained and dressed with
sweet butter and a dash of pepper and salt, and
all piping hot — man, man, but that's eating!
It takes a big dishful to go round at our house,
and even then I'm always nervous lest it give
out.

Just one good spring dinner with asparagus
a-plenty pays in delight for all the work we've
done on that bed — and we've had a hundred
of those dinners since the bed was set. And
that, mind you, was made out of an odd patch
of ground that nobody had ever thought worth

198 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

working over. Our vineyard, too, stands on
one of those redeemed corners; and last year
we had cantaloupe and watermelons on an-
other— melons by the hundred; rich, deep-
fleshed, luscious fellows stretching over a sea-
son of weeks and weeks through the hot middle
of summer when nothing else will quite take
the place of a good melon. We're fonder of
our Rocky Fords than of anything else that
comes out of the garden — unless it's a platter
of plump, sweet, tender Country Gentleman
corn — or maybe a creamy cauliflower. I don't
know : new potatoes and sugar peas aren't bad,
if they're brought in right fresh from the vines
without a chance to wilt. A dead ripe, meaty
tomato sliced over a buttery, crisp lettuce-
heart is pretty good, too, especially when you
flatter yourself that you know how to mix a
French dressing that's just the least bit better
than anybody else's. And did you ever eat a
sauce of tender young beets dressed with good
butter and homemade peach vinegar creamed
up together? You ought to try that. Oh —
and I'm near to forgetting the cucumbers.
Maybe you don't know how good a cucumber
can be. Most people don't. Most people are
perfectly willing to tell the grocer over the

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 199

telephone that they want some cucumbers — •
he's just to pick out a couple of nice ones —
and then they're stolidly content with what
they get. One of the two will be a big, bloated
thing, turning yellow on one side and as tough
and tasteless as a piece of blotting paper, and
the other a grass-green little affair with one
end shrunken and twisted over like the neck of
a gourd. And those are cucumbers ! It serves
a body right for expecting to get cucumbers
out of a grocery store.

There's only one place to get a real cucum-
ber, and that's right fresh from a real cucum-
ber vine in a real garden. Not any old cu-
cumber vine will do ; it must be a real one. The
hill it grows in must have been built up to the
very pink of perfection in soil ; the seed that's
planted in the hill must come from the cucum-
ber aristocracy; and from the day it thrusts its
first tender leaves out of the ground the plant
must have the most unremitting care. It must
be nursed, and watered, and forced to its quick-
est growth, and then be nipped back so that
its whole succulence and vigor will go into a
chosen small number of fruits. When those
fruits are ready they'll be good to look at — •
straight and plump and just of a certain inde-

200 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

scribable shade of tender green that isn't seen
anywhere outside a garden. On the last day
they'll grow like soap-bubbles ; between morn-
ing and evening, if you aren't watchful, they'll
reach the line of perfection, leap over it, and be
far on the downward road. If you want one at
its best, you'd better mark the leaf it lies under
and then go out every once in a while and take
a peep. When you catch one just right, let
me tell you you're a lucky man. Nobody on
earth will have anything on you at dinner that
night.

It just does beat all what you can get out of
the warm, mellow earth if you'll only forget
the ignorant old notion that to work with the
soil is a bitter contest against tremendous odds.
If I felt like that, nothing could hire me to
strike another lick at farming. I'd be all
through, right now. But, feeling as I do,
nothing could make me quit it. In sober
truth, the ancient saying that men have been
taking so hard, "in the sweat of thy brow," is
a benediction instead of a curse.

We found that out in our third year at
Happy Hollow. I think that was our critical
time. In that year all fear passed. Instead
of the grim will to make our farm succeed, we

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 201

were beginning to enjoy the fullness of realiza-
tion. That couldn't have happened until we
had put aside our lurking fear, which is the
most inexcusable form of ignorance.

I'VE told you something about Jake, our
hill-man friend who used to chop wood for us
once in a while when his meal-sack was empty.
I've told you, too, that poor Jake is dead. He
was an odd chap ; but there was no bad in him,
so he must have been all good.

His mother has just been down to see us.
She doesn't know how old she is, but she is a
very old woman, much stooped and all
shrunken away in her husk. She always makes
me think of a line of Knickerbocker History
which observes that if a woman waxes fat as
she grows old her tenure of life is precarious,
"but if haply as the years pass she wither, she
lives forever." That's what Jake's mother
seems in a fair way of doing. She must be
well on toward ninety ; but her eyes are bright
with an unquenchable brightness. There was
a new light in them this morning.

She was very fond of Jake and very proud
of him, for a reason mothers have. Sometimes

202

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 203

it's not easy for an outsider to understand.
His death hurt her terribly. He wasn't her
support, he didn't contribute the meal and
meat she ate ; but in a way he helped her to get
her living. Up to the time of his taking off,
he and she were used to working together in
the woods, at either end of a crosscut saw, cut-
ting firewood at so much a "rick." Jake would
find the jobs and then let his mother take a
hand. She is still able to swing a heavy dou-
ble-bitted ax like a veteran woodsman. I'm
afraid she's going to miss Jake more than she
knows. It isn't every man who's willing to
hunt up work for so old a woman, even if she
happens to be his mother.

When she came down this morning she car-
ried clutched in her lean hand a little wad of
feathers crumpled and twisted together in a
loose sort of rope. She was excited and eager
when she held this out to let us see.

"That thar's Jake's crown!" she said in a
kind of elated awe. "Yist'day I ripped open
the piller he used to sleep on, an' I found thish -
yere, jest like I'm a-showin' it to you. Hit's
a shore sign Jake's gone to Heaven an' is
a-wearin' a crown up Yonder. My oP Mammy
tol' me that, an' she was a heap older woman

204 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

than what I be, an' she knowed. Yes, sir, she
knowed!"

Once, two or three years ago, when the win-
ter snows were too heavy to let her do much
work in the woods, she was pretty hard put to
it for a time. She used then to come down to
Happy Hollow in the mornings to get a little
milk. She wouldn't take it as a gift, and we
had learned to know her fine pride too well to
insist upon it. She kept tally some way; and
then one morning when a mild spell had set in
she appeared with her ax over her shoulder.

"I come to pay for that thar milk you-all
been lettin' me hev," she said. "Hit don't do
for folks not to pay for what they git, jest be-
cause they're pore." Nothing would do but
that she must spend the long morning on our
woodpile. What could we say? We let her do
as she wanted. She's a brave old soul! Her
whole life has been stripped down to the bare
bones of hard need, with never a moment's
hand-grip on even the least of life's advan-
tages. In all her years she has never read a
word nor seen with her own eyes anything that
lies beyond the rim of the hills that shut our
neighborhood in. What she knows of Holy
Writ has come to her obscurely in roundabout

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 205

ways, by poor word of mouth, mixed with chaff
and tares and smudged by the murky logic of
the interpreters. You'd be likely to say that
the path of her life hasn't been lit by any direct
illuminating rays. In spite of that she has
managed to keep a stanch steadfastness, a
simple piety, an almost fierce loyalty to her
standards. Don't call it crude. Such virtues
are never crude. To be frank, I don't feel en-
tirely sure on that point of Jake's crown; I'd
rather take chances on his mother's, even with-
out a sign or a portent to guarantee it.

Just about the best of the values we've got
from our life at Happy Hollow has been the
human value. I used to think I knew people
pretty well and could judge their motives
fairly ; but that was only a townsman's conceit.
Looking back, it's no trouble to see how mis-
taken some of those old notions were — pitifully
one-sided, thin-blooded, bad-tempered. One's
judgments of men change, not so much be-
cause the men themselves grow better or worse,
but rather because his own motives and man-
ner of judgment change. My way of measur-
ing folks has grown kindlier; that's how I
know it's juster, better.

If you're inclined to insist that the way to

206 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

come at an opinion of a man is to pick the flaws
in him and find out his weaknesses, you're not
likely to be happy in a country neighborhood.
I don't know why, but that way won't work in
a country neighborhood. Maybe it's because
the countryman falls into a calmer habit of
mind, so that other people may have their little
faults without irritating him. Maybe it's be-
cause neighbors are so few in the countryside
that we can't afford not to hunt out the best
we can find in each other and dwell upon that.
Whatever the reason, the associations of the
country are a lot simpler and freer than in
town. There's less of show about us, and so
less of the silly discontent that mere show
breeds. Only once in a long time does any of
us pretend to a social "affair"; mostly we just
visit round in the plain country way, taking
each other as we're found without the "dog."
Of course that gives us more time and better
chance for finding what's real and worth while
in each other; and that's all that counts, isn't
it?

Oh, yes, we have our little spells of being
offish, but they don't last. Often enough one
or another of the folks around here has miffed
us a bit or given us excuse for talking him over

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 207

and saying to ourselves how "queer" he was;
but that talk has always taken the other tack
before we were done with it.

"Never mind!" That's the way we're apt
to sum it up. "He's a good neighbor, take
him altogether. We shouldn't want to get
along without him." And at that we're not
trying merely to make the best of a poor busi-
ness. Our feeling for our neighbors amounts
to good, simple liking. That's the way it
ought to be. You can't get good from a man
— no, nor do him any good — by holding him in
low esteem. Out in the country we easily get
into the way of weeding the garden of our so-
cial relations as we weed out our kitchen gar-
dens and our flower beds, keeping them as free
as we can of nettles and cockleburs. It's not
hard work, once you get used to it, and it gives
you much to enjoy.

We've been out of sorts, time and again,
over something we felt to be a lapse in neigh-
borliness. We have a "stock law" here in the
hill country which requires every farmer to
keep his animals inclosed and makes him liable
for damages if they're allowed to stray. It's
a good enough law on the books, but it's ob-
served mostly only in the breach. Arkansas

208 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

folk have never grown used to building good
fences nor to keeping them up. When the
"natives" lived on the farms around us, their
cattle and pigs and mules were always wander-
ing in and tasting our growing crops. That's
irritating; no farmer likes it. We used to get
quite angry about it sometimes, when it ap-
peared that arguments and warnings did no
good. I suppose that anger was the towns-
man's habit persisting. You know you'd fuss
with a man if he lived on the next town lot to
yours and if his cow would come over and muss
up your lawn or trample your lettuce patch.
Without half trying you could work yourself
up to heated words and strained relations.
That's because you'd be able to get to him
right away before your temper would have
time to simmer down. But it would be differ-
ent if he lived half a mile away across the fields
and woods. Even if you set off at white heat
to see him about it, and rehearsed to yourself
all the way what you'd say to him, by the time
you got there you'd be cooled off in spite of
yourself, and your quarrel would be resolved
into nothing fiercer than a friendly glass of
cold buttermilk and a bit of friendly chat about
the look of the crops, with maybe a few words

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 209

at the last of mild suggestion that you really
ought to be getting together somehow about
that division fence. That's the way we've found
it. I don't take any stock at all now in the
romances about family feuds arising over
boundary lines and trespasses and such like.
They aren't reasonable among farmer-neigh-
bors.

There was one old man on a farm down the
valley who was a steady offender. He wasn't
exactly a farmer, though he lived on a farm;
that is, he didn't work at farming. He owned
a few cattle that rustled a living as they could
on the poor brush-land he called his pasture.
The pasture was inclosed in a happy-go-lucky
sort of way by a few strings of rusted old wire ;
but half the posts were rotted out and the wires
sagged along the ground or were caught up
and held in the tangle of bushes. The cows
found it no barrier; they strayed where they
would, and they were always coming into our
crops. The old man had no time to fix his
fences; he was too busy sitting on his porch
figuring out easy ways to get rich — if he only
had money enough to get some of his schemes
a-going. He was desperately poor, as poor

210 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

as his cattle, but his unfailing visions kept him
buoyantly cheerful.

I liked the old chap ; but I couldn't manage
to match his cheerfulness with those cows wan-
dering over the place. When their own pas-
tures grew short, they'd visit us two or three
times a week. Always the old man was full
of gentle sorrow; always he promised that it
wouldn't happen again; but it kept right on
happening until one day we shut the beasts up
and sent our neighbor word that he must pay
for the damage done. I was just hot enough
to insist upon it when he came over to see
about it. He was genuinely distressed. He
had no money, he said, but if I'd let him take
his cows home he'd "work it out" on the farm.
He worked for half a day at a couple of odd
jobs, then borrowed a couple of dollars for
some pressing need at home — and the next day
the cows were back again.

We stood for that sort of annoyance so long
as the easy-going folk of the old school were
about us. It didn't hurt us any. It was good,
human discipline. We came through those ex-
periences on friendly terms with everybody,
though we never got used to their ways, nor
they to ours. That isn't necessary, is it? The

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 211

best of life is give-and-take. Nobody really
thrives on having everything his own way.
That's plain enough; but we had to come to
the country to learn it.

We entered upon our fourth year of farm-
ing with forty acres of our land in fine condi-
tion for cropping, clear of the old stumps and
stone, the soil so greatly improved in texture
by successive deeper and deeper breaking that
we could be sure of passing through dry weath-
er unharmed. The burning summer winds that
sometimes blight the prairie country to the
west of us never come into our hills, but occa-
sionally we have a dry spell rather long drawn
out. We've had one this year, and this has
shown as well as anything could the advantage
of handling our soil in our way.

When I began writing this story it was early
May. Our corn was then six inches high. It
is now the middle of June. A fine, soft rain
has been falling steadily for twenty- four hours,
every drop of it going into the ground. This
is the first rain we've had in five weeks. Our
corn is now waist-high, its foliage of that rich
black-green the farmer likes to see. Not a leaf
has curled ; not a plant in the field has halted in
its vigorous growth. We're mighty glad the

212 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

rain has come, of course; but its delay hasn't
hurt our corn a nickel's worth.

It's very different on some of the farms
around us. Yesterday morning, before the
rain began, I looked at two fields that were
planted when we planted ours. Both those
fields have been badly hurt by the drought;
the plants are not more than half the height
of ours, and their leaves are sun-dried, pale
and sick. With the best of care for the rest
of the season that corn won't make half a nor-
mal crop.

The reason? That land was plowed only
about four inches deep, and the subsoil wasn't
touched. Cultivation was abandoned two
weeks ago because the teams couldn't pull a
"double shovel" through the sun-hardened
soil; so the fields are foul with weeds. The
weeds have drawn heavily upon the little mois-
ture that was stored, and the loss by evapora-
tion has been great. On the contrary, we have
kept the cultivators going steadily every day
of those five dry weeks, stirring the surface
into a fine, shallow dust mulch to cover our
foot-deep seed bed. On the hottest day of the
drought if the mulch were kicked aside the soil
beneath appeared black with abundant mois-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 213

ture. The field has been kept absolutely free
of weeds, so we aren't put to it now to catch
up after a time of dispirited neglect. One
more cultivation and our corn is "made" — and
it will be a top-notch crop. You needn't tell
me that this way of doing things isn't right or
that it doesn't pay. I'm ready to bet that this
year at Happy Hollow we'll beat the average
corn crop of the state at least four to one.

