New lives for old
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Title: New lives for old

Author: William Carleton

Release date: August 15, 2025 [eBook #76684]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1913

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, David E. Brown, Joyce Wilson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW LIVES FOR OLD ***

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

BY
WILLIAM CARLETON
AUTHOR OF “ONE WAY OUT”

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1913
By Small, Maynard & Company
(INCORPORATED)

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

TO
HOLT
TO WHOM WE IN OUR TOWN OWE
MUCH OF OUR SUCCESS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | PAGE
I | A New Beginning | 1
II | My Neighbors | 21
III | Cold Facts | 40
IV | A Town Asleep | 55
V | Stirring Things Up | 64
VI | A Game Worth Playing | 72
VII | The Pioneers | 84
VIII | The New Way | 100
IX | Spring | 117
X | Results | 133
XI | A Great Day | 149
XII | New Ventures | 164
XIII | Getting Together | 179
XIV | Finding Ourselves | 194
XV | The Goose Hangs High | 208

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

CHAPTER I
A NEW BEGINNING

The first thing I did when I was fairly on my feet was to buy a farm.

It was a matter of sentiment with me. All my family with the exception of my father had been farmers and even he, in his latter years, had talked wistfully of the independence of country life. His father had owned a fairly prosperous farm in New Hampshire and on his few acres had lived and died. He had raised there wheat for his flour, wool for his clothing, hides for his shoes, cream for his butter, and meat and vegetables for his table. He even made a fairly good imitation tea and coffee and sweetened the drink with maple sugar from his own trees. Grandfather Carleton, according to father, could have built a Chinese wall about his fields and lived within its boundaries, asking favor of no man. I suppose it was the feeling of independence coming of this that made such men as he good Americans; the first to shoulder muskets for their country, the first to shoulder axes and blaze a trail through the wilderness.

Ruth’s folks, too, had all been farmers. She herself was born and bred on a farm and I think it was that which gave her such good health and good courage. Though in the years of our struggle in the city I never heard her complain, I knew that always in her heart she had a great yearning for the fields and open sky. She never spoke of this, but sometimes Ruth says a great deal when she doesn’t speak. I know when I first told her of my plan she had to swallow hard to keep from crying.

One thing alone disturbed Ruth and that was the thought that with success we were running away from our new-found friends.

“Somehow it seems as though we ought to stay right on here where we’ve made good and share our success with the others,” she said.

“You talk as though we’d made our fortune and were going back to the fatherland,” I said.

“I feel that way,” she admitted.

“Well,” I said, “the gang is part of me now and I wouldn’t quit if I were worth a million. But we’re in a position where we can afford more elbow room now. Of course we can move back into the suburbs again, if we want to.”

She shuddered a little at that.

“Not back there,” she answered.

“Then the only other thing is a farm,” I said. “And if you want, you can think of it as a farm for the whole gang. What a place it will be for the kiddies; your own and the others!”

That was all the cue Ruth needed. On the spot she hatched plans enough to keep her busy all her life. It looked to me as though we’d need a Carnegie endowment to carry out all her schemes, but I didn’t say anything. I’d felt that way before about her projects and seen her end by putting them through on a few dollars. If Ruth had put into business the same amount of thought and brains and energy that she put into her philanthropies she would have made a fortune.

I went to a real estate dealer and there I received my first surprise. It wasn’t my last, however. Before I was through with this business I discovered that I had as much to learn as I had during those first years as an emigrant. And I may as well say right here that my experience wasn’t the kind I’ve read about in the “Simple Life” and “Back to the Farm” stories. And because it was different is the reason I’m writing this. There’s been just as much nonsense written about the farm as about the slums. One man makes it out a hell on earth and another man makes it out a paradise on earth, and both of them are wrong and both of them are right, but neither of them seems to me to have got at the heart of the matter.

In “One Way Out” I learned to my own satisfaction that if an emigrant succeeds where an American fails it proves there’s something wrong with the American. And there is. True as you’re living, there is. Something is lacking in him that his ancestors had; something lacking that the emigrant has to-day. I thought that I had learned this once for all but when I got back into the country I had to learn it over again. The conditions were different, but the same facts held good.

I received a surprise, I said, at the very beginning. It came when the real estate man handed me a list of almost a hundred places for rent and for sale—all within easy reach of the city. I had my choice of anything from one acre to a hundred acres. Not only this but they were offered me almost at my own figure and my own terms. I found I could buy a farm as easily as a set of books. I don’t think the agents would have refused a dollar down and a dollar a week.

I didn’t know anything about real estate values then, but judging from the prices suburban property was bringing I had an idea that a fairly decent place with buildings would cost me around ten thousand dollars. I found that for this sum I could get a fourteen room Colonial house with land enough for a park. After living where the same amount of land would almost make a ward, I was staggered. I thought there must be something crooked in the proposition. But I went to the other agencies and found the same bargains open to me. It seemed that farms were a drug on the market.

And this was in a section of the country which had been settled for over two hundred and fifty years! There’s something to think about in that. It was within a ten cent car fare of a region which was absorbing emigrants by the hundred thousand. It was on the very outskirts of a city which was howling about congestion and moaning over the high cost of living. Land was actually lying idle almost within sight of a market pleading for more produce. It certainly looked queer.

These facts, however, didn’t concern me at the time. As soon as I made sure the facts were actually as represented, I set about making a selection. To Ruth and me this was like living our honeymoon all over again. Perhaps it was more like living our youth again, for we hadn’t ever passed our honeymoon. I’d go over the lists with her in the evening and we’d check off the places that sounded good to us, and then on the first fair morning we’d start to hunt them up. She’d leave the baby at home with some of our good neighbors and we’d go as far as we could on the electric cars and then walk. I wanted to have a carriage but she wouldn’t hear of it because she wanted to feel free. Some days she pretended we were gypsies and other days that we were two Indians hunting a spot to camp. I didn’t mind, because Dick was looking after most of the business now so I could take my time without worrying about that. In this way we squandered whole days along the country roads going through one old house after another and eating our lunch by the side of a brook or in a bit of woods.

I think there must have been something in our blood inherited from our ancestors, for we took to the open road as though we’d been born by its side. Oh, but those were good days—those days when we wandered about at our will in search of a home. It was June and the fields were full of flowers and the air full of birds. Ruth knew them every one and greeted them like old friends, pointing them out to me. I could tell a crow from a robin and a daisy from a buttercup, but that was about all, and yet to me also these wild things were like old friends. I had never missed them, but after the first day I knew I could never do without them again. It was just as I had felt about Ruth from the first time I saw her.

I suppose too that the contrast with our narrow quarters of the last few years had something to do with our joy in the broader prospect. Not that we had ever felt crowded. We had in our tenement all the room we needed and our lives had been so full that we didn’t notice our quarters anyway. Our lives were still full but with more leisure and less strain we wanted more than we needed. We were like pioneers—content at the start with a log cabin or even a tent, but with prosperity desiring larger and better quarters more as a matter of comfort than necessity. We were now ready for a few of the luxuries of life but we recognized frankly the fact that our new inclinations were luxuries. If success had been longer in coming than it was, we would have remained where we were in perfect contentment.

It was hard for us to decide on any of the many old houses we explored because to us they all looked attractive. The thing we both liked about them in spite of signs of decay was that they all seemed so firmly established. There was nothing flimsy about them. They looked as though they had become rooted in the soil like the big elms which grew before so many of them. It was as though the winds and the sun and the rain had tested them and found them honest. As Ruth said, in going into them you wouldn’t feel as though you were beginning life again as you might in a brand new house, but were only starting where the last owner left off.

After our experiences during the last few years we appreciated such details as those. There had been times in the emigrant days when way down deep in our hearts we had felt a little bit like people without a country. We were pioneers and we gloried in that, but we were pioneers without a fatherland. We had no sunny Italy, no emerald isle, no gay France, not even a grim Russia to talk about over a pipe at the end of the day as our neighbors had. We had to go back a century or more to get home, and vivid as that past seemed at times it was distinctly a past in which we had played no part. Now out here in the country where we saw stone walls built by our forefathers, where the land had been tilled by them, where trees planted by them were still growing, where if not direct descendants of our own, descendants of the old stock still lived, we felt closer to that history. So we thought that if we went into one of the old houses built by our forefathers, it would bring us still nearer home.

We spent almost a month this way, anxious to draw out the pleasure as long as possible.

“I’ll know our home as soon as I see it,” said Ruth; “I’ll recognize it like an old friend.”

And so she did. One day toward nightfall—when in the country all the world seems to get mellow—we came upon a little story and a half house connected by a shed with a ramshackly looking barn. It was half hidden behind trees and lilac bushes on the top of a knoll which sloped to a small lake some fifty rods distant. There wasn’t another house within sight of it—just woodland and pasture and fields. Standing there on the old granite doorstep, you wouldn’t have believed there was a city within a long day’s journey.

We had the key and went inside. The rooms were low studded and the windows came down to within two feet of the floor. The ceilings were discolored and the paper was off in great patches where the roof had leaked. But in spite of this the place somehow was like home. Ruth took my arm with a tight squeeze and looked up at me.

“This is it, Billy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure as she was until all excited she began to tell me what she was going to do. With the birds singing outside and the lazy sun streaming through the windows slantwise, she led me through every room, selecting her papers, making her changes, and placing her furniture.

“We don’t want a single new thing in this house,” she exclaimed. “We want to keep it just as it was and don’t you see how it was?”

I hadn’t ever lived in the country and so I didn’t, but she made it so vivid to me before we left that evening that I felt as though I had been born here.

“We must visit all the houses in the neighborhood and buy what furniture we can right here,” she said. “Maybe there’ll be an auction. Country people are always selling off their old stuff so we must keep our eyes open.”

“I should think it would be a lot simpler to buy what we want in town and be done with it,” I said.

“But we don’t want to be done with it, Billy,” she answered. “We can’t come slam bang into an old house like this. We must grow into it.”

She was so happy that I didn’t say anything more. I knew that she was right, whatever I thought. I’d trust Ruth’s instinct against my judgment any time.

I found that I could secure some fifty acres around the house and this was what pleased me. The lot included woodland, pasture and field, but mostly pasture grown up to alders and scrub pine. But however poor the land was, it was land, and that was what I was hungry for. I wanted to look out the windows and see land and walk over it and feel it beneath my feet, knowing I owned it. I wanted to feel that I had a certain section of these United States of America which belonged to me and my heirs forever and ever. To have this would seem like being taken into the firm.

When I came to look up the deeds I felt this more keenly than ever. I was able to trace the title back to an old Indian grant, for it had been held in one family over two hundred years and had changed title only twice since then. This in itself brought history mighty close.

I bought the land and house for twenty-eight hundred dollars—the house being practically thrown in. Because it was lop-sided and old and in need of repair it had no market value whatever. A flimsily built modern bungalow would have brought more. And yet when I examined the timbers I found them of oak, handhewn, and sound as a nut. The underpinning was made of great granite slabs and was as good as the day it was put in, though it had worked askew from the frost. Even the floors, though uneven and needing propping, were sound. The roof boards and shingles had of course rotted, but here again the timbers supporting them had with time only become seasoned. When our great grandfathers built houses they didn’t build for decades but for centuries. They didn’t reckon the cost of the lumber. In a cottage they used beams big enough to support a church, matched them true and fastened them with hand-made spikes a foot long. I couldn’t have bought the lumber alone for what I paid for the house. I couldn’t have bought it anyway. You can’t buy such timber as that any more.

I started work upon it at once, because we wanted to get in as soon as possible. From the moment I paid the first installment—I bought it on time as a matter of convenience—we felt this to be our home. I couldn’t spare any of my own men just then and felt anyway that as far as possible I ought to use local labor, so after considerable effort I rounded up three men to help me.

I came to know these fellows better later on, but at the start they were almost as foreign to me as though they had come from another country. One of them was a man of fifty, another a man of forty and the third was a young chap not more than twenty-two or three. I’ll call the oldest one Hadley—though that wasn’t his name. The last name doesn’t count for much anyway, because at the end of the week I was calling him Jim and he was calling me Bill. In less than two weeks the children who used to come over to watch us were calling me Bill.

Seth Sprague and Josh Chase will do as names for the other two and come pretty close to what their names really were. Josh was the young fellow—a tall, bony lad with shoulders already well rounded, and in many other ways looking as old as Seth, who might have been his father.

All three of them had been born in the neighborhood and had lived here ever since. All three of them came from old New England stock and had inherited small farms from their fathers. And I must say that their personal appearance was no great credit to that stock. This impressed me right off. Not only were their bodies undersized and spare but their faces were thin and sallow. They didn’t look healthy. They didn’t look as healthy as the average emigrant. And yet they had been living in the country all their lives with out-of-door work in this fine air for a tonic and with country food to nourish them. They didn’t look dissipated—just scrawny and underfed. If I had met one of them in the slums I would have said he was a case for the associated charities. I doubt if Seth could have got past the emigration officials. The first time they opened their dinner pails, however, I saw that I had missed my guess about their being starved. I never saw any three human beings get outside of as much food as they did. Three or four eggs, half a loaf of bread, a big slab of pie and two or three doughnuts to a pail, was their average lunch. They saw my surprise and Jim told a story fixing it on Seth, though I suspect it was an old one round the neighborhood.

He said that Seth happened into the grocery one day just after a drummer had opened a large tin of canned beef. The drummer took off a slice which he ate with some crackers, and then shoved the can along to Seth with the invitation to join him. Seth took out his pocket knife and began. He finished that pound can with the rest of the crackers and allowing that this sort of whetted his appetite ordered a second can. When he finished this the drummer who had been watching in amazement said, “Don’t quit now; have another.” Seth replied that he didn’t mind if he did and ate the contents of the third can. Then closing his knife and running the back of his hand across his mouth, he gave a sigh of satisfaction. “My,” he said, “but that was a juicy morsel.”

This started a yarn from Seth and he fixed his on Jim. They were full of these stories and would stop work a dozen times a day to drawl them out. Seth said that a man who lived on the edge of the town had a wife who was a mighty good cook. One spring she planned to go away for a week and visit some relatives but before going she cooked up enough food to last her husband a week. He was a hearty eater, so she spent three or four days at the task. When it came time for supper, the first day she left, the man felt so lonesome that he went out of the house and looked for someone to join him. He met Jim and asked him in. Jim said that he had just had supper and wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, but that he would join in a cup of tea just to be sociable. He sat down at the table and ate up a two quart pot of beans and the man brought on a second pot. Jim ate that too. Then the man brought out a pie and Jim ate that. A second one followed, and to cut a long story short, Jim before he finished ate up every single thing there was in the house. His host didn’t say anything until Jim rose from the table. “Well,” said his host, “I’m glad you didn’t come along when you were hungry.”

I had more trouble handling those three men than I’ve ever had with a gang of a hundred foreign laborers. They didn’t know enough to do the work properly by themselves and they knew too much to obey orders. When it came to straightening up the underpinning I let them go ahead for a while on their own responsibility. This was a simple task which three men with crow bars ought to have done in half a day. At the end of the first half day they had succeeded in harmonizing their various opinions as to how it ought to be done to the point where they determined they needed a jack screw. One of them went off to borrow this and when he returned it was lunch time. Then I took hold and it was only by doing most of the work myself that we finished this job in two days. I used them to help only where I needed more muscle and at that the three together couldn’t lift as much as one of my stocky, close-knit Italian laborers.

I found it impossible either to lead or drive them. My attempts resulted in nothing but longwinded arguments or sulky threats of leaving. And I was paying them a dollar and seventy-five cents a day for unskilled labor. They were both lazy and incompetent. That’s the frank truth.

I kept them along until the fourth day, which was cloudy with at times a light drizzling rain. I had got up at four o’clock in order to be at the house on time, for I was anxious to get this outside work done as soon as possible. At seven o’clock not one of the men had put in an appearance. I waited until half past eight and then went off to see what the trouble was. I found Seth at home smoking a pipe by the side of the kitchen stove. His wife was a pleasant faced woman and the inside of the house was as neat as wax—in marked contrast to the clutter around the outside.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“Dunno of any trouble,” he answered as though surprised by my question.

“I’ve been down to the house over an hour waiting for you,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“Aren’t you going to work any more?”

“Don’t expect a man to work in the rain, do you?” he answered.

“I guess it’s too much to expect work of you in any sort of weather,” I said.

I paid him for his four days and left him growling uncomplimentary remarks about me to his wife. I received the same reply from Jim. I paid him off too and went on in search of young Chase. I thought the boy and I together might be able to clear up some of the odd jobs. He wasn’t at home. His mother thought he might be at the grocery store. I went down there and found him lolling against the counter.

“You aren’t afraid of rain too, are you?” I demanded. There were three other men there and he looked ashamed.

“It’s my rheumatiz,” he answered, feeling of his leg. “It’s botherin’ me a powerful lot to-day.”

“Then you refuse to come to work?”

“I’d like to accommodate ye,” he answered. “But honest—”

“I don’t want you to accommodate me,” I said. “I want you to work for me.”

He straightened up a little at this and answered back. “I won’t work in the rain for no man.”

He glanced toward the others and I saw them nod their approval. This stand was more than I had expected of him. It showed that he had some spirit of a certain kind after all.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s your money.”

When I was leaving, he roused himself once more. “I reckon what you want mister ain’t a man—it’s a Dago.”

“You’re partly right,” I said; “I reckon what I want is a Dago.”

CHAPTER II
MY NEIGHBORS

This was my first introduction to the old-stock farmer of whom I was to learn much more later on. Of course in a real sense these men were not farmers, and yet they were farmers or nothing. They had been born on a farm, had spent their lives there, and still depended upon the land for whatever means of livelihood they had. They were willing to work out as a matter of accommodation or to pick up an extra dollar or so, but they certainly did not class themselves as laborers. I could agree with them in that, but neither to my mind were they real farmers; not as I conceived farmers to be from what my father had told me and from what I read in the magazines.

I don’t suppose my ideal differed much from that of the average city bred man who has never had the good fortune to spend even his vacation in the country. Perhaps I was a little more visionary about them than some, because my life in the foreign quarter had roused my patriotism and driven me back into history for comfort. From that source I had created in my mind as representative a tall, gaunt individual of the Lincoln type with all Lincoln’s ruggedness of body and brain. I pictured him as honest to his very soul, as industrious to an extreme, as shrewd and thrifty, as brave and long suffering. So I still believe the old New Englander to have been; so I believe many of them are to-day. Perhaps I was unfortunate in finding at the very start three who did not live up to my standard, but I want to put down my experiences just as they came to me. If there were no more like these in the length and breadth of the whole land, here at least were three. And they were of the genuine old stock, uncontaminated by a single drop of new blood.

I received from people who read “One Way Out” much criticism to the effect that the experiences which befell me were not typical; that the conditions which I encountered would not hold in other places. Perhaps that is true. I don’t know. As I tried to make clear before, I’m not an investigator, nor a sociologist, nor a writer of tracts. I don’t claim to know any more than I have seen with my own eyes—than I have actually lived through. But I still believe that conditions, whatever they are, don’t matter if a man tackles them in the right spirit. I believe that, because I see every day men starting even and one failing and one succeeding.

What I said in “One Way Out” I want to repeat here: I’m authority on nothing but myself. Just as Ruth and I, driven on by circumstances, went adventuring in the slums, so driven on by other if not such urgent circumstances we went adventuring in the country. And I approached my new and later life in a state of just as much absolute ignorance as I did the first. It was chance that led me to locate where I did, it was chance which furnished me with my neighbors; it was chance which furnished me with my opportunity. If this led me into an unexplored country and along paths never before trod by man, I thank my lucky stars. I don’t believe it, but I’m willing to let it go at that. I’m not much on argument.