Our fourth year gave us the proof on this
corn practice, if we needed proof. We had
twenty acres of our best land in corn that year,
and it was given the same care our field has
had this year. In that year we found that the
mark we'd set of a hundred bushels to the acre
wasn't a crazy vision. A part of our field,
where the plows had gone deepest and the sub-
soil conditions were best, made a surprising
showing for itself as the season advanced. It
came mighty near being perfect corn, almost
entirely free of barren stalks, the long plump
ears well set low on the stalks. At harvest a
measured acre gave us one hundred and ten
bushels of as fine grain as any farmer would
want to see. The rest of the field had received
the same attention in cultivation and in every
other particular, following the spring break-

214 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ing; but there was still some stone in the sub-
soil, preventing a deep and thorough stirring.
There lay the whole of the difference in condi-
tions. July of that year was a dry month, too,
and though the ears formed pretty much alike
over the whole field, there wasn't moisture
enough in the shallower bed to mature them
well.

In that year we gave thorough trial to the
"wide row" method of corn culture which the
Government experts are advocating for the
South. You know what that is, I reckon. In-
stead of having the rows four feet apart and
the hills three feet apart in the rows, after the
usual farm practice, the rows are spaced to six
feet and the hills to two feet. Both spacings
give twelve square feet of ground to the hill,
so there is no difference in the number of hills
an acre will carry. Advantage is claimed for
the six-foot row because the cultivator may be
run throughout the growing season. A row
of cowpeas may be planted between each two
rows of corn, and if the cultivator is made to
straddle the pea row both crops are given at-
tention at once. It's a fine theory, and it works
well in practice; but this year we're back to
the old three-by-four system. This enables us

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 215

to run the cultivators in both directions and to
keep the rows entirely clean of weeds through
spring and early summer. In a dry time like
that we've just been through a heavy growth
of weeds in the rows would have done a lot of
harm by wasting moisture the corn needed.
We're strongly "agin" weeds in our crops at
Happy Hollow. I've had many chances for
measuring the advantages of both methods in
all parts of the state on the lands of good farm-
ers, and I haven't been able to find that the
new has anything on the old at harvest time.
A clean field after harvest counts for a lot
with us. So there's one proposition in which
we'll follow the old fashion against the new.

That's been our rule on the farm — to try
without prejudice any new cropping method
that gives a reasonable offer of better results,
but not to persist in it to our own cost just be-
cause it is new. We've know men who seemed
to think they weren't practicing modern farm-
ing unless every scrap and shred of every 'idea
in use belonged to the twentieth century.
That's foolish. There's a great deal of good
sound usage in the "old" farming. Indeed,
so far as I've been able to discover, modern
farming consists simply in doing the old things

216 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

in a more intelligent and businesslike way.
Nature's laws are very ancient and firmly set-
tled. The scientific farmer hasn't grafted any
new laws upon her code ; he's tried only to get
a better understanding of the old so that they
might be better observed. The real service and
the real inspiration of modern farming lies
simply in stimulating the farmer to think about
his work — to keep his head on the job as well
as his hands. There's nothing dark or mys-
terious about this "science." The business of
feeding the world must go forward. That
work is piling up on us with greater and great-
er demands. The time is clear past when a
surplus of foodstuffs here or there need go
unused. Supplies will have to be increased.
There's the fact that has brought the farmer
fully into the big task. The thinking and plan-
ning of the task isn't to be left now altogether
to middlemen and distributors. The farmer
himself is taking a thinking part. Conditions
are compelling him to think about increased
production, lowering of costs, elimination of
wastes, and saving of profits for himself. The
new farmer differs from the "old" farmer only
in being trained to think up to the times instead
of in the past. They're not distinct breeds, as

y

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 217

some folk would have you believe. The most
hardened "old" farmer of the lot may shake
himself awake into a "new" one whenever he
will. It's a good deal like "getting religion."
We don't leave that to our sons on the theory
that we're too old to learn better morals. It's
a mistake to argue that only the school-trained
youngsters may be modern farmers. The old-
timers are dead wrong in supposing that mod-
ern farming is made up wholly of a lot of new-
fangled notions. It isn't. It's just the old
farming with new life put into it.

You see I can't help quitting my own story
once in a while to take up a bit of argument;
but all the time I'm thinking of its bearing on
our farm operation. We couldn't get any-
where in our farming without an occasional
spell of argufying and theorizing.

We did a lot of it in our fourth year. That
was the time when it was borne in upon me
that the difference between profit and loss in
farming hangs upon a slender peg. The farm-
er who isn't minding his p's and q's may make
or lose money without knowing how it hap-
pens. That's particularly true in what's known
as "general farming." The man who's stick-
ing to one project — poultry, peaches, potatoes

218 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

or pigs — is able to keep a closer watch upon
possible leaks and losses than he who has half
a dozen irons in the fire. The average "gen-
eral" farm leaks like a sieve, and it's very hard
to discover the flaws. It needs a wizard to
check one operation against the other and keep
the reckoning straight.

In our fourth season I tried to figure out a
system of accounting that would enable me to
strike a balance at the year's end and deter-
mine with a fair degree of accuracy how much
money I had made or lost in growing my oats
and corn and peas. I couldn't do it. I haven't
been able to do it to this day. I don't believe
it's possible. The cleverest method of reckon-
ing has something arbitrary and artificial in it
— something that must be taken for granted.
The balance must be forced. On a farm one
gets so many things that can't be measured in
dollars and cents. And there are the endless
losses by leakage which can't be estimated.

At the beginning of that fourth year I laid
out a plat of the farm on paper, with each field
measured in acres, and with a carefully stud-
ied schedule of a cropping system that would
cover the next three years. That was all right
enough, but before the middle of summer I

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 219

had to consider a number of things that
weren't to be foreseen by any uninspired
farmer.

Our pigs got away from us. From a mod-
est beginning with a few good brood animals
our herd had increased to a hundred head of
sows and pigs. Our losses by death had been
next to nothing at all. On its face that's a
fine exhibit. Almost anybody could take a
stubby pencil and a scrap of paper and figure
himself rich at the end of a few years at that
rate of increase. Two broods a year, six pigs
to the brood — why, that's 1,200 per cent, in-
crease, isn't it? And a money-lender gets rich
at eight or ten per cent! What's the matter
with farming?

Nothing at all — nothing but the chance of
losing several thousand per cent in taking care
of that increase and bringing it up to market-
able condition. A growing pig is the most de-
ceiving beast in the catalogue. His gain in
weight may cost you two cents a pound or
twenty or forty. That depends upon your
management.

We had too many pigs, considering the con-
dition of our farm. If we had let it go on at
that rate, we'd have had five or six times as

220 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

many at the end of another year. But the farm
wasn't ready to take care of a hundred at a
profit. We might have managed according
to the usual farm practice, shutting the pigs
up in a dry lot and pouring in corn and corn
and corn. That wouldn't have paid. An un-
comfortable, discontented pig will squeal away
a peck of corn in a day. The profit in pig-
growing is made while the animals are putting
on their first two hundred pounds of weight
on green pasture — clover or peas or small
grain or rape. With the plantings well man-
aged on good land, that growth ought not to
cost more than two cents a pound. The "fin-
ishing" twenty-five or thirty pounds made on
corn feeding with a vigorous animal costs six
or eight cents a pound. If the pig is brought
up on corn only from the time he's weaned till
he's baconed, you may have four times as much
money tied up in him as you'll ever be able to
get out. Well, what about it ? Isn't that a sit-
uation that calls for some thinking?

We hadn't any money to lose. We cut down
our herd, a few head at a time, till we had it
trimmed to the point where our pastures would
carry the animals that were left. We kept
about twenty, besides those that were to be fat-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 221

tened for making our own meat. These twen-
ty were carefully selected, and with the herd
I put a new male of a registered line, bought
in Kansas. He came of a prolific strain, fa-
mous for getting thrifty pigs that would make
maximum gains on good feeding. You ought
to see that boy to-day, if you have any doubts
as to the value of good breeding in meat ani-
mals on the farm. He's just a little more than
two years old, but he's as long as a cow and
weighs six hundred pounds. When he's put
in "show" condition for the county fair
next fall he'll weigh all of eight hundred
pounds. He's some pig! It's hard to
believe that he belongs to the same tribe
as the native hogs we've seen in these hills.
Did you ever notice a genuine Arkansas hog?
He's not big enough to eat till he's four years
old. He's built on the lines of a race horse —
slim and limber and high off the ground. He
runs free in the woods, and at butchering time
the hill people hunt down their meat with
hounds and gun. When you cook a strip of
the bacon you have to use store lard to fry it
in. That's no joke. I've seen a couple of pig
hunters come in from the chase with half a
dozen carcasses hanging from a stick swung

222 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

across their shoulders. It's only by courtesy
that you can call such beasts "domestic ani-
mals." The only living creature that ever
made me climb a tree was an old white sow
I met once on a woods trail. Such hogs
haven't anything at all in common with our
huge, mild-tempered Happy Hollow Bob.
The difference is all in the breeding. Old Bob
gives a good account of every pound of bran
and middlings and corn that goes into his
trough ; but I've seen native hogs that wouldn't
show any effect at all of such feeding beyond
swelling up in the middle.

Finding myself overstocked with hogs, with
a surplus that might not be handled profitably,
didn't decide me to get out of raising pigs. It
did set me to analyzing the business as closely
as possible in an effort to find its strength and
its weaknesses. I believe my conclusions right.
These conclusions apply pretty well to every
operation on a farm like ours.

Much of the danger of disappointment and
loss in small farming lies in the margin of sur-
plus which the farmer is likely to find in his
hands from time to time, a surplus which can't
be handled to advantage on the farm and
which is too small to justify great care in mar-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 223

keting. He may have a few extra head of
pigs that can't be put in marketable condition
at a profit and that must be sold for what they
will bring close by. He may have a few extra
bushels of apples or potatoes. It's a pity to
let them waste; but there isn't enough of the
stuff to pay for hunting the best possible
market. Counting time, the only thing to do
is to peddle it out for what it will bring on the
local market — and country town markets for
farm produce are almost invariably in the
hands of small middlemen who don't like to
pay profits to the farmer. Those little jags
of surplus almost inevitably spell loss to the
grower. That loss is the very thing that has
discouraged many and many a townsman in
his essay of farming.

My own study of the matter has had the pig
for its object. I've settled it just this way in
my own mind :

I'll breed no more pigs than the farm is able
to carry to maturity with its own pasture and
forage crops. I want to avoid a surplus that
must be fed at a loss or sold at a sacrifice. If
there's ever a surplus of pasture or feed on the
place it will be easy enough to get extra pigs
to consume it. According to that method my

224 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

herd will not be large. I'll break no records
with the number of animals handled. But
every beast in the herd will be handled at a
real profit, and there will be no losses to set
off against the profits at the season's end.

I'm going farther than that with the pig
business. Two years from now I shan't be
selling a live pig off the place save as I have
one now and then that will bring a fancy price
for breeding purposes. Two years from now
every pig that's bred and grown and finished
on the farm will be converted right here into
fancy hams and bacon and sausage, and these
products will find their way straight to con-
sumers who are able to know a good thing
when they get it. We've tried this in a small
way, and we know it will work. Every penny
of profit that's made in that business we'll be
able to keep for ourselves. The danger of loss
will be practically wiped away. I want to say
something more about that before I'm done
with the story.

XI

THIS is June twentieth, right at the zenith
of the long summer days. Sam has had a
grouch since early morning. You wouldn't
know it unless you knew him. Most Irishmen
have a way of cutting loose when they're hot
about something — using fiery words, or slam-
ming their tools around, or yanking at their
beasts at the plow. That isn't Sam's way.
The madder Sam gets the quieter he is. When
he's really in a rage you'd hardly know he's
about. He moves very softly and speaks not
at all. And man, dear, how he does work
when one of those fits is on him! I shouldn't
care if he stayed mad all the time through
the rush season.

We've been stacking our wheat to-day, to
have it ready for the threshers. There are two
young mountains of it, mighty rich-looking in
their deep golden yellow. It was hard work
to build them, though; hot work too, along in
the middle of the day, in the brilliant glare of

225

226 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

the summer sun. The thermometer was a
shade over ninety, and the lazy breeze merely
crawled across the land. No matter what a
man's disposition, he's bound to feel uncom-
fortable in the fields on such a day.

The slow mood of it got into the workers.
We wanted to get the wheat shocks off in a
hurry so the plows might be at the land while
it's still mellow from the fine rain of Wednes-
day. Our cowpeas ought to be seeded on the
newly turned stubble within the next couple
of days. As we saw it, there was good reason
for hurry.

The extra helpers didn't want to hurry.
They picked up the pace of the listless air and
crawled with it. Three of them couldn't throw
the bundles upon the load as fast as Sam could
handle them. They moped. They stopped
often to wipe away the sweat and to measure
with unfriendly eyes the part of the task still
undone. They'd much rather have had a half
crop than a bumper.

"Wusht I c'd quit an' go swummin'," one
of them lamented after dinner. "Thish-yere
work would keep twel Monday. Hit's too
hot."

That was Oscar talking. Oscar had had his

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 227

board for the week, and he'd done work enough
to set him three dollars ahead ; so he had a fine,
large, easy feeling that didn't match up at all
with the labor of the harvest field. Another
of the men did quit after an hour's work in
the afternoon. He had to go into town and
loaf a little while on the "square" before the
day was done. That's a firmer habit here on
Saturday afternoons than going to church on
Sunday. Pretty soon another hand laid off.
Whenever one of them stopped Sam quickened
his own gait to make up. He didn't speak his
impatience, as another man might have done;
he just shut his mouth and worked. The wheat
was all in stack when night fell. The last
bundles went up in murky half -darkness ; but
the job was done.

Sam was tired when he brought up the team
to the watering trough at the well. He didn't
have to tell me; I knew. While the beasts
drank he lounged wearily on the end of the
trough, looking away across the twilight fields.
He wasn't saying a word, but there was an
air about him of temper smoldering.

"Well," I said, "it's finished anyway.
That's some comfort."