This then is a plain statement of what I saw with my new eyes—the eyes of an immigrant into the country. It is a plain statement of what I did and what I learned and the people I met. I don’t claim that it’s either typical or important. The life of one man isn’t apt to be. Here it is, however, without any further explanation or apology, for what it’s worth, and if anyone gets as much fun out of reading it as I have had in living it, I won’t consider I’ve wasted my time in writing it.

I proceeded to act at once on Seth’s idea. I remembered having seen, back on the road, a little place which at the time I had thought looked like the home of some foreign-born pioneer. It bore all the earmarks; it was an unkempt but busy looking place. There were evidences of many children and a consequent clutter of tin cans, broken bottles and old shoes, but I saw no farming tools and broken down wagons in the yard. These things were all under cover in the shed. I noticed too that the yard was full of chickens and that every square foot of land around the house was being tilled. When I knocked at the door a woman appeared with a child in her arms and with half a dozen more clinging to her skirts. She was a red-cheeked, black-eyed woman, as plump and happy looking as you would ask to see. Somehow I felt instantly at home here. I surprised her by asking in Italian where her man was, and she answered that he was out back of the barn and bade one of the boys to run and fetch him for the signor. I said no, that I would go and find him myself. She protested that the signor would get wet and that he had better come in and wait. I felt half ashamed that she should class me with that sort of coddled signor and hurried off to find Tony.

I found him in an old hat and gray sweater, up to his knees in the black soil. He was a swarthy, well-muscled chap, with a face tanned to the color of sole leather. He looked like a villain of melodrama, but as I approached he smiled a greeting which revealed teeth as naturally white as a hound’s. A couple of mongrel pups were nosing at his heels and ran at me ferociously, but stopped half way and wagged their tails. With an oath in Italian he ordered them back and belly to the ground they obeyed him.

I introduced myself and he recognized my name at once for the fame of Carleton’s gang had by now spread far.

“I have two cousins working for you,” he said in a manner that made me feel it a compliment.

He told me their names and I remembered them well. They were good workmen.

“I’ve bought a house near you,” I said. “I need a man or two to help me. Do you want a job?”

“Ah, signor,” he replied with a shake of his head in apology, “if I did not have so much to do here.”

He waved his hand over the scant two acres of land back of him as though it were a principality.

“This is all yours?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered proudly. “This—the house—everything.”

“You are doing well then.”

“Well enough,” he answered with a shrug of his shoulders and a smile.

“Then I can’t hire you?”

“It would be impossible, signor,” he answered, as though some apology were due me. “The planting is not yet done. And—by the good Christ—there are a thousand things to do on an estate.”

It was good to hear the way he pronounced that word estate. There was enough dignity in it to make it seem in sober earnest like an estate.

“Do you know of anyone I can get?” I asked.

“There is Signor Chase,” he began.

But I shut him off. “Any of your countrymen, I mean.”

“There is Dardoni; he might have a man. But no—not in the spring. There are my wife’s cousins. They have just come over. I could send—”

“No,” I interrupted, “I can get men enough in the city.”

“I believe you, signor,” he answered with a bow.

I started to leave when rather hesitatingly he asked if I wouldn’t be good enough to step into the house and have a glass of wine with him. He had so interested me and what he said had so whetted my curiosity that I gladly accepted. He preceded me to the house and at the door called loudly for Maria. She came with her cheeks redder than ever and with the children clinging about her skirts, ushered us into the living room. There was no such neatness here as I had seen in the Sprague house. All was confusion; a mixture of sewing and play things and garlic-flavored cooking. What can one do with six children to feed and clothe? Maria made no apologies. This was home and home to her was a plant for the rearing of children. We seated ourselves at a bare wooden table and she brought out a bottle of red wine as light as new cider. I drank good health to Maria and success to Tony.

I asked him many questions out of honest interest and he answered me frankly and with eagerness as your true pioneer ever does because of pride in his accomplishments. He told me that he had come here three years ago to work for Dardoni who had a grand estate—ten times as large as his—on the other side of the town. He had saved a little money before he came and with that, and what he earned later, he had bought these few acres of his own. Since then he had earned his living and something over. The thing that impressed me at the time, but the full significance of which I did not realize until later, was that he found a market for his eggs and produce right here in the village. Some of it he exchanged at the store for groceries but much of it he sold from door to door. It sounded like carrying coals to Newcastle.

I passed a pleasant hour with Tony and then went back to my house where I puttered around the rest of the day doing odd jobs. When I came home that night and told my experiences to Ruth she only laughed to herself and made no comment. I told her I was going to take four or five of my own men out there next day and she said she guessed I would save time that way.

From that point on, the work went along swimmingly. After getting all the buildings straightened up I brought down a couple of carpenters to do the shingling. At different times Seth and Jim and Josh came along to watch proceedings. They bore no ill will and offered me plenty of advice. At first I resented this, but after a while I learned not to mind. I couldn’t help liking the men after a fashion and I enjoyed their stories. They took as paternal an interest in my affairs as though I were a tenant and they were landlords. They were like children in the intimate questions they asked, but I found that they were not at all disturbed if they received no replies.

After the shingling I began on the plastering. I knocked down the old plastering in every room and found that the lathing was all of the old split-board kind. This really made a stronger and firmer background than the modern lathing. I made another find; two fireplaces which had been bricked up to accommodate air-tight stoves. I was mighty well pleased with this because I’m fond of fireplaces and had wondered how I was going to build one without tearing the house half to pieces.

The next thing we did was to putty up the holes and cracks and paint every speck of wood inside and out a dead white. Ruth insisted on white.

“Somehow I wouldn’t feel I was living in the country if my house wasn’t white,” she said.

I agreed with her, for to my mind there’s no color so fresh and bright looking. And the very first coat brought the old house to life. It’s wonderful what paint will do. It didn’t make the house look new in the sense of making it appear like a house of to-day, but rather carried it back to its youth. It was like making an old man young again. We could hardly wait for the paint to dry before starting the second coat, and that carried us back another twenty-five years. Even Seth, who at the start had allowed that the old shack wasn’t worth repairing, admitted now that it began to look real nifty.

And the inside looked as fine as the outside. When we began, the woodwork was discolored both by age and dirt. This made the whole interior look worse than a cheap tenement. Twenty dollars’ worth of white lead and oil changed this as though by magic into a clean white, as fresh as when the house was first built. There is nothing which shows age more than paint and there’s nothing so easily remedied. If the owners had done what I had already done they would have made almost three hundred per cent. interest on their investment. In three weeks, at a cost of four hundred dollars, I had added fifteen hundred in value to the place. And it was a legitimate value. My paint hadn’t covered up defects; it had simply brought out the honest worth of the structure.

With the floors painted and the windows drawn, we were now ready for the personal details which should make this house into a home. It was then that we had a great stroke of luck in hearing of an auction in another village some eight miles away and off the main road. Seth told us about it and said if I was looking for old trash he reckoned I could find enough of it there. He said he wouldn’t give a quarter for the whole lot, which didn’t sound very encouraging. But Ruth said she had heard them talk like that before, and anyway it would be good fun to go.

One clear summer morning then we rose early and Ruth put up a lunch and we boarded the train. The nearest station was five miles away and there we hired an old white horse and a buggy. We jogged along over the country roads at a three-mile-an-hour clip and reached the place just before the auction started at ten o’clock. We found some thirty or forty natives there. Most of them had come just to look on. They always had time for that. Even in the busiest season it was as easy to gather a crowd in these out-of-the-way places as it is during the noon hour on Broadway. And they wouldn’t come for an hour, but for all day.

We found rather a romantic story in connection with this auction. The story ran, and I guess it was true, that the man who had been living here as a bachelor for forty years had originally built and furnished this house for his bride. Just before they were to be married she had died and he had moved into the house and lived here by himself until his own death.

When Ruth heard that, she said to me, “Billy, do you know I think he’d be glad for us to have his things.”

“I don’t know how he’d feel about me, but I’m dead sure he’d be glad for you to have them,” I said.

“He wouldn’t if it wasn’t for you,” she answered, with a smile.

I’m not saying she was right in this deduction but I made up my mind she’d have whatever she liked at that auction if it broke me.

There’s a lot in luck at auctions—for the buyer. And we were certainly in luck that day. There were no stray automobile parties in the group to boost things up for the fun of it, and no professional furniture buyers. It was a real country auction with a country auctioneer and a country crowd. Seth and Jim and Josh were there and the rest of the group was all of their kind. Both the men and the women looked bloodless and withered. It showed in their faded eyes, in their sallow cheeks, in their spare bodies. They seemed old and tired—even the young women. And the strange thing about it was that to me they looked like foreigners. I felt as though I had come into some distant country among a new people. I couldn’t seem to connect them with America; even with the America of history. It took an effort on my part to remember that the names they bore were the names borne by many of those who settled in Plymouth.

I asked Ruth if she felt that way and after thinking a moment she answered, “Not as much as you do.”

Still I saw she knew there was something wrong with them because she kept looking at the women with almost a sad expression. Once, she said, “There’s something to do here, Billy.”

“Missionary work?” I asked.

She nodded.

“But this isn’t Africa,” I laughed. “This is the United States of America. It’s a fact and we mustn’t forget it.”

“No,” she said, “that is just what we must remember.”

“And most of these people are descendants of the Mayflower. They are relatives of ours.”

“Yes,” she said soberly, “we must remember that, too.”

But the auctioneer was begging our kind attention to examine a collection of extremely useful articles which he announced he was going to include in a single parcel. Into an old tin pan he counted one by one a rusty egg beater, two iron spoons, a kitchen knife, three glass preserve jars, a doughnut cutter, a crockery door knob and finally a dozen ordinary tin coffee cans. Then with his hands on his hips he stood back and beamed with pride upon the collection.