He grinned. It takes a pretty good man to

228 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

grin like that right in the middle of a grouch.
"Yes, that's some comfort," he agreed. "But
there's not comfort enough in it to keep me
from being mad. I'm mad."

"Forget it!" I said lightly. "This is Satur-
day night. You'll have a good rest to-mor-

row."

"I don't want to rest," he snapped. "I don't
care if I never rest. I don't get mad because
I have to work hard; it's because the other
man don't want to. If he'd hold up his

end And I don't seem to get ahead at it

any faster than he does."

"You get a steady job," I said.

"I get a steady chance to keep right on
workin' my fool head off!" he retorted. "And
I like to loaf as well as the next man too, when
I can see my way to it. I ain't sure they
haven't got the best of it."

Well, that's an old, old question, of course ;
but it's everlastingly a live, brand-new ques-
tion on the farm, where you can't possibly see
instant results of your work. The curious
thing about it is that the more forehanded you
are and the busier you keep, the less chance
there is of measuring effects. So many, many
"ifs" creep in!

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 229

There's that wheat stacking, for example.
Rushing it through bred dead weariness of
body and heaviness of spirit. It might have
been just as well to let the last of the job lie
over to another day and come at it then in bet-
ter temper. But we really ought to have the
peas planted without the loss of an hour, so
they'll use every drop of the moisture that's
in the soil. A stubble field will bake hard in
a hurry in this sun if it isn't turned and har-
rowed. There's no telling when we'll have an-
other rain. Tons of water will be sucked up
out of the ground on a hot June day. Those
tons of water will make a sight of difference in
the start our pea vines get, and a difference of
tons of hay in the fall. Nobody knows. The
safest way to play it was the hardest way, the
way that wouldn't make any compromise. It
took the sap out of the men and put them all
out of sorts with their taskmasters; but we've
gained a day at the height of the year. If we
can gain a few days more in the same way
before mid- July those days may easily settle
whether our mows and stacks are half empty
or full to bursting for the winter.

What's that? It's a gamble, either way?
Are you right sure of that? That's what the

230 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

laborers thought to-day. But as I think of it,
it doesn't strike me that way.

Farming is a gamble only when the farmer
takes gambling chances. We might have tak-
en one to-day. Maybe we'd have won, maybe
we'd have lost. It was a toss-up. We made
it less of a gamble when we cut down the loss
chance. It's only when he refuses to take any
loss chance at all he can avoid that the farmer
dare call himself scientific. Isn't that right?

If there's any doubt in your mind, look over
the farms of the men who take chances and
those who don't. There's a case in point in
our neighborhood right now. One of our
neighbors grew twenty acres of oats. His
land was in bad condition in spring — full of
stones and stumps, as ours was six years ago.
He couldn't make a real seed bed, of course;
he just scratched his seed into the surface.
Chance number one. He got a poor stand.
The recent drought caught his crop and made
it certain that the grain wouldn't mature, so
he cut it for hay while it was in the milk. He
tore a mowing machine to bits in the cutting —
he thought he could dodge the stumps and
bowlders, but he ran into them every once in a
while. Chance number two. He lost lots of

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 231

his hay because his rake wouldn't work clean
on the rough ground. Because he wasn't fond
of the burning middays he put most of the hay
into the stacks in the cool of the mornings be-
fore the dew was well dried off, and he built
the stacks in a shady place. Chance number
three. His stacks are heating badly; they're
bound to rot if they aren't torn down and dried
out and rebuilt. At that his hay will be black-
ened and poor in quality.

Just across the fence our oats ripened per-
fectly, and we'll thresh a real crop. We re-
fused every one of the chances our neighbor
took. We got our seed where he got his, and
the fields were planted at the same time. Acre
for acre, we'll have twice as much straw as he
has hay, and we'll have our ripe grain besides.
There's just the difference.

And there's the question of the second crop
following the small grain. Some of my neigh-
bors have laughed at me for that practice.
Not many of them observe it themselves. They
say it's too risky to plant cowpeas in the mid-
dle of summer, after wheat and oats harvest —
that if the season happens to be an "off" one
they won't get hay enough to pay for the seed.
They insist that we're taking the gambler's

232 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

chance when we plant so late as the first of
July.

The way we look at it, we can't afford not
to take that chance. If we allowed our fields
to lie idle through the long summer months,
we'd simply be betting on a dead certainty of
losing. As a matter of fact, our midsummer
cropping hasn't proved a risk. In five years
we've failed only once in getting a crop of pea
vines heavy enough to cut for hay. That fail-
ure was on one small field which wasn't seeded
until mid- July ; and on that we got our money
back by pasturing and plowing under the
stubble for wheat in September. If we got
nothing from the peas but the new nitrogen
stored at their roots, we'd keep on planting
them. If we gained no advantage but the finer
tilth the plowing and harrowing and dragging
give for the crop to come after, still we'd keep
on planting them. Considering the practically
unfailing hay crop on top of these benefits,
don't you think we'd be taking a foolish chance
if we didn't plant?

Most of the cases of this sort on the farms,
with the farmers declining such chances, have
their root in shiftlessness and not in good busi-
ness prudence. "I've worked enough for this

HAPPY :^IOLLOW FARM 233

year." There's the easy formula that halts
many a farmer at his work in mid-year, just
at the point where profit-making might begin.
It's the rule rather than the exception down
here to consider that the working season on the
land is done when corn is "laid by." Then
comes a gap of months when the farmer fills
in with occasional odd jobs for somebody else.
That's habit rather than necessity. It's a bad
habit, for it almost inevitably means loss. The
farmer simply bets that he's going to lose, and
then sets about winning his own bet.

We've found a thousand chances at Happy
Hollow for betting against ourselves in just
that way. We've taken some of them to our
cost. It's not easy to keep an eye on all the
odds and ends on a hundred and twenty acres
and have everything done on time. Once we
killed a horse by turning him into a newly
fenced pasture where there was a loose strand
of old wire lying on the ground in a brush-
grown corner. We were crowded for time!
we thought we could safely put off that last de-
tail of inspection for a day or so. We took a
chance that cost us a hundred dollars.

We took a chance, two winters ago, in clear-
ing up a lot of new ground. The time was

234 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

favorable for the work, and we let our ambi-
tion run away with us, lightly taking it for
granted that we'd be able to keep the new acre-
age in cultivation. There was no time to move
the stone before spring plowing; we haven't
found time for it yet; so that ten acre patch
has "gone back" to brush. The clearing will
have to be done over again before the land can
be used. There's a loss of fifty dollars charge-
able to bad judgment.

Two years ago we put down a drilled well,
fifty feet deep, to furnish water for the stables.
When we were setting the pump we dropped
the valve and a length of pipe down the tube.
We had no grappling tool handy, so we turned
to other work till we might get one. That
pipe is still down there, waiting, and we're
still watering horses and cattle unhandily. In
the two years we've lost solid days of time on
account of that carelessness ; and there's an in-
vestment of seventy-five dollars that hasn't
done us a speck of good so far. We've grown
accustomed now to having that well out of com-
mission. We'll get to it one of these days. It
ought to have been attended to right off the
reel.

Gates break down, and we think there isn't

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 235

time to mend them at once; then before we
know it cattle and pigs have strayed into the
growing crops. Minutes would have fixed the
gates ; but now we've lost the labor of hours.

We ought to have had a small blacksmithing
shop on the farm long ago ; but we've put that
off. Trips to town for repairs have cost ten
times as much as it would have cost to build
and equip the shop; and we could have saved
many a tool that has gone into the discard.

It does beat the world how many losses of
that sort a farmer can count up when he really
puts his mind to it. I've had myself in train-
ing this year, making a tour of the place every
once in a while and noting holes in our scheme,
through which money is getting away from us.
It's been mighty good discipline, though I'll
own it's disconcerting to find so many things
that have been overlooked before.

Some of these things are justified. We
haven't had time or money enough for bring-
ing every part of the farm up to good form.
Our forty acres of timber, with its abundant
water, ought to be well fenced and seeded to
grass and clover. We'd make money on that;
but we haven't yet been able to attend to it.
We ought to improve our water supply in the

236 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

pastures we've made, so that we could have
full use of every subdivision at any time in the
year without extra labor of caring for the
stock. Every dollar spent in that way would
be a dollar doubled. Then there's that job of
foresting the woods forty. That would pay
handsomely, beyond all question. But it will
take a nice little lump of money to put it
through, and I shall have to put in full time
with the workers. I haven't been able to do
that yet. And so with a score of things that
wait to be done before we can call this a thor-
oughly established farm. I'm not blaming my-
self because the work of that sort isn't all fin-
ished. The losses arising from the delays I can
take cheerfully. Sometimes I wish I could go
right at it full tilt with an army of men and
have everything done at once ; but in my saner
intervals I'm glad I can't have it that way.
There's a lot more satisfaction in working as
we've had to work, taking our tasks one at a
time and feeling that each task completed
stands for a real difficulty mastered. It doesn't
do to have things come too easily.

There's another sort of loss I'm not so com-
placent about. That's the loss that grows out
of sheer neglect. If things once done on a

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 237

farm aren't kept up by eternal vigilance, all
profits may be absorbed in no time. Every
farmer is more or less slack in that particular.
I'm in the same potful as the rest of them.

Sam won't mind if I say outright that that's
the only quarrel I've had with him. He's not
a careful manager in details. He's a master
hand at a big, tough job afield that would dis-
may an ordinary man; but he hates to tinker
round keeping up the loose ends. That seems
to him too much like boy's play. He'd rather
tear out a whole string of fence and rebuild it
than walk along the line with a hammer and
a pocketful of staples, tacking up the wires
that have sagged from the posts. He'd rather
whirl in and dig a new well than help to fish
the lost pipe out of the old one. He'd rather
build a new barn than fuss with driving a time-
ly nail to save a partition the colts have kicked
loose. You can't find fault with him for that
disposition. I'd rather have him fit for big
things than little ones. Just the same, those
pesky mickles make a very mountain of a
muckle. I've had an extra man on the farm
for a month this summer, catching up those
straggling ends, and there's another month's
work ahead of him.

238 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

Every farm in the country hereabouts is rich
in the poor fruits of such neglect. On the best
of them all a one-eyed man could find fifty
ragged signs of inattention to details. Have
you ever seen a farm anywhere that showed
none of them ? I haven't.

The root of the trouble seems to be that
there isn't any standard in the mind of the
farmer for thrift in such things. With most
of us thrift is nothing but an abstract notion
and not a clear rule of action. None of us is
able to say for sure that he's practicing real
thrift in the care of his acres or in any part
of his work — that he can't improve upon his
methods while using no more than his present
working capital. We have no model to go by,
even in our mind's eye.

I've set out to change that this year. I'm
fixing up a model patch right in the heart of
the farm that will serve for our guidance. I
believe the plan will work.

This patch has always been a rough looker.
It includes about four acres lying between our
kitchen garden and the well-tended fields. The
land is stony, and there's a rain-washed gutter
running through the middle of it. A tight red
clay subsoil comes up close to the surface. A

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 239

few of our apple trees were planted at the edge
of the patch, but they haven't thrived. Noth-
ing will thrive there till we go at it and give it
a thorough overhauling. It's in no worse con-
dition than some of the rest of our land has
been; but it's in bad shape. We've let it lie
from year to year in all its unsightliness, wait-
ing till there would be time for fixing it up
right. It's not an inviting spot for establish-
ing a model farm; but that's what I'm going to
do with it.

We're taking off the surface stone first.
When that's done, we'll give the tract a dyna-
miting, cracking and loosening the clay; and
then we'll go after the rest of the stone with the
big plows, staying with the job till we've got
them all, cleaning up as we go. It's likely that
we'll have to spend a week on each acre in this
first rough preparation ; but we'll have the land
smooth and fine and the subsoil in perfect con-
dition for the work ahead. In a month from
now those four acres will be in better form than
any others on the farm. The old wash will be
stopped and we'll have a firm foundation for
the trial of our idea.

We'll spread upon the tract all the manure
and litter we're able to work into the soil, turn-

240 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ing it deep, going over it again and again,
making ready against autumn. In November
we'll replace the apple trees whose growth has
been stunted, adding a few more of choice va-
rieties. The vineyard, too, will be enlarged by
half. That will leave two acres for other use,
besides what we now have in garden stuff.

On one acre we'll grow our potatoes; the
other will be our seed-corn plot. On that acre
everything we know of good corn culture will
be practiced to the letter and without stint, up
to the very limit — selection, testing, prepara-
tion of seedbed, planting and care. All
through the year every step will be taken as we
know it ought to be taken. We'll work for
high quality and for maximum yield, too. All
that good care can do will be done for every
square rod of that acre, and for all the rest of
the model patch. What's more, that patch will
be kept up in appearance to the dress-parade
notch.

The object? Well, partly we want to find
out what an acre of our land may be forced to
do with all the conditions right; but mostly
we want to set the pace on these acres for the
whole farm. If by right methods we can make
our own demonstration acre give us one him-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 241

dred and fifty bushels of corn — and that's
what I'm bent upon two years hence — then
we'll have no excuse for failing to key our
larger fields up to the same mark. We'll get
good discipline out of that trial tract in hold-
ing ourselves up to the best that's in us; and
we'll find out what's in the land.

Understand, we're not planning to do any-
thing extravagant or faddish on our model
acres. That's to be practical farming, as prac-
tical as any we're doing, and carefully guarded
against everything that wouldn't be likely to
pay on the larger scale of the fields. It's to
be a "show" spot; that's true; but we'll be
showing ourselves.

Don't you think that's a good idea? I'm
stuck on it. If on those four acres we can
keep things from going slack — keep all at high
tension — I believe the example we set our-
selves will be infectious. I think we'll catch it.

I've let this run over till Sunday evening.
We've had a fine day at Happy Hollow — just
our own folks. It's a long time since a Sunday
has passed without somebody coming over the
hill from town for a visit. It was too hot to-
day; so we just loafed around the house by
ourselves, having a quiet dinner, reading a lit-

242 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

tie, talking a little, playing with Peggy and
Betty. Haven't I told you about Betty?
She's a year and a half old; a gay-hearted wee
one, full of rollicky humors. She certainly
does keep things stirred up ! I don't know how
we ever managed to get along without her.

By and by, toward the cool of evening,
Laura and I went across the farm to the home
of some new neighbors. They came here from
Texas, and they're good people. We sat with
them and talked for an hour or so, and inevi-
tably the talk turned to matters of the farm.
Their place lies beside ours; it's in the rough,
as ours was six years ago; their problems are
ours right over again. It's not an easy thing
they've set out to do.

They know it, too, but they're not looking
for the easy thing; if they were, they'd be bad-
tempered, peevish, complaining — you know
what sour dispositions the easy-thing hunters
always have. These people have been on their
land for eight months or such a matter, and
they act just as if they were having no end of
a good time. Presently they began to joke
about their misadventures, and then we told
some jokes on ourselves, and then they told
some more. Listening, you'd have thought

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 243

that the work of making a farm out of a piece
of wilderness is nothing but a riotous jest.

But the talk carried a serious undernote, for
all the surface lightness. Those folks are doing
some thinking. There's an unfailing sign we
found in them: They've learned something
besides discouragement from their mistakes.
They've learned some things that might hardly
be learned at all save by making mistakes.

They've learned the very duplicate of our
own most invaluable lesson, that farming is a
waiting game and that the waiting must be
done thoroughly. They've learned just what
I've been trying to tell you all through this
part of the story, that there's no thoroughness
in any method of farming which seeks only im-
mediate results and that what the old-timers
of this country call long chances are really no
chances at all, but the surest of sure-thing bets.

It boils down to this: Wouldn't you rather
stake a big, round dollar on a proposition that's
certain to give you two for one next year than
fritter away a dollar's worth of nickels on a
slot-machine gamble with nothing guaranteed
but quick action? Apply that to farming, and
who's taking chances — the man who plays his

244 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

dollar safe and sure, or he who plays the nick-
els against certain odds ?

I'll have to tell you a story by way of illus-
trating what the nickel-players are likely to
come to. It's a story about that same old
friend of ours — Jake.

Three years ago Jake tended a little crop of
his own, up on the hillside — three or four acres
of corn and a patch of turnips for greens. He
worked one undersized donkey to a "bull-
tongue" plow. Of course he stood no show of
making anything at it. That didn't matter,
so long as he could come down between whiles
and cut wood for us. He kept tirelessly cheer-
ful about it.

Along in the fall he had ten bushels of corn
to sell, after he'd put away what he absolutely
must keep for feeding his donkey through the
winter. The ten bushels brought him five dol-
lars. For a week after that, while his money
lasted, we couldn't get him to do a lick of
work. Then a traveling circus drifted into
town, and early on the morning of circus day
Jake appeared with his ax.

"We-uns is aimin' to go to the show this
evenin'," he said; "but I lack twenty cents of
havin' enough. I want to work for you-uns

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 245

twenty cents' worth. I wish you'd please tell
me when I've done worked that much, so I
won't lose no time gittin' in."

Jake never took any foolish long chances.

XII

I HAVE a poorer opinion of myself than I
had a week ago. It's on account of those goats.
I set about trying to sell them to a friend the
other day. The trial came to nothing; my
friend was too wise; but it might have suc-
ceeded, and then I'd have been a traitor to
friendship. Would you like to think of your-
self so?

It came about through a visit to this friend
at his farm over south of town. He owns a
beautiful place of four hundred acres on the
crest of a mountain, overlooking all the earth
and the kingdoms thereof. He bought it three
years ago, and he got just what the rest of us
got who bought around here — a farm in a sad
state of neglect. There was a run-down apple
orchard of fifty acres. The fields were mostly
rough wastes of sassafras bush. If you looked
at the spot sharply you saw only unkempt
ugliness ; you would have to throw your mental
eyes a little out of focus to see the great beauty

£46

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 247

that was hidden beneath the rough, shabby
outer coat. My friend is a man of a sort you
meet sometimes — a poet who has never writ-
ten a verse, an artist who has never made a
picture, a prophet whose broad humor won't
let his prophecies be taken seriously. It was
the poet and artist and prophet in him that led
him into buying that great lot of land. But
it was the practical man in him that made him
set about making the land into a farm.

There's no need to tell all of his story. It's
a duplicate of all the others. He's had the
strong zest of the homemaker, but that's been
frosted over more than once by irritating little
troubles. The labor problem has been for him
an unending torment. To turn a bunch of
hired hands loose on four hundred acres, with
only one man to look after them — well, you
know about the luck he's had in getting results.

He's been trying to clear the undergrowths
from a couple of hundred acres of timber so
that the land might be seeded for pasture. He's
had a time of it 1 As we smoked after dinner
he told me about it. He wasn't using the
speech of the poet; his words were short,
choppy, sizzling hot.

That's when I made my break. I'm

248 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ashamed. I wasn't trying to serve him; I
guess it was just the rude instinct of self-
preservation that spoke.

"Why don't you get some goats to clean up
your brush?" I asked. In the back of my
head was a dark purpose. I meant to do that
man dirt!

That's as far as I got with it, though. He
stopped me right there with an emphatic ges-
ture and a loud snort.

"Goats!" he exploded. "I've got 'em! I
had a big herd a while ago, and there are
twenty-five of 'em left. Mine are the jump-
less kind — born with stiff knees, or something,
so they can't jump an inch off the ground.
Great! Maybe they can't jump; I don't
know; but they can certainly bounce, then. If
I had money enough, I'd like to try making
a pen of some kind that would hold them in
— or out. Either way. Goats! And jump-
less goats! Why, I've seen mine up with the
buzzards in the treetops."

That brought on more talk. We talked
about the discouragements — not in a discour-
aged way, but trying to figure them out.

"Sometimes I'm tempted to quit," my friend
said, "or else to compromise and try to be sat-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 249

isfied with what I can get. But I won't do
it! Maybe I shan't get what I want, but it
won't be because I've slackened up in my ideas.
There'll be no compromise!"

That's the way to make a farm. You can
see that I shouldn't have helped that man a
mite by putting my goats upon him. If a
goat isn't a compromise, I don't know what
you'd call him.

But here's a point that every farmer must
face and get used to. Whatever he's aiming
at, if it's anything worth being called a real
aim, he'll have to accept compromises and
nothing else by way of results. If he gets all
of what he's trying for, that simply means he
isn't trying hard enough. Purpose must al-
ways be set ahead of actual achievement. To
be quite content, smugly satisfied, with results
is the last and worst compromise of all. That's
the slowing down of purpose my friend was
talking about.

Look here: How can any farmer afford to
be perfectly satisfied with any result, even
though it break all records, when he doesn't
know how much better he may do ? Right on
the face of the proposition, there's no limit to
possible performance on a bit of good soil.

250 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

The only thing to do is just to keep right on
going.

One of these times the average corn crop of
the United States will be fifty bushels to the
acre instead of twenty-six. How do you sup-
pose that will come about? By means of the
farmers remaining satisfied with twenty-six?
Not much! By means of setting the mark at
fifty bushels? No, sir! We'll raise the aver-
age to fifty bushels when we all really try with
all our might to beat a hundred bushels. Do
you see?

Nothing in our crop work at Happy Hollow
has given us any reason to be satisfied save
that each successive year has marked a step
ahead. How many more steps ahead — good,
long steps — may we take before we get to the
limit of possibilities ? You tell me, for I don't
know. I'm tolerably sure of this, though:
When my work-time is done, the way will still
be clear ahead for doing better things than
anybody has succeeded in doing in my time.

There's a mocking bird sitting on the very
tip-top twig of the big wild cherry tree back
of the house, singing at the very tip-top of his
voice. He's been at it all this week, from the
first glimmer of dawn to the last soft glow of

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 251

dusk. I don't believe he's stopped for five min-
utes together. He acts just exactly like a bird
on a tearing spree. He's having a profound
debauch of song.

I don't know what it's all about. I wish I
did. He and his mate hatched a brood of
youngsters last month in the shelter of a wild
grapevine that grows over the roof of Peggy's
playhouse. The little ones learned to fly and
went their way a couple of weeks ago. Maybe
this outburst is a riot of thanksgiving that the
responsibility is past ; or maybe it's a riot of re-
joicing over a new brood on the way. The
mother bird is keeping mighty quiet and stick-
ing mighty close at home. I'm afraid of both-
ering her by going to look in the nest. I guess
there isn't anyway for it but to wait and see.
Whatever the reason, Daddy is having a royal
good time, up yonder.

Just at this, minute he's mocking the skreek-
skreek of a block and tackle the men are using
in lifting the dirt out of a cistern they're dig-
ging. Five minutes ago you'd have thought
the yard was full of cawing young crows. He
can "Bob- White," too, fit to make a quail
ashamed of his own lack of proficiency. Now
it's a cardinal, and then a chattering sparrow,

252 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

and again the thin, treble tweetering of a
warbler. He's right good at everything he
tackles. But in the last day or two I've been
growing suspicious of him. He's so incredibly
clever with his imitations; his repertory is so
utterly inexhaustible. I'm beginning to be-
lieve that most of the time he isn't mocking
at all, as he pretends, but is just romancing —
just making it up as he goes along — giving us
a few genuine imitations and then sticking in a
lot of stuff of his own and trying to make us
take it as "something just as good."

Query: Would that be cheating? Or
would it? The question has set me to wonder-
ing. There are some folks who, if they could
really prove it on him, would feel a sense of
disappointment. Since he poses as a mocker,
they'd want him to mock and mock and do
nothing else. They'd be for denying him the
right to any least flicker of originality. Are
they right? Or are they cheating themselves
in failing to take him as he is and make the
best of him?

I shouldn't wonder if we see a lot of our
clever planning on the farm go wrong simply
because we want everything to bend to our no-
tions and aren't willing to surrender our no-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 253

tions to the great fixed laws. It's so easy in
farming to settle into habits of thinking and
practice, even though one prides himself that
he's a progressive of the progressives. After
a while it becomes hard to say what is the real
thing and what the counterfeit of good
methods.

We've made a few mistakes by taking up
what we thought to be advanced methods and
persisting in them when we might better have
let Nature have her own way. Hers is almost
certainly a more deliberate way than ours;
but that's most likely to be its chief virtue.

There's the matter of artificial fertilizer, for
instance. With a soil so impoverished as ours
was, we knew it would be a matter of years
to bring it to normal producing power if we
stuck to the natural way of returning our crops
to the land through stock feeding. It seemed
vastly easier and certainly quicker to doctor
the soil, giving it at once the elements it lacked
and so stimulating it to immediate perform-
ance. Soil chemistry, if you get just a smat-
tering of it, seems an imposingly exact science.
You get an analysis or what's called a normal
soil; then you find out that your own is shy
about so much potash, and so much phosphoric

254 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

acid, and so much nitrogen, and you buy these
things in sacks, all properly balanced, and ap-
ply them exactly where the need is indicated.

There's nothing the matter with the theory,
as a theory. It needs experience to prove that
it has certain weaknesses in practice.

Along at first my garden patch didn't suit
me in the quantity or quality of some of the
stuff it gave me. I'd been making garden in
Nebraska on a black, deep loam that had been
heavily enriched with tons and tons of manure
to the acre. It had produced according to its
strength. The results gotten down here, com-
pared with those of earlier times, were far from
satisfactory. My head lettuces looked pale and
pindling, and they weren't nearly up to grade
on the table. I'd always fancied that it would
take a pretty good gardener to beat me at
growing head lettuces. In Nebraska I'd had
'em as big as your hat and as solid as croquet
balls. The product of the first summer at
Happy Hollow turned out of the size of eggs
and of the texture of a wad of paper.

There wasn't nitrogen enough in the soil;
that was plain. I bought soda nitrate and be-
gan to feed my plants as carefully as you'd
feed a bottle baby. The result was distressing.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 255

The plants grew, of course; but they grew into
tall, lean rods, with just a few drooping leaves
scattered up and down. The chickens would
pick at them inquiringly and turn away to eat
grass. We didn't try to eat them ourselves.

I tried that feeding, too, with others of the
vegetables. The tomato vines responded
pretty well in vigor of growth, but the fruits
were mostly small and misshapen. The peas
came along tolerably, but they weren't as good
as we'd been used to. We had used the last
winter's wood ashes freely on this plot, along
with the nitrate ; but our stuff was a long way
from being up to the mark.

The trouble was that our soil was dead, as
dead as though we'd brought it from the bot-
tom of a well. The vitality had been sapped
out of it. No normal, living process was going
on beneath the surface. Decay of old life had
stopped because there was no old life there to
decay — and decay must go hand in hand with
life. I might almost as well have applied my
soda nitrate upon a bed of brickdust, expect-
ing it to produce good garden truck.

The use of chemical fertilizer in such a case
is just an attempt to make a short cut on Na-
ture. Instead of getting a successful short

256 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

cut, we got a short circuit and a "burn-out."
I had to go back to first principles and begin to
make a real soil. That meant putting organic
matter into it — manure, and weed-stalks, and
every sort of litter that would rot. My garden
rows now don't feel underfoot like stone pave-
ment. The ground is so mellow that in the
driest time you might kick into it to your shoe-
tops. Now it's in form so we may get the bene-
fits of any commercial fertilizer that's applied.
In the beginning the use of chemicals was alto-
gether unprofitable. I'm not sure but that it
did actual harm. As it is now, that soil turns
out vegetables equal to any grown anywhere.
In many ways we have had that hint given
us at our work — the hint that in order to suc-
ceed at farming we must be content to take
Nature as we find her and make the best of
her and not defeat ourselves by trying to
defeat her unalterable ends. I think we've
learned the lesson now. Whenever anything
is to be undertaken nowadays that's a depar-
ture from old usage, I like to try first of all
to find out how Nature is likely to feel about
it — whether it's consistent with what I know
of her own behavior, or whether it would work
contrariwise. There are men through the

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 257

country here who are bolder. Some seem bold
enough to try growing bananas or edible sea-
weed on these rocky Ozark hillsides. Frankly,
I'm growing more timid rather than bolder
about radical innovations. A reasonable cau-
tion has its place in progress, hasn't it?

Speaking of progress, we're getting some of
it in the Fayetteville country this year. We've
fussed about the delays ; but we'll have to stop
fussing pretty soon and take a fresh grip on
things if we don't want to be known among
the neighbors as hard-shelled old-timers.

A rural life conference was held at the state
university in June. In point of attendance
it's said to have beaten any other conference
of the sort in the United States. It was a
whizzer! Day after day, right in the middle
of summer, the farmers gathered for discussion
of their living problems. They weren't con-
tent merely to sit and listen to a lot of speech-
making by distinguished visitors. They were
interested enough to take part in some high-
strung disagreements and arguments among
themselves about this, that and the other.
That's a mighty good sign. They talked of
good roads, and improvement of rural schools,
and better marketing of farm products, and

258 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

farm credit and such-like as if they were deeply
interested. The conference has left a clean,
wholesome after-taste. It's bound to show
some of the results we've been hankering for.
The project was undertaken rather doubt-
fully; its backers were afraid that folks
wouldn't care enough about it to turn out more
than a handful of listless listeners. The farm-
ers fooled them.