“How much for the lot!” he demanded.

He himself looked like one of the odds and ends he was selling. Though not over thirty-five he was round shouldered and dyspeptic. He wore glasses and though smooth shaven his beard still showed. His clothes hung loosely about his spare frame and he seemed to be always in pain.

The bids started at two cents and quickly went to five, while the crowd laughed good naturedly.

I gained a better impression of the auctioneer right off by the earnest, sober way he went at his business. He had a trick of leaning over the crowd with his long bony finger outstretched and calling earnestly, “Once, twice—” with a little pause there which made you feel as though you were missing a great opportunity.

“Twice,” he repeated, and in the excitement of the moment I was on the point of bidding six when he brought both hands together with the decisiveness of a decree of Fate and I escaped.

Ruth had detected my temptation and pulled at my sleeve.

“Look here, Billy,” she warned, “you mustn’t bid on anything except what we really want.”

“Think of all those things going for five cents,” I answered.

“And when the man gets home with them he’ll wonder why he ever bid two,” she said.

The auctioneer disposed of the culch first and always found a bidder if only for a worthless basket filled with broken bottles. And there wasn’t a man who bought those things who didn’t have his wood shed cluttered up with similar waste.

Finally he came to six wooden kitchen chairs. They were painted yellow and had seats three inches thick. They were hand made and fastened together with wooden pegs instead of nails and were as stout as when first built. Ruth had picked these out at once.

“I’d better start them at a quarter,” I said.

“No,” she whispered, “you keep quiet. Let me do the bidding.”

“How much a piece for the lot?” inquired the auctioneer.

The man who had the adjoining farm started them at two cents.

“Why you’d pay more than that for kindling wood,” exclaimed the auctioneer. “But two I’m offered. Will anyone make it three?”

I nudged Ruth but she didn’t open her mouth.

“Three,” called someone.

“Three I’m offered, who’ll make it four?”

No one answered.

“Three I’m offered, once,—”

I nudged Ruth again but she remained as though dumb. I was standing on tiptoe.

“Three I’m offered; twice. Going, going—”

I was all out of breath when Ruth spoke up as cool as you please, “Four.”

“Four I’m offered.”

He extended his finger towards the first bidder.

“Now make it five,” the auctioneer coaxed.

The man shook his head.

“Make it a half.”

Again the man shook his head.

“I’m offered four cents a piece for these fine hardwood chairs. Make it a half. Make it a quarter. Going—going—”

He paused again with an eager tantalizing smile. Then he brought his hands together.

“And sold to Mr.—”

“Carleton,” I answered quickly.

“Oh,” gasped Ruth. “They are ours!”

We bought another lot of eight at twelve cents a piece. We bought a third lot, cane seated and painted a handsome black, for nine cents. Besides this we bought a mahogany veneered bureau with old brass handles, in perfect condition, for four dollars and a quarter. I learned later that it was worth at least twenty-five dollars. We bought a grandfather’s clock with pine case and wooden works, made in Winchester, England, for thirteen dollars and a half. We bought a solid mahogany four-poster bed for twenty-two dollars. We bought a hardwood kitchen table for two dollars. We bought three feather beds at a dollar and a half a piece—the goose feathers alone in each being worth five or six dollars. We bought a set of black and white ware consisting of a tea pot, sugar bowl, milk pitcher, and nine cups and saucers, in perfect condition, for five dollars—less than you’d pay for ordinary crockery. We bought a mahogany veneered kitchen clock for two dollars. We bought a bird’s eye maple, rope bed for four dollars. In addition to this we bought beautiful old bed spreads and rag rugs and mirrors—all for a song. In fact, we took about everything in the house that was of any value and paid less than ten cents on a dollar for what it was worth merely as furniture, and less than two cents for what most of it should have brought as antiques.

I accomplished two things that day; I furnished my house for a song and I introduced myself to my future neighbors, for my reckless buying became the gossip of the neighborhood.

CHAPTER III
COLD FACTS

It was the middle of August when we moved into our new home, and on the second Saturday following we gave a house warming. When we left our tenement we told our friends that instead of saying good-by to them there we meant to say howdy at the new home. And so this party was principally for them, although through the local paper we sent out a general invitation to everyone in the neighborhood.

We swept up the barn floor and set a long table there, improvised out of boards and saw horses. Ruth decorated it with green and with wild flowers. We served cold meats, bread and butter, ice cream and cake, coffee and milk, to some seventy-five grown-ups and Lord knows how many children. The latter made the whole country-side spring to life as though by magic. If a happier, more enthusiastic group than our former neighbors ever gathered together under one roof I’d like to see them. Ruth, Dick, and myself acted as waiters, with plenty of assistance from everyone, and saw to it that all had as much as they could eat.

The village people came more out of curiosity than anything else, I imagine. Ed Barclay, the auctioneer, was there and I liked him even better than at first on further acquaintance. Seth, Josh and Jim turned up in spite of their aversion to Dagoes. Then the Reverend Percy Cunningham, pastor of the Methodist Church, came with his wife. He was a slight, very serious man, dressed in black like an undertaker. Deacon Weston, said to be the richest man in town, also dropped in for a minute and bade me welcome. He had a thin, hard face that hinted as to how he had acquired his wealth, and later I found out that my guess was sound. Horatio Moulton, who kept the village store, was another who stopped to shake hands.

But the fellow out of the whole lot who interested me most was Giuseppe Dardoni, the landed proprietor of whom Tony had spoken to me. In spite of the fact that financially he was one of the strongest men in town he was never called anything but Joe—not so much in a spirit of good fellowship as with the easy familiarity people speak to a Chinaman or a no-account Indian. He never resented the slight openly, but I had long since learned that these people appreciate being given the dignity of their full name.

Signor Dardoni was a man of forty-five, I should judge. He was slight and wiry of build, with a kindly face and smiling eyes. His hair was turning gray and he was extremely courteous and gentle mannered. Neither in dress nor speech did he betray the fact that he was any more prosperous than most of his fellow citizens. I noticed, however, that he drove up with his daughter behind a very good horse and in a well-kept sulky. He greeted everyone with a good-natured smile, and Seth who happened to be standing near introduced us.

“Joe,” he said, “let me make ye ’quainted with Bill Carleton who’s figgerin’ on settlin’ here.”

“I’ve heard much of you,” I said to him, speaking in Italian, to Seth’s disgust.

“And I have heard much of Signor Carleton. But you have traveled in Italy?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, “in Little Italy.”

He laughed at that and I took him to meet Ruth. Later we adjourned into the house where, over a bottle of smuggled Italian wine, which one of the boys had given me, I learned more about him. We passed a pleasant half hour and when he left I told him that I wanted to come over and visit him.

“I want to see how you manage your farm,” I said.

“I shall be honored,” he said with the sincere but exaggerated politeness of his race. “But it is not much, just a few acres.”

It was not until midnight that the last of our guests left, for Pelletti, who had brought along his fiddle, furnished music for a dance. It would have done your heart good to watch those people dance—especially the girls. The fiddle seemed to become part of them. Before we knew it Ruth and I were on the floor and Dick had seized Lucia, Dardoni’s oldest daughter, and followed at our heels.

It was right after this that I began to plan the development of my farm. It was of course much too late in the season for me to attempt to plant anything. However, there were many other things about the place that needed attention. I hired Hadley by the month to help me and started in at once clearing up generally. I had him repair the walls and fences, cut bushes, trim the trees, and do the chores around the house. I bought a cow for the sake of having our own milk for the kiddies, and so he also had her to look after. I paid him forty dollars a month and it was all he was worth. Dick and I used to do as much every Saturday afternoon as he did through the week.

I made one other investment this season; I bought a second-hand automobile. This made me independent of trains and allowed me many an odd hour at home which otherwise I would have lost. I could make the run from my office to the house in thirty-five minutes, but the thing cost me first and last a good deal of money. It didn’t take me a month to learn that anyone who figures on saving car fare with one of them makes a mistake. However, I figured that we would save enough in other ways to make up for this added expense. Here again I soon learned I was mistaken, and that brought me face to face with a new revelation which knocked sky high some of my preconceived notions. We found when we came to settle our first month’s store bill that it was costing as much and in some cases more for our food stuffs than it had cost in the city. When Ruth came to me with the bills and I looked them over I was astonished to find that the prices even for eggs and butter were those current in town; that such staples as sugar and flour and lard were if anything a little higher and that for vegetables we were actually paying more than we did at the city market when Ruth was doing her own marketing.

“Well,” I said, “what do you make out of this?”

“I don’t understand about the butter and eggs,” she said, “but of course I don’t have the chance here that I used to have to get cut prices on the other things.”

“I know,” I said, “but these men don’t have to pay high rents or an expensive staff of clerks. They don’t even advertise. It looks to me as though our friend Moulton was taking advantage of us. Probably he thinks we’re city folks and don’t care what we pay.”

This was in September and there wasn’t an item on our bill that did not equal or exceed town prices for the best. Taking into account the fact that, as Ruth said, there were no bargain sales, it is easy to see that where we had looked for a reduction in living expenses we had really met with a substantial increase. Not only this, but in most cases the goods we received were inferior to those we secured in town. As for meats, the prices charged were exorbitant.

Now neither Ruth nor I had reached, or ever will I trust, a point where we didn’t care how much we were paying. The lesson of the ginger jar was too firmly implanted for us to accept without a question, as we did when we were living in the suburbs, whatever we might be charged. But aside from this I was genuinely interested in the economic side of the matter. I wanted to know how this condition of things happened to exist. It looked to me on the face of it as though there was something wrong in having to pay as much in the country for butter, eggs, vegetables and poultry as we had to pay in the city. So I went down to the village and had an interview with my fat friend Moulton. He welcomed me cordially and listened to my questions with a smile.