It isn't only in the first stage of conference
that the farmers are getting action hereabouts.
We have something for a sign at our own doors.
They're making a real road out of the old
Huntsville trail.

Do you remember what I told you about how
that trail struck us when we first drove over it,
six years ago, coming to look at the farm? It
stood for one of the ancient ways of travel; it
was rough and unkempt; picturesque enough,
but not very serviceable. It was impossible to
haul a real load over it.

To be sure, a part of the county road tax
was spent upon it once in a while, in that queer
way which used to be called "improvement."
You know what that amounted to. The road
would merely be mussed up a little. It was
the custom for the farmers to gather on the

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 259

road in summer, after crops were "laid by,"
bring along their teams and their dinners and
spend a day or two working out their taxes.
Mostly those days were only occasions for
meeting and swapping neighborhood gossip.
One of the workers would be chosen as "boss,"
and by fits and starts the crew would plow out
a ditch or two, throw some rough stone into
the worst of the chug-holes, and leave it next
to impassable till the next rain would wash it
down again. It was a good old style, and good
for neighborliness, but it didn't help the roads.
For the last month a big modern grading
machine has been at work on that old road, a
gang of huge plows and scrapers pulled by
gasoline power and managed by a man who
knows what a real road is and how to make
one. He's one of the newcomer-farmers of the
district. The road has been changed till its
own mother wouldn't know it. Deep ditches
have been run along the sides, run on such
lines that they'll carry off the water in a heavy
rain instead of letting it collect in puddles and
boggy places. The earth from the ditches has
been thrown up and rounded off in the center;
it's been scraped and rolled, and scraped and
rolled again. Extra crews were kept at work

260 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

picking up and throwing out the stone. The
job took about a week to the mile, but when it
was finished it looked as if it had been newly
barbered and manicured. We can drive over
the Huntsville trail now with our eyes shut;
and next winter if a farmer wants to go to
town from out here all he'll need to do will be
to hitch up and go. Lots of times in past win-
ters we've stayed at home rather than mire
down on the way in.

There's something doing, too, in the country
school district just north of Happy Hollow.
Until lately that has been a quiet country set-
tlement whose people went about their affairs
pretty much in the old way, taking things as
they came, doing no agitating, not getting
ahead very fast. Their life was largely a life
of traditions.

A District Improvement Club has been or-
ganized, its members meeting week after week
to talk over living problems of farm life.
Sometimes they've had as many as a hundred
and fifty farm-folks at their gatherings.
They've had great good out of it, and the inter-
est is growing instead of flagging. Contrast
that with conditions in our own district six
years ago, when an ungraded school was

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 261

"kept" for three months in the winter, with a
teacher paid $25 a month. There was talk of
discontinuing it altogether as a needless ex-
pense, for on some days only two or three
pupils would show up.

What do you suppose the farmers are dis-
cussing in the new Improvement Club up
north? Good roads, of course, and ways and
means for doing some necessary things; but
just now the central idea is vocational training
in the country schools! The subject is being
discussed, too, not merely fooled with. Be-
fore we know it these schools will be reorgan-
ized for real service.

Besides these more pretentious undertakings
there are many neighborhood clubs scattered
round, some of them not formally organized
but meeting in the farmers' homes in the even-
ings or on a Sunday afternoon. The truth of
it is that sentiment for better conditions is sort
of seething around Fayetteville.

What has brought the change to pass? The
weight of opinion of the newcomers? Well,
that has helped, of course. Some of these new-
comers have brought with them a lot of fresh,
vigorous ideas and an unbounded enthusiasm.
It's probably true that if the old life hadn't

262 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

been stirred up by the immigration of the last
few years these changes would have waited for
years. A stirring up was badly needed.

But, when all due credit has been given the
newcomers, there's a lot left over for the folks
on the ground. There was nothing the matter
with them save that they had lacked just the
right impulse to get things a-going. It would
have been impossible for the strangers to make
actual headway with their undertakings
against any real antagonism from a majority
of the older settlers. Some of these of course
have stoutly opposed the new program ; others
have been offish outwardly at first till they
could find out what was what, but at heart they
weren't set against better conditions. Most of
them have desired better conditions as ardently
as anybody could ; but long usage in any coun-
try hardens into habit, and the habit isn't easily
broken till something comes along from out-
side to interrupt it. It simply hadn't occurred
to these people that they might actually do the
things they wanted done. They didn't quite
know how to go about it.

That's the part the strangers have played,
once the older settlers got to know them and
found that they were to be trusted as friends

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 263

and neighbors. Enthusiasm, too, was a little
lacking — enthusiasm and not desire.

Enthusiasm! There's a fine, strong word,
standing for a great power in this little old life
of ours, whether in town or country. The
more I think of it, the more I'm persuaded that
the flow of youth from the farms to the towns
in recent years has had its source, not in dis-
content with country hardships, not in any
morbid desire for excitement, but for the most
part in a limitless enthusiasm which sought
room for expression according to its strength.

Now the enthusiasm is coming back to the
farms; for under the new order it can have a
better chance on the farms than of old. Farm
life has become a great life, and it will be
greater still beyond compare in the years
ahead.

That won't be altogether on account of out-
ward changes in farm conditions. Scientific
methods in crop production, scientific farm
management, improved marketing facilities —
all such things are agencies, but they'd be next
to valueless without the fire of human enthusi-
asm to give them life and meaning.

That's what we're getting on the farms in
these days.

XIII

DID anybody ever entice you into trying to
figure yourself rich at the chicken business?
If not, then you're the hundredth man. Even
if you aren't thinking seriously of going into
chickens, you really ought to try that figuring
sometime, just for the education you'll get out
of it.

Come on, now; get out paper and pencil.
You won't need much paper. The back of an
old envelope will do, if you crowd the lines up
a little. It isn't at all a long job.

You begin with just one hen. That's all
you'll need for a starter. Most likely your
ideas are more liberal than that. Perhaps that
sort of a beginning strikes you as too trifling
and slow. But just wait till you see what that
one hen will do for you. She's certainly going
to surprise you.

Of course, since the beginning is so modest,
she'd better be a good hen — one of the two
hundred-egg kind you read about. She'll be

264

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 265

easy to find. Lots of poultrymen advertise
that kind of stock for sale. And she won't
cost much. You'll be able to find a corking
good hen and a rooster from a pedigreed,
strong-laying strain — as good birds as any one
need have as a foundation for a commercial
poultry business — for a ten-dollar bill. You
may find cheaper stuff if you wish; but that's
cheap enough.

All right. You start with your one hen,
and she starts laying. If she lives up to her
family standard, she'll lay you two hundred
eggs in the first year. jNow you set those eggs.
This high-grade bird can't hatch them herself,
for that would interfere with her laying opera-
tions ; and you can't manage a one-hen egg out-
put very well with an incubator. That needn't
bother you, though. You can get a few scrub
barnyard hens to do the first year's hatching
and brooding. When that season's work is
done, you can sell the scrubs off and begin
with incubators next year.

With two hundred eggs, theoretically you
ought to have two hundred chickens. But not
all the eggs will hatch; and then besides
there'll be some losses of young chicks by acci-
dent and disease. It doesn't do to expect too

266 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

much. So suppose you get only one hundred
chicks that will live through to maturity.
That's fair enough, isn't it?

Probably half of those chickens will be roost-
ers ; so you'll have fifty hens for starting your
second year's work. That's fifty for one.
With that rate of increase you'll come to the
beginning of your third year with 2,500 hens.
You'll have disposed of the cockerels at the
end of last season, of course, when they
weighed say an average of six pounds apiece
— 15,000 pounds. At ten cents a pound that
would give you $1,500. Income has begun al-
ready, you see!

That same fifty-fold increase will give you
125,000 hens at the end of your third season.
We're not counting the old hens, you notice;
we'll leave them out of the reckoning entirely,
so as not to complicate the figures. By the
same token, you'll have fifty times as many
cockerels this year as last, and fifty times as
much money for them. That's $75,000!
That's only three years from the start! And
from just one hen, mind you! And you have
125,000 hens left for your fourth year's breed-
ing.

At the end of the fourth year you'll have

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 267

6,250,000 hens and an income of $3,750,000
from the sale of cockerels ; and your fifth year
will give you 312,500,000 hens and an income
from the cockerels of $187,500,000. Still leav-
ing all old stock out of account, you see ! We
throw them in for good measure, so nobody
may charge us with being too visionary.

From one hen, bought only five years ago!
Aren't you glad now that you didn't start
with more? If you'd started with a couple of
dozen, perhaps the increase would be more
than you could manage. Yes, one hen is
enough for a beginning, if she's a hen of the
right kind.

No doubt you'll want to stop at the limit of
your fifth year's flock of 312,500,000 hens.
That's as many hens as you'll feel like caring
for. In fact, you'll have to stop there ; for if
you had a fifty-fold increase in your sixth year
you'd have 15,625,000,000 hens. You see
where the trouble would start then. If you
fed each hen only a bushel of grain in a year,
your flock would eat up about four times as
much wheat and corn and oats and other grains
as all the farms of the United States produce.
That would be awkward. Never mind. Sup-
pose you do have to stop there and just main-

268 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

tain what you've got ; your income will be more
than you can possibly spend, provided you con-
tinue to give some of your time to a personal
attention to the business. Indeed, I shouldn't
wonder if you'd be willing to retire pretty soon
— say by the end of your tenth year, and give
yourself up to a good time for the rest of your
days.

Is that absurd? Where's the absurdity?
It's a matter of plain, simple arithmetic.
There are the figures, truth-telling, confidence-
compelling. Right on its face, that proposi-
tion is a lot more reasonable than some others
I've read in advertising addressed to back-to-
the-landers.

No, there's no flaw at all in the logic of this
calculation — until you run it out to its logical
conclusion. Then it's absurd enough to satisfy
anybody.

What makes it hard to understand is the
fact that lots and lots of people — hundreds and
thousands of them — have actually started
chicken-raising with one hen as a beginning
and have actually come to the beginning of
their second year with fifty hens as increase.
But nobody on earth, since the beginning of
chicken-raising, has ever carried the matter

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 269

through at that rate for five years, nor four,
nor three. Maybe somebody has done it for
two years, but I've never heard of him; have
you? Be careful, now! Did you ever know of
a flock of 2,500 hens that had been bred and
reared in two years' time from one original
mother? You'll have to show me!

What's the answer? If that program is
practicable for one year, why isn't it just as
practicable for two years, or for three? We
came to Happy Hollow with two dozen or
more hens six years ago — fine, strong stock,
as good as the best. Why isn't the Fayette-
ville country literally overrun by their in-
crease? How does it happen that there isn't
some time, somewhere, a freak exhibition of
the possibilities of that indisputable capacity
for increase? If it is theoretically possible in
six years for one little old hen to produce 15,-
625,000,000 female descendants, wouldn't you
think that all the hens in the country, working
all together for century after century, might
arrive at something like that grand total after
a while?

Now that we're started on the arithmetic of
it and are talking about logical conclusions, we

270 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

might as well let out a few notches more, just
for fun.

If the increase of that one solitary hen were
continued at that rate for ten years, the end of
the tenth season would give us 488,281,250,-
000,000,000 hens, not to say a word about the
roosters. That would be about 500,000,000
hens apiece for every man, woman and child in
the United States. And yet there are folks
who talk gloomily about an early impending
shortage of foodstuffs in the world! Why,
every one of us would have to eat 57,077 hens
an hour for every blessed hour, day and night,
through the whole year in order to eat up his
share. We couldn't do it. Besides, what
should we do with those roosters ? And as for
the eggs

Shucks! What's the use of acting the fool
like this? Let's talk sense. You may not
think it, but I had a sensible idea in the back
of my head when I started this foolishness.

If you've followed me carefully, perhaps I
needn't say that the chicken business isn't what
it's cracked up to be — that the practice doesn't
come out at all like the theory. Every one who
has tried it has found that out. It seems some-
how inevitable that everybody whose thoughts

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 271

turn toward the land for a livelihood gets to
thinking about chickens as affording the safest,
surest and quickest route to success. Yet it
isn't often that you hear of anybody making a
fortune out of chickens, nor even a decent liv-
ing. There must be a screw loose somewhere.

It isn't hard to find — in practice. The fac-
tor that's the most fascinating of all, when
you're working with paper and pencil, is the
very factor that defeats you when you get to
working with hens. A flock of poultry does in
fact increase at an almost unbelievable ratio;
the increase is so rapid that the poultryman,
if he's just an unskilled amateur, can't possibly
keep up with it. It overwhelms him, throws
him into hopeless confusion; and before he's
able to bring order out of the chaos he finds
himself involved in losses he couldn't foresee
and can't afford to bear. So, plumb discour-
aged, he sells out and quits. I dare say that's
been the history of ninety-nine out of every
hundred ventures in commercial poultry rais-
ing.

The facts are that a farm flock of forty or
fifty good hens or thereabouts, if given good
farm care and kept down to that number, is
usually highly profitable. A flock of a thou-

272 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

sand good hens under good management by a
skilled poultryman who will give the necessary
time to it has been proved profitable; and of
course that number may be increased with an
increase of facilities for care. But between the
small flock for farm use and the commercial
flock of a thousand birds lies a gap that isn't
often crossed. Somewhere between the two
extremes every adventurer almost certainly
comes to a point where for a time losses must
overbalance income. Unless he's uncannily
long-headed, or unless he can command the
help of some one who's been through it and
knows, he'll be quite unable to see through the
maze of confusion.

We had a fine flock when we came to Happy
Hollow. That small flock had always paid
handsomely. We knew how to handle the
birds, how to feed for results, how to select for
breeding, and all the intimate details of suc-
cessful care. We hadn't tried to build up a
large commercial flock at home in Nebraska
simply because we hadn't room enough. But
we had had it in our minds for years as a most
fetching possibility. When we found ourselves
actually owning a big farm, that vision quick-
ened. Discounting and discounting again

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 273

for every possible emergency, and then cutting
the resulting figures in two and dividing again
by half, we couldn't for the life of us find any
good reason why there shouldn't be good
money in commercial poultry farming. We
went at it in our second year.

We didn't plunge. We didn't try to force
the pace at all at the beginning. The best of
our stock was used for the breeding pens, and
our eggs were strongly fertile. We had a
one hundred and forty-egg incubator, and this
was filled a second time so soon as the first
hatch was off. As our supply of good eggs
was larger than the incubator's capacity, we
supplemented its work by setting hens on good
clutches at the same time, so that the chicks
might be brooded and tended all together.