“I’m not kicking on your making a fair profit,” I told him, “but I simply can’t figure out why it’s necessary for you to charge so much in order to do it. If you can show me, I’ll trade with you; if you can’t I’m going to trade in town after this.”

“That’s right,” he nodded, “I hear your kick every year from summer folks. They come up here to save money and go away sore because they don’t.”

“But why don’t they?” I demanded.

“’Cause I have to make a profit in order to live,” he answered. “Now look a-here, I ain’t so big a corporation that I have to hide my books to steer clear of an investigation from Congress. If you’ve got a spare hour I’ll show you some things that city folks don’t reckon on.”

And he did. I’ll give him credit for making the whole business clear to me in less than an hour. He opened my eyes to a few facts that I’ve never seen mentioned in any fairy dreams about the simple life that I’ve ever read. And what is more they were cold facts that don’t seem to get into even the heavier treatises on New England life.

In the first place, he proved to me with his books, that he bought not only his staples from the city market, but even his produce.

“I can’t buy a pound of decent butter here,” he said. “The farmer’s butter you hear so much about isn’t made any more; what little is made is loaded down with salt to a point where you couldn’t pay ’em twenty cents a pound for it. I can’t buy a decent chicken. All they bring in here are the old fowls that you couldn’t cut up with a broad ax.”

“What do they do with their chickens?” I asked.

“They don’t raise many to start with.”

“Why not?”

“Too lazy for one thing, and then they say they have to pay too much for corn.”

“Why don’t they raise their own corn?”

“Don’t ask me,” he answered. “The fact is they buy western corn for all their stock.”

“Won’t corn grow here?”

“I reckon it would grow if they planted it,” he answered. “Seems t’ me I recollect something about the Injuns growing it. But I guess that maybe the Injuns didn’t have to plant theirs. Maybe it just growed. I s’pose it’s hard work to plant corn and hoe it.”

He laughed to himself at a story this suggested. All these people had Lincoln’s gift of pointing a fact with a story.

“They tell about Josh Whiting who lived in that old house down to the lower end of the village where Horatio Sampson lives now. Josh was so all-fired lazy that he wouldn’t do no work at all and like to starved to death. So the neighbors after feeding him for a while allowed that so long as he warn’t no good he might just as well be buried. A committee of ’em went down to his house one day and took him out and put him in a hearse and started for the graveyard. When they were nighing the gate a stranger came along and inquired what was up. They told him and it seemed to him like such hard lines that he offered to do something.

“‘I’ll give the corpse a bag of corn anyhow,’ says he.

“‘All right,’ they says.

“So he went to the hearse and opened the door and looked in.

“‘I can’t see a man die for lack of food,’ says he. ‘So I’ll give ye a bag of corn.’

“Josh, he hitched up on one elbow to see who was speakin’. ‘Is it shelled?’ says he.

“‘No,’ answered the fellow. ‘But it won’t be much trouble for you to shell it.’

“Josh settled down on his back again with his hands crossed over his chest. ‘Drive on,’ he says.”

“Well,” I said, when I was through laughing, “who gets what chickens they do raise?”

“Dardoni,” he answered. “He buys them for cash and sends them to the wholesaler in town. When I want one I buy from the wholesaler.”

“What about eggs?”

“Same thing. They bring in a few to swap for groceries. But look at ’em.”

He went to a basket and held up one about as large as a robin’s egg.

“That’s the kind they bring in,” he said. “An egg is an egg and I take them ’cause I can sell them back again. But when I want a decent egg I have to pay the market quotation for it. They all take the papers and they charge accordin’ to what they read there.”

“But vegetables—”

“They don’t raise enough for themselves—except Dardoni and a few other Dagoes.”

“What do they raise?” I asked.

“Damfino,” he answered. “Measles mostly. Some rheumatiz and a fine crop of dyspeptsy. You want to know what I make more profit on than anything in my store?”

“What?”

He pointed to three shelves loaded with patent medicine bottles. “That stuff,” he said. “There’s fifty per cent. profit in it and I can’t keep nuff of it.”

“But good Lord, you wouldn’t think that in the country—”

“They live on it,” he answered; “what it says on the bottles is pretty nigh true; ‘Babies cry for it.’ Only they oughter add onto that, ‘And parents die for it.’”

He leaned over towards me and spoke in my ear. “It ain’t nothin’ but dope and whisky. The village is pretty nigh divided even on which they like best. I’ve got a bunch of old maids that get drunk reg’lar on it and don’t know it. The meanest thing I do is to sell it to ’em.”

“Why don’t you cut it out?” I suggested.

“’Cause they’d go to the drug store and buy it there,” he said. “If this was the only place in town where they could get it, I’d take an ax handle and smash every last bottle. That’s honest. Howsomever, that ain’t got anything to do with eggs, an’ then again maybe it has. P’raps it’s that stuff that makes them lazy.”

He turned to his books again.

“You any idee how many of these folks I carry on credit?”

“Ten per cent.,” I said for a guess.

“Say seventy per cent. an’ ye’ll come nearer. Any idee how long I carry most of the accounts?”

“Six months.”

“They’ll average up two years. Any idee how much of that is bad?”

“Five per cent.,” I said with a laugh.

“Say twenty per cent. and ye wouldn’t come nigh enough even to hit the target.”

I was curious enough to examine his books carefully and I saw that every statement he made was true. I settled my bill without another word.

“I don’t see how you keep in business,” I said. “You’ll have my trade from now on even though I could do better buying in town. I’ve come out here to live and I believe in standing my tax, but I’ll be hanged if I can see any reason why things should be this way.”

“After you’ve lived here a year, maybe you’ll see.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, “but I tell you right now that within that time I’ll be raising most of my own stuff.”

He nodded.

“That’s what they all say. But I’d hate to pay you what that’s goneter cost you.”

“What about Dardoni?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s a Dago,” answered Moulton, as though that disposed of the question.

Moulton’s books had summed up conditions in this country town concretely and vividly. His ledger was a tract. Five years’ residence couldn’t have given me such a clear insight into the actual state of things as they existed here. But of course they furnished no explanation either of the apparent degeneracy of the natives or the success of the newcomers. The key to the latter I held myself, but the revelation of the condition of the former came to me as a shock.

Think of it! Here almost within sight of one of the oldest and most prosperous cities in the East lay a village of three or four hundred American families, descendants of the best New England stock, in a condition of such stagnation that they couldn’t pay their store bills. Surrounded by land which had supported their ancestors, they were dependent upon the West for their food stuffs. Born and bred in the open air they were weak and lazy and sick. In ideal surroundings my own kith and kin were actually worse off than many of the penniless immigrants of the slums.

What, in God’s name, was the matter with them? I asked this of myself over and over again and that winter, as I learned still more about them, what had at first been merely an exclamation of surprise became a prayer. What, in God’s name, was the matter with them?

CHAPTER IV
A TOWN ASLEEP

During this first winter Ruth and I made the most of every opportunity to get acquainted with our fellow townsmen. We went to church regularly and attended all the sociables and concerts and fairs and we met some very fine people. But a large part of them, however, were not so representative of the new generation in whom I was most interested as they were of the old generation. I found that most of the comfortable and well-to-do were among those who had inherited small fortunes, where the accumulations of several branches of one family had finally settled in a single individual. Much of this money I also found had been made outside the village. Then of course there was another prosperous element consisting of a half dozen local business men who were doing well; the hardware merchant, the druggist, the grain and hay merchant, the local lawyers and doctors. I might have seen more of these men if I had been a member of the fraternal organizations, but somehow I never took to them. I found that there were a half dozen branches of various secret societies in this small village and a good many men belonged to them all.

Another significant fact was that I didn’t meet at any of these gatherings any of my foreign-born friends. I never saw Dardoni there, or Tony or any of the other dozen families who as far as enterprise and worldly success go were important members of the community. One reason was their difference in religious belief, but another and stronger was the fact that they were held to be on an inferior social plane. In many ways they were. There’s no denying this, but they had, to my mind, enough sterling qualities to offset that. Anyway, I hadn’t looked to find social lines drawn in a country village, but when I expressed my views even to Cunningham, the minister, I didn’t receive much encouragement. It made me mad to see such snobbishness in an American village and several times I spoke from the shoulder. After I had visited Dardoni’s farm I felt more strongly than ever.

Signor Dardoni had some forty acres and there wasn’t a square foot which wasn’t under cultivation. Ten of them were in an apple orchard—the only orchard in town that produced commercially. He had taken native trees when they weren’t more than half alive with their clutter of dead limbs, and trimmed them up, grafted them, and made them pay. That one accomplishment alone ought to have distinguished him in the village. It ought to have set an example if nothing else. And yet I found orchard after orchard going to waste and producing nothing but cider apples. Even these weren’t picked, and Dardoni made another neat income every fall buying them on the trees for a song and turning them into new cider and vinegar. He had done this for five years and everyone knew that it paid and yet no one thought of following his example and making the same use of their own waste apples. That’s a fair illustration of the difference in spirit between the two races.

Another ten or fifteen acres he kept for hay, raising enough for his own use and sometimes enough to sell. On another strip he raised his own corn and wheat for fodder, being the only man in town who didn’t spend his good money at the hay and grain store where corn went at times way over the dollar mark. Here again the natives had a working example before their very eyes and yet took no advantage of it.

Another ten acres Dardoni devoted to garden truck for the near-by market, reaping every spring a handsome profit. There wasn’t a native in the whole village who tried even to raise more than enough for himself and many didn’t do that even when they had back door yards big enough to supply them for the year.

The rest of his land he used for his chicken and egg business, although he had some fifty pigs which ran loose most everywhere. Of course he also kept cows—a half dozen of them, selling the cream to the local creamery (which, incidentally, was not owned by local capital) and using the buttermilk for his pigs and chickens. The pigs kept his orchard in good condition and the cows and horses furnished him with dressing for his other land.

Now I want to make a point here: Dardoni was not a scientific farmer. He didn’t know anything about the science of farming. He was not reviving worn-out soil by the use of modern cultivation. He was not applying laboratory methods; he was applying horse sense. He didn’t know any more about farming, or as much perhaps, as every mother’s son of those who had been born and brought up here and their fathers before them. But he did know enough to work his land and he had learned to do that in a country where a single acre means something. The only difference between him and these others was that he got up early in the morning and worked—worked all day long. The one thing in his favor was that he also had a business instinct and appreciated the value of his city market. But principally his success lay in the fact that he used every single advantage and made the most of it.

He lived in a large old-fashioned Colonial house which had once been owned by a local politician who had succeeded in being elected to Congress for a single term in Civil War days, and who had never found it necessary to do anything afterwards. His son dissipated his fortune and the place came on the market about the time Dardoni happened along. Dardoni hadn’t improved its appearance any but he had added a big barn and several out houses. His family consisted of a wife and six children, the oldest being Lucia who was eighteen and who had been educated at the local high school, and the youngest being Joe, now three years old. The rest of his household included a half dozen young men, all relatives, to whom he paid an average of ten dollars a week. They were good workers and seldom remained with him longer than three years before buying a place of their own. Through him, directly and indirectly, some forty families had already settled in the village.

Personally I found Dardoni a most interesting and agreeable fellow, and the more I saw him the better I liked him. He had become thoroughly Americanized in the sense that he had really made America his home with the expectation of spending his life here and having his sons and daughters live here after him. He had been naturalized and was a heavy taxpayer but he took no interest in the affairs of the town. For one thing his home was his castle and for another his habit of thought was to accept conditions as they were and make the best of them without any attempt to change them. But whenever I suggested any needed improvement, such as in the matter of better roads, I found him alive and willing to do his share.

One other incident that winter set me to thinking and made me feel more than ever the need of some radical revolution in this old town. Hadley came to me in January and wanted to borrow fifty dollars.

“Show me that you really need it and I’ll let you have it,” I said.

“I’ve got a note comin’ due,” he answered.

“Who holds it?” I asked.

“Dardoni,” he answered.

“What did you borrow from him for?” I asked.

“Well, there was considerable sickness in the family last year and I got hard up.”

“You own your house all clear?”

“Yes—except that Dardoni took a first mortgage on it for the note.”

“And you have five acres of land?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s only you and your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Then how—”

“Doctors and medicines cost something,” he broke in, rather resenting my further questioning.

Now here was a concrete example of a man without any bad habits in the ordinary meaning of the word, who had lived here fifty years in a house and on land which came to him by inheritance, who had worked with a fair amount of industry and raised three children, all now away from home and self supporting, who in a crisis had been forced to borrow money from an immigrant who hadn’t been in this country ten years and who started without a cent. On the face of it there was something wrong here, but what was it? In a nutshell, lack of thrift, lack of industry, lack of enterprise. Hadley was doing here on a farm exactly what I had done in the suburbs; he was living and always had lived up to the last cent he made. Even at this time, when he was earning forty dollars a month from me, he didn’t save a cent. He bought hay and corn for his horse; he bought expensive meats for his table; instead of mending old harnesses, he bought new harnesses; he subscribed for a daily paper and had a telephone in his house which he didn’t need any more than he needed a safe deposit vault. In the meanwhile he had five acres of idle land at his back. He was in a state of lethargy as the whole town was in a state of lethargy. He was stagnant—half-dead. A dozen things which had been luxuries to his father had become necessities to him. The price of everything had increased and he hadn’t kept pace with it. What was true of him was true of the whole town. I loaned him the money, but that night I had a talk with Ruth.

“Ruth,” I said, “I’m going to give this old town the biggest shaking up it’s had since the glacial period.”

“Why, Billy, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Everything’s the matter,” I said. “This village isn’t sleeping, but dead. It’s time someone blew the resurrection trumpet. I’m going to blow it; I’m going to play Gabriel.”

She looked up from her sewing with a laugh, but when she saw I was in earnest she put aside her work and came over and put her arms around me.

CHAPTER V
STIRRING THINGS UP

I meant every word I said and I set to work right off. One of the first things I did was to have the Reverend Percy Cunningham up to supper. His church was probably the biggest social influence in the village and so if it was possible I wanted to enlist him at the beginning. Personally I didn’t think much of his ability. He was a serious man who acted as though he thought his chief function here was the conducting of funerals. The very sight of him was a grim reminder of death. He dressed in black, seldom smiled, and he walked on tiptoe. His appearance was all the more marked because it happened that Seavey, the local undertaker, was a roly-poly, good-natured man and the biggest sport in town. He owned an automobile, drank more than was good for him, and acted as starter at all the horse races within a radius of fifty miles. Perhaps it was to offset this blithe influence of his colleague that Cunningham felt it necessary to go to the other extreme. At any rate Ruth said that whenever he called in the afternoon she felt as though she ought to darken the room and send the children off to a neighbor.

We had him up and Ruth laid herself out to make the meal as cheerful as possible, but when we were through I felt like saying Amen. Ruth spoke of it later as the Last Supper and was ashamed of herself afterwards.

I took him into the front room and began on him at once.

“Mr. Cunningham,” I said, “it seems to me the time has come for this town to take out a new lease on life.”

“To be sure,” he agreed.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve been here longer than I have; what’s your suggestion for bringing this about?”

He thought a moment and then he said, “I’ve been seriously considering your suggestion for a very long while—in fact ever since I took up my pastoral work here.”

“That was about fifteen years ago?” I inquired.

“Sixteen years this coming spring,” he answered.

“You ought to have reached some conclusion in that time,” I said.

“To be sure,” he nodded. “What I thought I should do when I saw my opportunity was to invite here two or three good evangelists and hold a rousing week of revival services.”

Now I have no objection to revival services. In their way they do good. But after all, their function is largely religious and I had in mind just at present something more material. Besides, the revival end seemed to me to be his own duty. He himself ought to have been holding meetings all these last sixteen years.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I guess we need something of the sort. But to get down to brass tacks, have you any idea how many people in this town are in debt?”

“No,” he said, “I have never looked into that.”

“About half of them,” I said. “Have you any idea how many of the men and women in this town are drunkards?”

“Women—drunkards?” he exclaimed.

“About a third of them,” I said.

“Mr. Carleton, you must be mistaken!”

“Ask your druggist; ask Moulton!” I said. “They’ll tell you. Most of the children are either doped or stimulated with patent medicines. Besides this, there are a dozen or two downright morphine fiends. Dr. Wentworth is responsible for that.”

“Dr. Wentworth!” he exclaimed. “That is a very serious charge, Mr. Carleton. Dr. Wentworth has been practicing here for almost forty years.”

“More’s the pity,” I said. “He belongs back in the dark ages. I went to him myself with a touch of neuralgia and he prescribed morphine before I’d been in his office fifteen minutes. It’s become a habit with him just because it’s the simplest way of relieving pain. However, those are details. They don’t account for the general lethargy, for the decaying orchards, for the waste land and wasted opportunities which are lying all around your parish. Now, to take another tack for a moment—did it ever strike you as significant that every foreign-born settler who has come here during the last ten years is waxing fat and prosperous?”

“I’ve seen very little of the foreign element,” he said.

“Why?”

He smiled weakly.

“They are hardly of us,” he said, “either in faith or standards. It has always seemed to me a pity that they should have found their way here.”

I became heated at that.

“Pity!” I exclaimed. “It’s the one ray of hope in this whole blessed village. They came here and are coming here with the old-time spirit of the men who founded this town. They are adventurers—pioneers. They come here fresh, eager, earnest, with simple tastes and simple standards. They are making good and they are going to continue to make good until—mark my words—they own not only this town but all New England.”

He sat up at this.

“It’s a fact,” I said. “Look around you. It’s clear as daylight. On the one hand we have the old stock, either abandoning their farms or dying upon them; on the other we have the newcomers pressing in with the eagerness of explorers, taking up these farms and bringing them to life. Why, this is Eden to them. Where they came from they’ve been making a living off bits of soil that we wouldn’t build a pigsty on, and here they have acres for the asking. Look at Dardoni; look at Tony; look at the dozen others. They are settling this country anew in exactly the same spirit that our ancestors did. And they are going to win in the same fashion. They are going to drive these shiftless remnants before them exactly as our forefathers drove off the Indians. We think Columbus discovered this country in 1492 once for all, when it’s really being discovered now before our face and eyes. We think this country was settled by the Pilgrims, when as a matter of fact the real settling is going on to-day.”

I didn’t intend to orate but as I sat facing Cunningham I felt as though I were facing the whole village. With his black clothes, his drooping shoulders, and his fifteen years of deliberation, he represented just the element I wanted to get at. But I didn’t rouse him very much. He murmured something about being surprised and I ran on still further.

“Now,” I said, “what are we going to do about it? Most of the younger generation are moving away as fast as they are old enough. They are either going into the cities or out West. I don’t blame them for that. It’s encouraging to think they have life enough left in ’em to crawl out of this frog pond. Those who don’t emigrate are as old and feeble at seventeen as their grandfathers were at seventy. What are we going to do about it?”

“Really, Mr. Carleton, I—I don’t know.”

“Then let me give you my idea: let’s all emigrate.”

He evidently thought I was crazy.

“I mean it,” I said. “And I know what I’m talking about because I’ve already done it once. Let’s emigrate out of the past into the present. Let’s emigrate to new New England. Let’s start a pioneer movement and tackle these old acres as though they were virgin soil. Let’s join Dardoni and his fellows.”

“You don’t mean literally, Mr. Carleton?”

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t that be—to speak frankly—a little bit like going backwards?”

“If you like,” I said. “But it wouldn’t hurt this town any to go back a hundred years or so. The curse comes in standing still.”

“Well,” he said, preparing to leave, “your suggestion is interesting—very. I most certainly will think it over.”