Our hatches were excellent, and our losses
after hatching were very small. Of course the
year's work didn't show anything like a fifty-
fold increase in the number of hens used in
breeding, but the increase was very satisfac-
tory. After a rigid culling out, we went into
the next year with about two hundred hens fit
for use in the pens. We didn't use all of
them, but selected again, taking only the best ;
and again the hatches were fine. By mid-

274 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

summer our yards held about five hundred
hens and growing pullets. There had
been no accidents worth mentioning, and
the percentage of loss had been very small.
So far as increase was concerned, we had every
reason to be satisfied. Another year would
easily give us a flock of a thousand hens. From
that point almost anybody would have read his
title clear — on paper.

But we stopped with the five hundred and
then began to cut down the number till we had
got back to a flock just about large enough for
our own table needs. We've stayed at that
point since. We had found out that we were
up against a big undertaking. If we had
stayed with it for another year we couldn't
by any chance have missed losing.

The solemn truth is that hatching chickens is
merely a detail of the chicken business. We
had no trouble at all with that part of it, nor
with bringing the hatches through to maturity.
The difficulty was quite aside from that.

It seems inexcusable, looking back over it;
but we hadn't figured on the very obvious fact
that it must take a lot of time to give proper
care to a thousand hens. A flock of two or
three dozen made no great demand; that was

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 275

just one of the morning and evening chores,
and soon over with. While the hatches were
small, the brooders might be kept in the house-
yard, right under our eyes, where they could
have continual oversight without making us
realize that we were giving much time to them.
The hen houses we had built at the beginning
were roomy and comfortable enough for shel-
tering several times as many as we started
with, and the yards we had first enclosed were
equally roomy. Feeding cost had never been
a considerable item, either, when we had only
the domestic flock; table scraps and kitchen
refuse went a long way toward disposing of
that.

During our five hundred-hen summer we
discovered the difference. We found that a
flock of that size could hardly be made to pay
because it wasn't large enough to justify either
of us in giving it the undivided time and at-
tention it must have if it were to prove a suc-
cess. Feeding, watering and tending became
vastly more than a light chore which might be
delegated to the children. With a barnyard
flock running around, the loss of a hen or two
now and then hadn't seemed to amount
to much, because we hadn't been keeping

276 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

accounts of profits and losses; but in the
course of a year that unconsidered leak
might easily amount to twenty-five per
cent, of all we had. When we essayed to put
the business on a commercial footing, and on
a much magnified scale, plainly those losses
had to be looked after closely. They couldn't
be guarded against save by staying right on
the job, watching for disease, keeping up the
yards, scoring and sorting out the likeliest
breeders, keeping individual records of per-
formance. There was a lot to be learned be-
fore we would be able to do this well.

We should have to work hard for at least
two years without any net income, while we
were getting the business firmly on its feet.
Had we been situated close to a good consum-
ing market for our surplus eggs and broilers,
and able to reach consumers directly, the case
would have been somewhat better; but Fay-
etteville, like every other country town I've
ever known anything about, isn't a profitable
market for a little jag of farm surplus. Too
many farmers are going in every day with
little jags of something or other, accepting
whatever the middlemen are offering. Our
surplus wasn't yet great enough so that we

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 277

could afford to seek a direct and a better mar-
ket, by advertising or otherwise. Had we had
plenty of working capital it would have been
good business to set about making direct con-
nections, looking to the years to come ; but that
would have absorbed at least as much as our
surplus would bring us. There must be noth-
ing haphazard in the marketing, if profits were
to be realized. That preparation would have
taken a great deal of time, too ; and more time
would have to be spent in keeping records, in
studying good methods, and generally in put-
ting the business on a business basis. Yes, one
of us would have to give all his time to the hens
for two years without any net profit.

And a considerable working capital was de-
manded for other things than advertising and
making our market. We hadn't forecast how
large an investment we should be called upon
to make in feed. Though our small farm flock
had cost next to nothing in that way, we should
have to feed grain worth $500 or more in ma-
turing our five hundred pullets and carrying
them over to the next season. We hadn't so
much money right then that we felt was avail-
able for that use.

And there was the matter of housing. In

278 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

getting ready for a thousand hens, we should
have to increase our housing capacity many
fold to accommodate the breeders and the
broiler hatches. That would call for another
$500 at least.

Plainly, instead of our original small yard
we should have to devote at least twenty acres
to our flock for yards and range; and besides,
with a thousand hens to be fed and their
hatches to be prepared for market, all the rest
of the farm would have to be given up to the
production of chicken feed. The twenty acres
of range and yards would have to be fenced
and cross-fenced, and the business would call
for an investment in incubators and brooders
and other equipment. Then, as in any other
business whose management was fit to be called
intelligent, we ought to have a moderate cash
capital for operation. Without it we should
be running into unforeseen snags.

So, you see, if we were going into chicken-
raising on a commercial scale and on a safe
basis that would justify us in expecting good
profits, we must make a very substantial in-
vestment. In addition to what we had in the
land, we should need $3,000 or $3,500 — maybe
more — to get the business a-going. We hadn't

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 279

so much money to give to it ; and so we backed
down while the backing was good.

Have we abandoned the chicken idea? We
have not. We got into it far enough to see
clearly that with an adequate investment and
right attention commercial poultry-raising
might be made to pay well, perhaps better than
anything else we might undertake on an equal
capital and with an equal use of time. Next
year we shall go into it again, and this time
we'll go to stay. With our earlier experience
to help us, letting us understand the strong
and the weak points in the proposition, we can't
see failure in it.

We shall start moderately, it's true; but our
start won't be made with a dozen hens and a
rooster. We shall contrive to skip over that
disheartening half-way-between year of no
profits. We don't want to spend another year
in taking care of four or five hundred hens
when we can see that that is a needless loss
of time and patience and money. We shall
begin next time with breeding flocks of
one hundred hens so we may jump over
the troublesome time and come at once in
our second year to a commercial flock of
1,000 or 1,200. Then we'll have something.

280 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

We'll go into it with money enough in hand to
see us through, so we may put some "pep" into
the marketing of our stuff; and from that
foundation we shall build as large a business
as we are able to take care of.

I Ve been running on quite a bit about chick-
ens. I've done it on purpose, because I have
never seen just this statement of the matter in
print, and because a fair understanding may
save other folks many a disappointment.

Here's the way it stands, as we see it: If
you're figuring on the chicken business, don't
waste time in figuring over the fabulous rate
of increase that's theoretically possible. If
you'll make right provision for it, increase will
come fast enough. That will be the least of
your frets. If you don't make right provision,
well in advance of the actual increase, you'll
be doomed to failure.

Figure carefully on practical ways and
means, and not at all on the fairy-story end of
things. Then you'll be reasonably certain to
win.

A couple of years ago I was down South,
riding through an isolated farming district that
lay far from railway. One day I stopped for
dinner at a farmhouse, and of course we talked

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 281

farming over the meal. The farmer's family
was living in most uncommon comfort; the
farm produced just about everything that was
needed. Remoteness from market towns
rather compelled that. There was a fine gar-
den, plenty of fruit, turkeys, geese, ducks, hens,
pigs, cows and mules, well fed and sleek.

Out beside the house was a little patch of
Spanish peanuts, half the size of a small town
lot. The farmer told me the nuts would be
used in fattening the pigs he would have for his
own meat supply.

"How many pigs will that patch fatten?" I
asked.

"Oh," he said easily, "them'll fat up a right
smart of hawgs."

"Have you any idea how many pounds of
pork a patch like that will make?" I persisted.

"Oh," he said, "it'll make quite a consid'ble
meat."

But I was after information. "See here," I
said: "Suppose you had forty acres in a crop
of peanuts like that, how many hogs could you
carry on the crop?"

The question seemed to paralyze him for a
minute. "Fohty acres?" he said. "Fohty
acres ! In peanuts ? Why, man, dear ! Fohty

282 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

acres in peanuts would fat all the hawgs they
is in the world!"

That's something of the uncalculating state
of mind in which many of us approach the
chicken business. It takes so little to feed one
hen! If she's put to it she can rustle a living
for herself, without a cent of cost. Well, just
multiply that trifle a thousand times, and there
you are! Doesn't it sound easy? Not once in
a hundred times is any real thought given to
the business end.

I should say that that easy spirit is account-
able for nine-tenths of the failures met by
townsmen who go at farming. They have such
a supreme confidence in Nature's vast generosi-
ties ! They can't find any good reason why Na-
ture should be stingy. A patch of ground, a
few seeds, a hoe — and then fat abundance:
That's the usual mental formula.

But that won't work. It's ridiculous to ex-
pect success to blow in upon a chance wind.
Whether in dairying, or seed-breeding, or meat
production, or chicken raising, or any other
branch of farm industry, success simply will
not come to reward free and easy, hit or miss
methods.

We've had some of that to learn at Happy

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 283

Hollow, and the learning hasn't been alto-
gether easy. Sometimes, when things are go-
ing right, there comes over us a sense of hearty
well-being that prompts us to open our hands
and relax our minds. Maybe you know the
feeling — a sort of assurance that Providence
must certainly be helping to take care of you,
and that you needn't worry. Those are the
times when disaster is most likely to get in its
work.

A banker doesn't grow genially lax and be-
gin to make careless loans just because he's
had a prosperous year. If he's a good banker,
he'll take a hunch from that prosperity, tighten
the lines, buckle his mind to his work, and so
make himself a better business man than be-
fore.

Well, that's farming, too. That's just the
temper the farmer needs to cultivate with all
the genius he has. Successful farming is suc-
cessful business — that's all.

XIV

DOES our farming pay? It's hard for us to
put sentiment aside in considering the ques-
tion. When we talk things over between our-
selves, Laura and I, sentiment is never left
out; for to us that is the substance of what
we're doing. It's no more than fair to you,
though, that we should get right down to hard,
practical bedrock for a while and "talk
turkey." The veriest sentimentalist on earth
must have something to eat now and then.
Maybe having three square meals a day makes
him all the better sentimentalist. Our home
at Happy Hollow would be a queer sort of
place if the storerooms and pantries and cel-
lars were empty. It's practical farming that
keeps them full.

So let's try to stick to the very practical
question of the farm and what it's giving us
that's good to eat and fit to wear and meant for
tangible enjoyment. Sooner or later we must
come down to that; for if the farm isn't able

284

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 285

to feed us and clothe us and make us comfor-
table, then there would be no particular use in
all this writing about it. If Happy Hollow
isn't paying its way, then it's just a luxury
such as anybody might enjoy if he had the
price, and I'd be deluding you by trying to
make it appear that it's anything else. The
fact that we've made a delightful home of it
wouldn't be enough to distinguish it ; for there
are many happy homes. Yes, we must sum up
the matter of farming for a living and the re-
turns in dollars and cents.

The farm is giving us a good living. That
would better be said plainly and in few words.
Any day in the year we can set our table abun-
dantly with what our own land has produced.
Always there is plenty for our own needs and
for the pleasure of our friends. No prince of
the blood could fare better, for we have just
what we want to make us perfectly satisfied.
What we have is all so good that it couldn't be
any better. It comes to our table from within
arm's reach of our own doors, and everything
is of the best of its kind.

I don't know how to express that by writing
a dollar mark with a row of figures after it.
If we were buying in the markets what we get

286 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

from our garden and vineyard, from our pas-
tures and dairy-barn and hen yards for our
own table, we'd have to pay $1,000 or $1,200 a
year for it. It comes so easily and so naturally,
just when we want it, a basketful or a pailful
or an armful, that we're very apt to overlook
its value; but it amounts to a good snug sum
in the course of a year. Besides, there's always
a surplus. Some of this surplus we sell.
Maybe if we were as thrifty as we ought to be
we'd sell it all. But it's a pleasure to have
some of it to give away, to be able to send a
basket of asparagus or grapes, or a roll of
sweet butter, or a side of sugar-cured bacon
to somebody we've taken a shine to. We can't
keep track of that, because it has no equivalent
in coin. It won't do to call that a mere in-
dulgence. Friendship isn't a luxury; it's a
necessity. We had no such way of showing
friendliness when we lived in town. If you're
able to write that out in figures, you have me
beaten.

However you compute it, with every charge
made against it that the greatest stickler of an
accountant could devise, the cost of doing all
this is so little that it's never felt. The return
is great. There is just no chance for a dispute

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 287

as to whether that part of our farming pays
and pays well. A small corner of the farm,
and a few acres of uncultivated land used as
pasture, supply our table. We're living more
comfortably than we ever lived before.

That might not happen so for everybody.
In all probability it wouldn't happen so if the
householder were not something of a manager.
The difference between low cost and high cost,
in furnishing the farm table, lies altogether in
management. When there's work to be done
in the garden, we plan always to have it done
at a time when the work horses are idle for an
hour or so and when we can squeeze in the labor
of one of the hands who would otherwise be
hanging on the side-lines. In the course of a
season we cut out considerable waste of time
in that way. The saving amounts to a great
deal. No matter how carefully the farmer
plans, he'll be bound to have some gaps of time
in his heavy field work now and then; gaps of
hours that run into days.

Maybe the cultivator has been at work in
the morning on the new-ground corn, with an
extra hand following the machine with a grub-
bing-hoe, cutting out the loosened roots of the
old growths. And maybe there's an interval

288 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

of an hour or so after dinner while the machine
is being overhauled or a broken strap of the
harness mended. The extra hand would like it
first-rate if he might spend that hour squatting
on his heels in the shade, dozing. The loss in
his wages for that hour wouldn't be much —
only ten or fifteen cents ; but we don't like loaf-
ing in the middle of a summer day. I like to
watch for those chances. If I can get the idler
to hitch a mule to a garden tool and clean out
a few rows of potatoes, or run through the
sweet corn patch, or attend to some other little
job like that, it sets us definitely ahead. It
isn't often in summer that we'd like to have a
man and team spend a whole day straight on
the garden while the fields wait. If the garden
work of midsummer isn't done in odd hours,
it's very likely to be neglected altogether.
Time after time those short catch-as-catch-can
jobs have "made" a potato crop for us or saved
some other crop in the garden from ruin.