Remembering how long it took him to think over things before, that didn’t sound very encouraging.

“All right,” I said, “and in the meanwhile I’m going to start something.”

CHAPTER VI
A GAME WORTH PLAYING

The pioneer idea—that was the heart of my scheme; the same old idea that had already lifted me from the slough of a salary and the suburbs and put me on my feet. Under its inspiration I had worked out my salvation in the city and now, although I had come here for peace and quiet, I felt as though I were being challenged by a cuff on the cheek. No live man could sit down and look on calmly at such conditions as faced me here. When these people within sight of a hungry market said that farming didn’t pay it proved that the fundamental trouble was not lack of opportunity but lack of appreciation of the opportunity. Just sit down and figure out what the forebears of these same people accomplished on these very acres. Out of this soil they wrenched the capital that went far towards establishing the richest nation on the face of the earth. But it may be argued that the Pilgrims had the advantage of virgin land. So they did, but virgin land in New England meant also virgin rocks—a million or more to the acre as testified to by the stone walls of to-day; it meant virgin trees with a wild tangle of roots and no dynamite to blow them out with; it meant virgin cold and the crudest kind of stoves to fight it off with; it meant crude virgin farm implements and virgin Indians to make the use of them interesting by zipping arrows from ambush at the sturdy plowman. And yet in spite of these handicaps and a hundred others, those same pioneers fought it out with such fine spirit that there are to-day men who sigh because they were not living then instead of now. They won a comfortable living and so did their sons and grandsons after them, even though they were forced to sacrifice half their time and money and life in battle to establish this nation which now we enjoy already established. And they did this because of the pioneer spirit back of them—a spirit which a nation allows to die at its peril.

With all I saw before me I didn’t believe that spirit was yet dead. As Ruth said, there wasn’t a youngster in this very village, who though he wasn’t worth his salt here, wouldn’t buck up if placed on a Western homestead a hundred miles or more from civilization. The spirit of his ancestors would then rouse him. They were proving it by taking up farms in Canada. In a less marked degree it was this same spirit which without their knowledge prompted them to do better in the cities at the beginning than at home. The thing then, to my mind, which was needed was to make these same young men realize that it was really just as much of a brave adventure to make a few acres pay in the East as in the West. That was what I had got hold of when standing helpless without the capital to go West. I assumed that I had already traveled a thousand miles to get where I already was and from that point didn’t go ten miles from home.

Now it was this spirit of a young nation which the foreign-born caught. In the older country where it was dead I haven’t much doubt but what Dardoni and his fellows were a shiftless lot. If they had remained they would probably have plugged along in a beggarly rut. It wasn’t until they came over here that they roused themselves to work, not ploddingly like uninspired natives, but with a romantic fervor that made these old acres yield as they had never yielded before. They brought with them no modern agricultural methods. They took the land as they found it, and it was their simple pioneer standards, their pioneer earnestness, their pioneer courage, that brought them success. They worked for independence with the same pioneer enthusiasm and industry which inspired the early settlers. How long would that little band of adventurers who landed on the rocky shore of Massachusetts have lasted if they had shown no more backbone than those who to-day fold their hands and shake their heads at the deserted farms surrounding them?

The more I talked over these things with Ruth the more excited I became. It was as clear as daylight that idle land could not forever exist in the face of a needy market. I had learned at school the phrase that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Rural New England to-day was practically a vacuum and nature was already finding a way to fill it. She was forcing in adventurers of other nations with the challenge to the native born to either get to work or get out. If anyone wants to see proof of this for himself let him travel through the Connecticut valley, or along the Massachusetts cape, or through the small towns in the neighborhood of Boston. Let him go into the hill towns of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and he will find there Italians, Portuguese, Russians, Poles, already established and accepted where twenty years ago a foreigner was a curiosity. They are the vanguard of the army Nature is marshaling for her certain purpose. Let the traveler look below the superficial squalor and learn how many people these pioneers are supporting, how much they are saving and how much they are buying, and he will catch an inkling of what’s afoot. I had seen this going on in the city, but there the contrast between what was and what is was not so marked. New England cities have long ceased to be merely New England, and I had come out into the country for that very reason. I had wanted a taste of undiluted New England, and this was what I found.

In the meanwhile Dick had been taking hold of the contracting business with such good results that I found myself able to throw more and more upon him. He had with him a college mate, and the two under the spur of youth went hustling after new business at a pace that made my services unnecessary except as a sort of advisory committee. With my new interests to occupy me, with the business prospering under the younger management and with a fair amount in the bank as a surety against accidents, I was glad to have it so. I believe it’s an older man’s duty to turn over his business to the younger generation whenever it is possible. During the winter I watched the progress of the two boys closely and was surprised at the shrewdness and level-headedness that Dick displayed. I give credit for that to his experience in selling newspapers on the streets. It taught him not only self-reliance but in his association with men both self-confidence and poise. He knew how to approach men, how to put forward his case in the shortest possible time, and then how and when to leave. He was popular too with the gang and I found the latter turning more and more to him.

It was in February that after a long talk with Ruth I called the boy into my den one evening.

“Dick,” I said, “I haven’t been very much more than a figurehead in the business during the last few months and now I think I’ll pull out altogether.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Dad,” he answered, “what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Only you don’t need me and I want to take up farming.”

“You’d better let me call in the doc,” he answered.

“Do I look as though I needed him?” said I. “It’s sure that if I felt that way I wouldn’t be undertaking a new business.”

“It’s all right for you to putter around here for fun,” he said, “but you know as well as I that you can’t make farming pay. Just look around you—”

“That’s what makes me believe farming will pay,” I said. “I look around me and I see men doing just what you advise me to do—puttering around. You wouldn’t expect to make contracting pay if you went at it that way, would you?”

“I know, but—”

“Look here,” I broke in, glad of a chance to express some of the things I had been thinking over for the last few months. “Look here, boy, do you realize what as a business proposition this village is? It’s a big unused plant in which thousands of dollars have been invested, and it’s lying idle next door to a market crying for its products. If you saw a big factory building all equipped and standing idle, with labor loafing around the doors, with its books filled with orders, you’d jump in, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s exactly what this village is. Small as it is, you’ve only to look at the assessor’s books to find that over a million dollars is invested here in lands and another half million in buildings. There are over eight hundred voters in town and not a hundred of them are making more than a bare living out of this investment. It’s safe to say that not a quarter of one per cent. is being made on this big capital. And yet within a team drive of us there’s a market so large that it’s bringing its produce at a profit some three thousand miles. It’s not only bringing it there, but it’s bringing it into this very town.”

“But look here, Dad,” Dick interrupted, “you don’t own the town, you know.”

“But I own part of it,” I said, “and I intend to help operate the rest.”

“I don’t know how,” he said. “Besides it’s been tried and the business hasn’t paid.”

“What about Dardoni?” I asked.

“That’s so.”

“I’m not going to undertake anything that isn’t being done to-day right under our noses. It’s as true as gospel preaching that these old-world pioneers are going to own this village and utilize to the fullest these opportunities unless we do ourselves. What is true here is true of all New England. That isn’t a cry of wolf when there is no wolf, either; it’s the sober truth. These fellows are going at their work right. It isn’t luck with them. You can’t say that New York is owned by Jews because Hebrews are a lucky race. They are the unluckiest race on the face of the earth. They own New York because they are a pioneer race. And because of this they are going to own more than New York if we Americans don’t wake up.”

“By George, you’re right, Dad,” exclaimed Dick. “What is more, they deserve all they get. They’ve worked and sacrificed for every cent of it.”

“Exactly as our ancestors did when they were adventurers in a new land,” I said. “It gets back again to the pioneer idea. This country with its institutions no longer belongs to the people who made it. It’s being made all over again and it belongs to those who are helping in the new making.”

“Right! Right! But what you want to do is to get out and preach this. You’ve worked hard, Dad, and it’s time you had a rest.”

“There’s been preaching enough, Dick,” I said, “and as for rest—a man doesn’t rest at my age by doing nothing.”

“Then what’s your scheme?”

“To make my own farm pay and then to help my neighbors make their farms pay.”

“I’ll stake my last dollar that you make your own pay if you start in to do it, but as for the others—have you thought out any plan?”

“In a rough way,” I said. “In the first place I’m convinced that talk doesn’t do any good. These people have been preached at through the papers, magazines and pulpit until their brains are calloused. They aren’t interested in the problem in the abstract. They aren’t interested in anything much—not even themselves. They’re convinced that farming doesn’t pay and they have before them the visible proof that it doesn’t so far as they are concerned anyhow. On the other hand, there’s Dardoni, but they dispose of him by calling him a Dago.”

“Then what’s left?” demanded Dick.

“To get them interested in themselves first of all. The only way I know of to do that is to make it worth their while in good hard cash.”

“Bribe ’em?”

“It amounts to that. I want to get them together in some sort of an organization.”

“There’s the Grange,” said Dick.

“It has played its part and in some places is still playing it. But around here people are sick of it. It has become nothing but a social club.”

“Well?”

“You know what they are doing in the West and South; they are offering cash prizes to boys for the best crop of corn raised on a given area. They’ve roused the whole country to the competition and have advertised it so well that the winner becomes for the moment a national figure. That’s what we ought to do here, only my plan is to give the competition a wider scope. We ought to have prizes for the older men and for the women. We ought to stimulate better care of our apple orchards, better hay fields, better potatoes, better household economy, better kitchen gardens.”

“Hold on,” interrupted Dick, “who’s going to pay for these prizes?”

“In the end the club will raise the money. To start with it ought to be raised by public subscription.”

“If I know this crowd, you’ve got a job.”

“Ten prizes of a hundred dollars each will amount to only a thousand dollars. The business men of the town ought to give half that the first year; I’ll give the rest.”

“Hear! Hear!” shouted Dick.