So you'll understand what I mean in saying
that the actual cost of getting our own stuff to
our own table is almost nothing. If we failed
to keep an eye on these small turns and tricks
— as most farmers do fail — the cost might be
multiplied many times over. But for that sav-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 289

ing feature of management, in all probability
our verdict as to the wisdom of kitchen-gar-
dening on the farm would be very unlike our
feeling of to-day. A neglected garden is
hardly better than none; yet care ought not be
given it regardless of cost. With that in mind
we've kept our truck patches clustered close
about the barn and stable, so they're handy to
get at with tools and beasts, and so it's always
possible to make good use of a chance load of
manure which might go to waste if we waited
to haul it to a far field.

The dairy barn, too, is a constant invitation
to the study of many little economies whose
sum is large. There's the matter of late sum-
mer and early fall pasture, for instance. In
most parts of the South pasture for the cows
becomes a problem in July, August and Sep-
tember, which is our hot, dry season. Most
southern farmers are able to keep up milk yield
in those months only by a free use of mill feeds
at high cost. The cost is often so great as to
absorb all profits ; so it's not uncommon to see
the cows prematurely dried in summer and
turned out to pick a bare living on such weeds
and roughage as they're able to find for them-
selves. Then through the fall and winter

290 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

there's often no milk or butter on the farm-
house tables.

That looks like poor business, doesn't it?
With a little planning all expensive summer
feeding may be done away with. Even if the
farmer isn't able to afford a summer silo he
may save himself by a bit of contriving.

It happens that we have at Happy Hollow
in this midsummer quite a likely bunch of
young cows and heifers and lately weaned
calves. Up to this time there has been plenty
of good grass and clover pasture, but in an-
other week or ten days we shall have to think
about other feed. There are more animals in
the lot than we need for farm use. Most farm-
ers in this fix would sell off the surplus; in-
deed, that's just what the neighbors are doing.
The desire to sell has struck them all at once,
so that the speculators are able to beat down
prices several notches below real values. If
we can carry our animals over the next month
or six weeks cheaply and have some good milk
animals to offer when the fall rains start and
the fall pastures freshen it will mean a good
many dollars to us.

We prepared for this emergency a month
ago, making a thick sowing of amber sorghum

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 291

after oats harvest on a couple of acres lying
just over the fence from the barn lots, timing
the sowing so we would have the cane ready
to feed by mid-July. The land was heavily
manured, and with only a month's growth the
sorghum is now shoulder-high, rank as a tropi-
cal jungle. If it were cut now it would give
us five or six tons of cured hay to the acre;
cut and fed green and fresh it will carry our
cattle abundantly till the first frosts come. The
value of the manure we get will much more
than pay the cost of preparing and seeding the
land, so we get the feeding value of the crop
for nothing but the little labor of throwing it
over the fence.

That cane crop as it stands is a living proof
of the value of manure applied to these worn
soils. The dressing was applied heavily while
our supply lasted ; but the supply gave out be-
fore the whole of the patch was covered. You
can see the difference with both eyes tied be-
hind you. Only one good rain has fallen since
the seeding was done. The dressed part of the
land is to-day mellow and moist; the cane
standing there is rich, thick-stemmed, dark-
leaved and drips juice when it's cut. The strip
through the middle of the field that had no

292 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

manuring is baked hard, and the cane there is
only shoe-top high, the leaves saff ron-hued, the
stems no thicker than lead pencils and appear-
ing just about as succulent as an old tooth-
brush. With every condition in its favor for
the rest of the season it will give no more than
a ton of hay to the acre; probably the yield
will be only half a ton.

On one of our oats fields there is some stone
left which we want to haul off this summer;
so we didn't follow the oats with peas as on the
rest of the small grain land. Those five or six
acres promised to lie fallow for the remainder
of the year; but now there's a fine volunteer
crop of crabgrass and Japanese clover coming
on. We're running a line of fence across one
side, to cut the patch off from the cornfields —
and there's excellent pasturage for the horses,
enough to carry them well till the beginning of
winter.

All this means of course that the permanent
pastures will be left to restore themselves for
late fall use. They'll be greatly improved by
the rest, and the stock will thrive all the better
for the change. The ultimate cost of doing
these things is just the cost of a couple of days
labor; the profits can't be exactly estimated,

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 293

but they'll run up in one way and another to
many dollars. Best of all, our pigs will be
thriving on a part of that sorghum for next
winter's meat, and for the rest of the year our
milk and cream and butter will cost us nothing
but the labor of caring for the animals while
most of our farmer neighbors are going with-
out.

You can see that there's nothing extraordi-
nary in any of this. We've had no circum-
stances in our favor save as we've taken hold
and molded them to our needs. There isn't a
farm in the country on which this sort of man-
agement might not be followed — just a careful,
timely stroke that's thought out long enough
beforehand to give it full value. As a matter
of fact, though, I don't know of one farm
around Happy Hollow that's having such man-
agement. I haven't seen another farm in the
neighborhood that has provided even a little
forage-patch.

That isn't a showy sort of management.
Even a practical farmer would be apt to un-
derestimate its worth if he had never tried the
stop-gap system in his own work. He'd de-
ceive himself by figuring the money value of
the small batches of stuff grown in that way

294 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

instead of the value of the service they render
— which of course is the true value on the farm.
The cash-crop idea is all right till it becomes
an obsession ; but too close devotion to it leads
many a farmer to miss many an opportunity
for getting ahead. The measure of value of
that sorghum patch isn't at all the price we
might get for the hay if we cut and cured and
sold it in the market, but rather what it will
save us by conserving our pastures and mak-
ing it unnecessary for us to sacrifice valuable
stock.

You'll see how difficult it is to write down
the profits of such operations in dollars and
cents. What's it worth in dollars and cents to
have brimming pailfuls of rich fresh milk,
night and morning, all through July and Au-
gust and September, just at the time of year
when it's most needed for health's sake? I
can't cipher it out. There are many degrees of
living, and none is too good if it insures health
and comfort. The best doesn't often depend
upon the amount of money spent in getting it,
but far oftener upon a little good care.

A few days ago I visited a farmhouse down
the road and saw an eight-months-old baby sit-
ting on the floor sucking hungrily at a chunk

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 295

of pork. There was no milk for it, because the
cow had been sold, because there wasn't any-
thing to feed it, because the farmer hadn't
planned by a couple of hours' work in June to
meet this unfailing midsummer condition. The
farmer's wife said the baby was "right puny,
this hot weather," and it looked the part.

Well, anyway, to get back to the practical
question, I know perfectly well that this stop-
gap method of doing things in garden and barn
and feed-lot is enabling us to live and to live
well on no money outlay at all. You may say
if you like that that's contrary to all reason;
but it's true. True things needn't necessarily
gee with what we think is reasonable. Nothing
seems reasonable till we've grown more or less
accustomed to it. But there's the fact. Our
table is supplied through careful little savings
in time which, but for this practice, must be
sheer wastes. We have no loafing hours in our
work days. If field work stops for any reason
at any time, we make it a point always to find
something to do that will make our living con-
ditions better and help to keep our living costs
at zero. Lean back in your chair for a minute
now and see if that proposition doesn't clear
itself up for you.

296 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

That leaves the field work to be talked about
— that part of the work which most of us think
about when farming is mentioned. Since we're
calling this a farm, we ought to be able to ac-
count for what the fields are doing. That's
fair enough; for running a farm as large as
ours doesn't consist merely in supplying the
house table. That may be done on only a few
acres ; but we have a hundred and twenty acres
in the farm. If the big end isn't paying, then
it's a case of the tail wagging the dog — freak
business.

We have sixty acres of the farm well cleaned
up and in a fine state of cultivation, besides
twenty acres in partly timbered pasture — a
pasture with a brook on either side, and the
fields between. Ten acres of the sixty is in
park, lawn, garden, orchard, house grounds,
barnyard and feeding lots. That leaves fifty
acres actually devoted to field crops.

From that fifty acres we shall get this year,
after deducting enough to pay labor cost,
about three hundred bushels of wheat, four
hundred of oats, eight hundred of corn, sixty
to seventy-five tons of cowpea and sorghum
hay, ten or twelve tons of straw, and perhaps
twenty tons of corn fodder that will be cut and

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 297

stored for feeding. About as much more fod-
der will be pastured in the fields ; and we shall
have no end of second-growth peavines for
pasturage. Suppose we throw in that pasture
part; we'd have to guess at its money value,
anyway. Suppose we count only the harvested
crops.

Most of the farmers around us have been
used to selling so soon as they could manage
it after harvest. Usually they need the money ;
but, if they weren't impelled by necessity to
sell, they haven't enough storage room for put-
ting by anything beyond their own farm needs.

If we intended to sell what we've grown, we
should hold until December 1 or later when
the depression of harvest time is past and re-
covery of prices is under way. Judging from
the past, about December 1 our wheat will be
worth in the local markets approximately
ninety cents a bushel, our oats forty cents, our
corn seventy cents, our hay fifteen dollars a
ton, and our straw five or six dollars. There
isn't a market price on the corn fodder,
as no one hereabouts has made a com-
modity of it. What is saved is usually fed on
the farms. Sometimes it figures in trades be-
tween neighbors, but never in the open market.

298 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

It's worth as much as the straw, at least — five
or six dollars a ton.

We shan't sell our crops in the raw; but if
we were to sell we'd realize about $2,000.

In 1908, the year we bought the farm, the
tenant's crop summed up sixty bushels of
wheat, thirty bushels of oats, one hundred
and twenty bushels of corn, a few small
loads of fodder, and no hay. If he had
owned the entire crop and had sold on the
average prices of December 1, his gross income
would have been about $165, with nothing
counted out for labor. And his crop was about
on a footing with the crops grown on other
farms here that were run as ours was.

So, considering everything, we feel that our
farming has paid and that we have succeeded
uncommonly well. If future years showed
no improvement over this year in point of
yields, if we made no further advance in any
way, and if there were no income from any
other source, we could live in security on our
farm. We could indulge no extravagances,
but we could get along very comfortably.
We'd be well above the poverty level. If we
knew distress it wouldn't be the distress of
hunger or privation.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 299

We couldn't be satisfied with that, though.
We should feel a very positive distress at this
point in achievement if we thought we must
go no further — not because we need or want
more than the farm is now giving us, but be-
cause we have just now discovered that real
achievement is all ahead of us.

We have set no records in anything we have
done. There's the rub. But why shouldn't
we? We're carrying no handicap; there's no
obstacle in our way ; and there's no reason why
we must think of stopping where we are, even
though we have done better in many ways than
we hoped in the beginning. Frankly, this was
an adventure. We meant to succeed in it.
Never at any time have Laura and I seriously
discussed the possibility of failure. I shouldn't
wonder if that's the main reason why we
haven't failed. Tenacity of temper, with the
mind set upon success, and with no alternative
of defeat to be considered — that's a good half
of accomplishment itself.

We didn't go at our work with any fixed
goal, saying to ourselves that when we got to
such and such a point we'd be willing to halt
and thereafter let well enough alone. Always
our talk has been of something ahead, some-

300 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

thing better than the best of the past. We're
still of that mind. We mean to keep right on,
using the past simply as a beginning, and re-
garding the future as an invitation which must
be accepted.

You know how pleasing it is to review a
creditable performance and say to yourself
over it: "Well, there! I've never done that
before! I'm advancing!" I'm trying to think
how it would feel to change the form and say :
"Well, there! Nobody on earth ever did that
before !" Before we're through with our work
we want to taste that satisfaction.

For my part, I don't much care what form
this achievement may take, if only it's some-
thing worth doing. Maybe we'll wind up by
growing more corn on an acre of land than has
been grown before. That wouldn't be bad.
Maybe we'll work out a means of reducing the
production cost of one or another of the farm
staples. That would be all right with me.
Maybe we'll succeed in demonstrating in some
new way how far an acre of land may go in
furnishing food for us humans. That would be
bully! Maybe we'll discover a new wrinkle in
the work of restoring vitality to an exhausted
soil. That would be going some! Or maybe

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 301

our pace-making will be decidedly more modest
in its character. I shan't kick about that.
Whatever it may be, we're bent upon doing
something here at Happy Hollow that will
advance the business of farming and so make
it easier for folks to live.

Is that a practical aim for a farmer? Or is
it merely a sentimental notion? I don't care
what you call it. We're going to do it. Only
when that is done shall we be able to feel that
our adventure has wholly and happily justified
itself.

Why shouldn't we do it? Goodness knows
there are plenty of ways open for breaking
farm records. We're progressing, and we're
moving fast in our understanding of possibili-
ties ; but we haven't yet moved very far from
the old-time stagnation. Everything that's
being done on the farms of to-day will be bet-
ter done in the next generation. Our feet
aren't yet accustomed to the new forward stride
after so many centuries of just marking time.
Every blessed thing in the new science of farm-
ing has been discovered and developed since I
was a boy. We're mighty vain of all this
brand-new advancement; but don't you think
it likely that the farmers of the next generation

302 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

may look back over our work and smile at the
half way things we've done and the half way
goals we've been striving for? It may do us
good to brood over that a bit.

I think I should feel a little mean in settling
back and resting content with what we've done,
even though it suffices for our needs, when I
know that we haven't yet rendered any real
service to anybody but ourselves. So long as
that chance of service lies plain before us we
shall keep right ahead. Perhaps the vision
has some sentiment in it, but the realization will
be practical enough.

XV

I'VE found out about that mocking bird.
He's quit his singing; I haven't heard a peep
out of him for a week. He's too busy. Late
yesterday afternoon, when the first hint of the
evening coolness of the mountains was in the
air, Laura and I sat in the shade of the grape-
vine that hides the nest. We were talking a
little, by fits and starts, and watching Peggy
and Betty as they played at "tea party" on
the grass before their tiny house.

Then there came a sudden flash of warm
brown and warm gray in the slanting sunlight,
and there was the songster of last week balanc-
ing airily on a stem of the vine just over our
heads, flicking his tail with sharp, excited jerks,
twisting sideways to take a keen look at us.
He must have figured us out as harmless, for
he went hopping along the stem to disappear
in the thick leafage. We saw why he hadn't
been singing lately: He held a small brown
grasshopper in his bill! In a moment there
came from the deeply sheltered nest a sound

303

804 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

as unmistakable as the contented sighing of a
babe at the breast. Daddy was stuffing his
grasshopper down a yawning, hungry pink
throat. In another flash he was gone to find
another tidbit. He's keeping at it steadily,
from morning till night. He is certainly a
busy bird!

"Well!" I said. "The old man has had a
come-down, hasn't he?"

"Has he?" Laura asked quietly. Her eyes
were on our own babies at our feet. The sim-
ple question caught me up short.

"No, no!" I said. "God knows I didn't
mean that. He's been promoted ; he's gone up
to the very head of his class — as far up as any
male thing may ever hope to get in this life."

We didn't argue the matter. There was no
need. We only sat and looked about us and
let the calm of the coming dusk take posses-
sion of us.

It was an exquisite picture we saw. Near
lay our cornfields, a very embodiment of
Plenty brought magically into being. A light
air swept across the tasseled ranks of the corn,
and they bent, rustling, whispering of the pro-
found mystery. It needed no abnormal fancy
to catch a hint of what they talked about.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 305

We'll never learn the strange, wild-sweet vo-
cabulary, maybe ; but if we will we may under-
stand the spirit of it. Life's abounding good-
ness— that's what it all means. And beyond
our own lay other fields of corn, stretching
away and away into the distances, covering the
land with life's eternal assurance. Among the
corn, embroidery of gold on the rich, deep
green, were fields of wheat stubble after har-
vest, dotted with stacked mounds of their grain
ready for the hands of the threshers. Here and
there, nestled in trees, stood the homes of the
farmers, gray-walled, gray-roofed, with the
smoke of the supper fires curling and drifting
from the chimney tops and melting into the
evening haze. Slowly, slowly, while we
watched, the hill-rimmed cup of the valley
filled with purple shadows, a flood of wondrous
color, rising, swelling, brimming over. Listen-
ing, we could hear the far, faint sounds of the
life of the farms — the rattle of a wagon home-
ward bound over a country lane, the friendly-
sounding bark of a house-dog, the shrill whinny
of a hungry colt for its dam. So homely it
was, and so beautiful ! It gave me a little pang
of wist fulness.

"I wish I were a poet," I said. "I'd like to

806 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

sing of all this glory/5 But in the next minute
I had to laugh. "No," I told myself, "it's bet-
ter just to live in it than to sing of it. There's
that mocker. He quit his singing to feed his
babies. I'll bet he's a far happier chap than
he was last week. This is the better part!"

The full tide of the dusk was upon us. Lit-
tle Betty left her play and came to my knee,
coaxing to be taken in for her night's drink of
new milk. Dorothy called to us from the
house, summoning us to the late summertime
supper. So we went into the cheerful dining-
room and sat down together.

We had a couple of guests at the table — not
"company" folks, but good friends who have
learned to be at home here. There was some
gay talk over the meal; not frivolous nor
smart; serious enough at moments, but light-
hearted for all that, carefree, with a laugh al-
ways ready to follow close upon the heels of
the spoken word. We were feeling pretty
good.

After supper, when the youngsters were in
bed, somebody hinted at a rubber of whist;
but somehow we drifted out to the lawn, with
rugs spread upon the grass in the soft twi-
light, and there we went on with our talk.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 307

The talk turned by and by to another sum-
mer night out of doors — our first night on the
farm, six years ago, when we camped in the
thicket down by the big spring, strangers fac-
ing a new life with only a vision to guide us.
That time seemed very remote now, separated
from this day by a world of curious experience
— no, not curious, but vivid, vital, transform-
ing. It needed no deep self-scrutiny to dis-
cover that I'd become another man in those six
years. The change was more than a change
in interests or in manner of living or in out-
look; it was a change that went to the very
heart's core. Is it egotism to say that I've be-
come a wise man? All right ; but don't grudge
me that indulgence. Say if you like that there
are degrees and degrees of wisdom. What I
mean is that upon the whole I'm more wise
than foolish. I'm rid now of just about all
of the insanities that may fill a man's life with
doubts and distresses.

Farming has made the change ; nothing else.
You know how easily a man's thinking may be-
come all littered up with the non-essentials if
the life about him is tangled and confused.
He mistakes the shadows for realities and the
realities for shadows till after a while the whole

808 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

scheme of things seems no better than a vain
illusion. There's only one cure for that: To
find the way back to simplicity.

Ours is simple living, and it has led me into
plain, straight ways of thinking. Can you be-
lieve me when I say that I have no doubts now
about life? It's entirely true. Why should I
have, when Life itself has been patiently teach-
ing me?

We talked of these things the other night out
of doors ; talked on and on while the constella-
tions marched orderly, stately, unhalting across
the infinite background of the sky. We were
in a fine temper for trying to put ourselves
right, with the mood of the great outdoors to
help. We slept peacefully that night.

Laura hasn't read a great deal of this story
as it's been a-writing — a scrap now and then,
pronouncing a mild sort of approval. I
haven't minded that, for I know what the trou-
ble must IDC. Though I've let you see some of
the surface signs of the delight we've known,
I've failed to say so many things I ought to
have said, so many things I'd like to have said,
so many things I would have said but for the
luckless circumstance that I can't find the
right words for them. It's of no use to search

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 309

the lexicons or the books of synonyms; the
words I want aren't there. I've been searching
everywhere for them, but they elude me. I'm
beginning to wonder if anybody has yet found
them, or if they aren't still to be molded out of
the flux of life. There must be words still un-
born, better than any we know. You'll think
so if you ever try to tell a plain true story like
this. If I were only romancing there would
be plenty of words crowding up for attention ;
but for use in a bit of truth-telling there are
so few!

Where's the word for supreme content, for
unfaltering faith in the Divine order of things ?
There isn't any; but there will be some time.
The wordsmiths won't be the fellows who'll
make it. It will leap warm and living out of
the heart of somebody all unlearned in every-
thing but content and faith. When the right
time comes, suddenly he'll look up from his
work and speak the great word simply.

I wish I had it now, for that's the word I'd
like to use in telling of the spirit that hovers
over Happy Hollow. It's a passion too deep
to be sounded, a calm too perfect to be ruffled,
both rolled into one. We would have that feel-
ing astir in us though we had failed as farm-

310 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

ers, though we had done no better at crop-
growing than the poor tenant before us. The
abundance of the fields is good, and we're very
thankful that it has come to us ; but if it had
been withheld we shouldn't be bankrupt in con-
tent if only life were given us here in the hills.
It's a feeling that seems to belong to this per-
fect setting, regardless of all the minor cir-
cumstances. Just to look out into the soft
glory of a misty morning; just to see life astir
at the height of a fervid summer noontime;
just to draw close about the kindly hearth-fire
on a blustery winter evening; just to feel the
good earth under us and the deep sky over us
and the sheltering hills round about us — that's
enough.

Though we've fared so much better than she
in the circumstances of life, Jake's poor old
mother knows as well as we do what this feel-
ing is. Yes, she knows it better, for it hasn't
been tangled up in her heart with so many
other feelings.

Early one Sunday morning we went up the
mountainside to make her a little visit. Her
cabin was very bare. On the table was a bit of
the cold cornbread she had made her breakfast
upon, and on the back of a rusted sheetiron

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 311

stove no bigger than a toy stood her blackened
coffee pot. She had a rough homemade table
in one corner; her chair was a cracker-box on
end, and squeezed in beside the table was a nar-
row bed with drawn ropes for springs. We
were welcome, though we had to stand up for
our call because there was nothing to sit upon.
"Ain't it sure a powerful pretty mornin'?"
she said. "I've been watchin' it sence sun-up,
through the trees. Sunday, ain't it? I knowed
it was. A body ought to go to meetin' Sun-
days. I used to go; but it seems like when a
woman gits as old as me she don't always have
clothes. I ain't got none but this dress I got
on. But if I don't go to meetin' I kin stay
home an' be thankful. Ain't a person got a
lot to be thankful fer? I got my health, an* I
got my home. The' ain't no reason fer any-
body bein' good to an old woman like me ; but
they are. A lady in town done give me that
stove yest'd'y, an' I packed it over the moun-
tain. It's been terrible unhandy, cookin' my
victuals on a chip fire outdoors. Sence Jake
died it's kind o' hard fer me to git work some-
times; but I'm piecin' a quilt that I'll git a
dollar fer when it's done. It's sort o' slow,
'count of my fingers bein' so old an' stiff; but

812 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

a body oughtn't to complain none about that.
A dollar will keep me in meal an' coffee a long
time, won't it? I ain't got anybody but the
Lord to take keer of me; but He's doin' it,
ain't he? I sure am thankful."

What has that spirit to do with large success ?
Isn't it in itself the largest of all successes?
I'll leave it to you.

When the harvest is finished next fall and
the farm is put in shipshape for the winter,
Laura and I with our children are going over
to Egypt and then up through some of the
countries to the north, Italy and France and
Germany and England and a few other places.
That's to be a part of our children's education.
We want them to see some pictures and hear
some music and get something of the "feel" of
the great world and its great history. We
think they'll be the better for that, and maybe
usefuller when they come to take their places.

We shan't spend much time in the feverish
capitals — just time enough to give us some
sharp effects of contrast. We're going for the
most part along quiet ways so we may see real
life instead of the poor counterfeits.

I suppose the folks will spend most of their
time in the towns and villages, in the libraries

HAPPY HOLLOW; FARM sis

and galleries and cathedrals and in the town
homes. I shall spend my time mostly with
the farmers, living in their houses, working
with them at their jobs, getting as close as I'm
able to the minds and hearts of the living men
and women on the soil. I've had just about
town enough in mine.

We're not to pay for this trip out of the
hoarded profits of our farming at Happy Hol-
low. If we tried that, we'd get stuck some-
where between here and New York. I've
turned back to my magazine writing to help
me through with some emergency money. At
that, they won't see me staking high heaps of
gold at Monte Carlo. We're going quietly,
modestly, keeping prudent watch over the pen-
nies. There will be nothing of the tip-giving,
racing, breathless, bored-to-death American
tourist about us. We shall move leisurely,
stopping where we want to stop, with money
enough for shelter and food. Ours won't be a
glittering "progress," and we shan't bring
back marbles or canvases or costly trophies.
We shall travel as befits such a family as ours,
eager to get the utmost of enduring good out
of the opportunity of a lifetime.

I'm telling you this, not for the fact alone,

314 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

but because the prospect has shown in a curious
way what the life of Happy Hollow has done
to me. Save on the family's account, I'm not
half so keen for the trip as I fancied I should
be. Honestly, I don't more than half want to
go for my own pleasure. I'd just about as
soon stay at home here in the Arkansas hills.

That wasn't my temper six years ago. If
we had planned then for such an adventure I'd
have spent excited days and sleepless nights
on the planning. That's not the case now. I'm
brushing up my German and Spanish a bit,
and I'm trying to direct the children as I'm
able in some reading they ought to do before
we go; but my own days' work goes on right
placidly, free of nervous exaltation. Not that
I'm indifferent. I know it will be a wonderful
experience and that I'll come home with sym-
pathies broadened and understanding mightily
quickened. I'm always anxious for new hu-
man contacts, and I'll get some on this trip.
But with all that in prospect I'm not so keen
for it as I should have been before we came to
the farm.

I know what you're thinking: "Why, that
man's getting old! He must be losing his
grip." But that's not the explanation. Maybe

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 315

if I tell you a little story it will help you to
understand.

This Fayetteville country was settled years
and years before the railroad was built — and
that's nearly forty years ago. A new railroad
has come in lately. Last summer I rode back
into the hills a dozen miles east of home, and
there I stopped at a farmhouse one day. The
farmer was a middle-aged man, and his father
who lived with him was "goin* on eighty." At
dinner our talk ran for a time on the new rail-
way and the advantages it would give us farm-
ers in the way of better markets for our stuff
and better shipping rates. It was the younger
man who did most of the talking. By and by
the old father broke in.

"Hit's kind o' cur'us," he said, "but I ain't
ever seen thet first railroad yit. Hit's done
been thar a long while, too. I've sort o' fig-
gered sometimes thet I'd go in an' hev a look
at that darned thing, just for cur'osity; but I
ain't never got round to it, an' I don't expect
as how I ever will. What'd be the use? Hit
don't take a railroad to make me happy. If
I've ever got any time to spend in lookin', I
can set right here on the front porch an' look
across the cove at the hills. They're a heap

816 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

better to look at than a common railroad. I
don't b'lieve a railroad would content me to
look at like these hills does."

Well, there you are! Say if you like that
the old man was hopelessly primitive and be-
hind the times; but he's so far ahead of the
times in the supreme good of life that not
many of us will ever catch up with him.

I've learned to feel pretty much as he does
toward the glories of these hills. They've
given me what I needed. I've looked at them
for so long now, whenever there's a brief
chance to look away from my work, that I
know every round line and every gentle curve
and every play of light and shadow as I know
the soft curve of my baby's cheek and the light
in her eyes. I'm going to be sorry when the
time comes to turn my back upon them and go
away to look at other hills.

We'll see some great old hills, of course;
hills sheltering happy valleys, hills that have
been blood-soaked and tormented through cen-
turies of bitter struggle, hills in whose shadows
great races of men have worked and fought
and suffered out their destinies; but we'll see
no hills so good as these at home.

Home I Isn't that the very word I was fuss-

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 317

ing about a little while ago — the word that
hadn't been found — the word that would stand
for faith and content and goodness ? Why, of
course that's it ! And we've had it all the time 1
Home!

What is the idea of home, anyway? You
needn't bother to turn to the dictionaries. I've
just this minute looked through half a dozen
of them; and what do you suppose I've found?
Listen: "The house in which one resides;
place or country in which one dwells ; pertain-
ing to one's dwelling; the abode of the family
to which one belongs ; a place or state of rest or
comfort; a future state; the grave." Now
what do you think of that?

Yet that's not surprising, when you think of
it. We have the one great word ; how dare we
hope to find other words fit to define it with?
It can't be done. There isn't any definition.

But, oh, I wish you could see the picture I'm
looking at just now! Then you'd understand.

It's evening. There are long shadows across
the land. The day has been warm, but the air
is coming cool now from the heights. Work is
over. From my window I can see Sam going
wearily through the yard toward his cottage
with his two little boys. My own family is

318 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM

gathering in for supper time. Laura has been
working with her honeysuckles and roses this
afternoon, and she's tired, sitting by the big
open south window and waiting for Dorothy to
call. On the floor in the middle of the living-
room the two littler children are sprawled at
their length with a book. Peggy is telling
stories, and Betty's voice is chirping along be-
hind, trying to pronounce some of the easy
words. Peggy is laughing at her queer, quaint
accents; and the baby laughs, too, without
knowing what it's about. To laugh seems to
strike her as the only thing to do. My son has
just come by my desk, laying his hand upon my
shoulder with a jolly word. Twilight is soft-
ening the lines of the wide rooms. We'll light
the lamps pretty soon, and the wide spaces
under the spreading roof will shine out golden.
There's no evil under this roof, no bitterness,
no sorrow, but only a divine content. This is
Home!

THE END.

Gen.Lib.

7 DAY USE

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