“As an investment,” I said. “If we can bring this old town to life it will pay every mother’s son in it. If we can make it the livest, the most beautiful village in the state, as it ought to be made, we’ll attract a desirable class of residents and double real estate values. The prosperity of every citizen is the prosperity of the community. In the meanwhile we’ll decrease the cost of living here and give men cash to pay their bills. Good Lord, there’s no limit as to what can be done if we can rouse these people. I tell you it’s a great big business proposition if nothing more.”

“By George, I don’t know but what you’re right, Dad,” exclaimed Dick. “It will be a game worth playing, anyhow.”

CHAPTER VII
THE PIONEERS

Our plan was simple and to the point; first to organize the village into a club on the simplest and broadest lines. It was to be called “The Pioneers,” and every taxpayer and the family of every taxpayer was to be eligible for membership. The membership fee was to be for adults one dollar, for women fifty cents, for boys ten cents. We were to have a president, a secretary-treasurer, and a board of five directors. The latter were to pass on all disbursements and had the privilege of canceling membership fees in any worthy case. Our constitution and by-laws were to be merely perfunctory and as free of red tape as was consistent with proper organization.

Holt, a young lawyer in town who had taken an immediate interest in the plan, undertook to secure the pledges for the thousand dollars so that at the first meeting we might have something tangible to present. I headed the list with five hundred dollars, he came second with fifty, and Ed Barclay made up another fifty. Holt secured the rest in two days from the village merchants. Not a man refused to subscribe. On the face of it the scheme appealed to them as worth a try anyhow. It took no argument to make them appreciate the fact that their business was dependent upon the prosperity of the community, but it impressed them as a distinct novelty to attempt anything to further the prosperity of the same community upon which they were dependent. They had always accepted conditions as fixed by forces over which they had no control. They were like farmers who, before the days of irrigation, accepted drought as a decree of God. The idea of doing anything to remedy natural conditions never occurred to them. This new plan was carrying matters even one step further; it was an attempt not to remedy but actually to create. The argument I had used with Dick about the town being a big unused plant appealed to them. With a market waiting for us and plenty of labor on hand we proposed to set the wheels a-going and create a business for the merchants and for every citizen in the town.

Three days later, on January fifteenth, the following notice, prepared by Holt, appeared in the local paper spread over half the front page, in place of the usual stale Washington correspondence:

ATTENTION!

Next Wednesday evening, January nineteenth, a meeting will be held in the Opera House to discuss a plan for putting money into the pockets of every resident of this village.

WE ARE GOING TO WAKE UP!

A committee of citizens has contributed the sum of ONE THOUSAND Dollars which will be divided among those who attend this meeting and fulfil the conditions.

WE ARE GOING TO WAKE UP!

Come and bring the whole family. The Woodmen band will furnish music.

WE SURE ARE GOING TO WAKE UP!

This looked to me a little bit like circus advertising and I wanted Holt to tone it down, but he shook his head.

“I’d put it in red ink if they had any in the printing shop, but they haven’t. You don’t use a tinkly silver bell when you want to call this bunch in the morning; you use a cow bell.”

In addition to this we had the same call to arms printed in the form of a circular—Holt unearthed some green paper for this—and mailed a copy to everyone in town. Those we had left over we tacked up in the stores and on telegraph poles. It’s pretty certain no one missed seeing it, and if they did they had to be deaf not to hear about it, for there wasn’t much of anything else talked about from the moment it appeared. We wanted to get everyone together for once if we never did again, and we certainly succeeded.

An hour before the meeting was called to order the hall was packed jam full and there were at least a hundred who couldn’t get in. There is something electric about the enthusiasm of people in just being together. The whole village rubbing shoulders with one another in a bunch had its effect. They were on edge with excitement and began to show signs of waking up on the spot. The slightest incident was enough to send a laugh through the crowd and it took nothing at all to start a cheer.

Holt was flying around like a hen with its head cut off trying to make room for those outside, collecting chairs and poking up the janitor to keep the hall warm. His face was flushed and his eyes bright with the excitement of it. I myself was fairly stage struck when I looked out from behind the wings and saw the gathering. I found it difficult to catch my breath and heartily wished someone else was going to preside. I tried to persuade Holt to open the meeting but he wouldn’t.

“No, siree, you’re the man. Where’s that confounded band?” He was off in a second to round them up and make out the programme for the music. He had to make room for them on the stage and a few minutes later they struck up the Star Spangled Banner. After they had played it through once Holt stepped to the front after nodding towards them to repeat.

“Now,” he said, “everyone join in.”

He stood there like the leader of a chorus beating time with his hands, and every man, woman and child sang his best. They sang the second verse with a vim that strained their throats. As I watched them my eyes grew blurry and my knees weak. I began to question all the hard things I had said about them, for if ever patriotism was expressed in music it was then. It seemed to me that a hundred years and more rolled back, revealing every man here as ready to shoulder a musket for his country as ever their ancestors had been. When the singing ceased and it came time for me to step forward I felt worse than I did when as a boy I had to speak a piece on Friday afternoon. I was appointed temporary chairman by acclaim and then started in to deliver the little speech I had prepared for the occasion. But I hadn’t gone far before I forgot it and took a new course. At first I had been self-conscious like a bashful man among strangers, but when I was used to the many eyes staring at me I felt as though I was with my own family. A common country and a common cause seemed to unite us on the spot. I had wished to avoid the personal. Even in the face of the publicity I have already given the little happenings of my own life, I can truthfully say I don’t like it. But I felt here as I felt before when I wrote for print, that what a man can talk of from his own knowledge counts for a great deal more than his theories. So before I knew it I found myself telling briefly what I put down in “One Way Out.” I tried to impress upon them the opportunities that are open to a man who tackles life in a pioneer spirit and the fun of the fight. Then I rehearsed what their ancestors had done on these same acres upon which they now lived and tried to make them understand that if to-day there were more handicaps there were also corresponding opportunities. I spoke of the big market awaiting their produce and by my personal experiences in living in the big city made them understand how hungry a market it was.

“If your great grandfathers could come back here to-day,” I said, “there isn’t a man of them who wouldn’t build a fortune upon this land.”

I was conscious of cheering from time to time but I didn’t realize how deeply they were really moved until I had finished. Then I became conscious again that I was on a platform facing them and I saw them rise to their feet and cheer again and again. I had in some way introduced Holt, but before he stepped forward he motioned to the band and they struck up Yankee Doodle Dandy. The leader didn’t step lively enough for him and amid more cheering and laughing he took the leader’s place and led them off at a quickstep that made the whole crowd keep pace with pounding feet. Ruth was in the front row with Dick and I caught her eye. She smiled at me in a way that made me very proud.

Holt, taking advantage of the right feeling I had created in the audience, developed at once the practical side of the proposition.

“Have all the pioneers died or moved West?” he demanded.

“No! No!” came the reply from a group of the younger men.

“Right! Right!” he shouted. “What is more, we’re going to prove it. We have a fine example here in Mr. Carleton, but we aren’t going to allow him to be known for long as the only living specimen of pioneer captivity.”

This of course raised a laugh and then he told them something of what was being done in the middle West and South to encourage farming. Then he quoted from some of the reports recently made by the government and by agricultural schools to show what the possibilities for farming were right in New England.

“Now,” he said, “what we want to do is to get together and work together and fight together and accomplish some of these things ourselves. The trouble with us is that it’s been every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The farmer must help the merchant and the merchant help the farmer. To this end it is proposed that we organize ourselves into a club to be known as ‘The Pioneers.’”

This was greeted with a cheer and then Holt outlined the plan as we had already outlined it among ourselves. This was greeted with a still noisier cheer. But when he mentioned the thousand dollars that had been raised as prize money the audience let itself loose.

“Now,” he said in conclusion, “I move you that we waste no further time in discussion but adopt at once the constitution and by-laws for this organization as here prepared.”

It was seconded and carried unanimously.

“Now,” said Holt, “I move you that Mr. William Carleton be elected president of this club by a unanimous vote.”

It was done.

I took the floor again and nominated Holt as secretary-treasurer, which was seconded and passed.

Then Holt, the three leading merchants and myself were elected a committee of five directors to prepare the further details. The meeting then adjourned until the following Wednesday.

Holt had ready on the platform paper and ink for those to sign who wished to become members, and no sooner was the meeting over than a rush for the stage began. Two hundred and sixty-three signatures were secured then and there and as near as I could judge the only reason everyone in the hall didn’t sign was because only the hardy could reach the table.

Now no one could have asked for a more auspicious beginning than this, but I had seen enough of how men act in a group to know that the real test would come later after each individual had cooled off and thought over the proposition for himself. Consequently while I considered this evening’s enthusiasm to be decidedly significant and boding well for the scheme, I expected a slump sooner or later. Holt, however, couldn’t see even a speck in the clear sky, and I for one was glad of it. It’s good to see a man that way.

“They jumped at it like a hungry trout does at a worm,” he declared. “This is just the encouragement for which they’ve been waiting twenty-five years. Before next Wednesday I expect to have the name of everyone who can hold a pen on that list.”

And Ruth was about as enthusiastic as Holt.

“It was fine, Billy,” she said. “You certainly kept your promise about waking them up.”

In looking back over these last few pages it strikes me that perhaps these things aren’t very important but my pen sort of ran away with me as I remembered that first meeting. But then again maybe these details are significant as showing how easy it was to rouse these people as a whole in contrast with how difficult it was to inspire them individually. If Holt and I had taken any one of these men into an office and given him the same talk it would have gone in one ear and out the other without leaving even a record of its progress.

During the next week the five of us worked hard on our list of prizes. We wanted the money to cover as much ground as possible but we also wanted each prize to be substantial enough to be tempting. This is what we finally made ready to report to the next meeting:

1. For the best crop of hay on one acre of fresh broken land, one hundred dollars.

2. For the best crop of hay on an acre of land already used as hay land, seventy-five dollars.

3. For the best crop of corn on an acre of land, one hundred dollars.

4. For the best house garden, seventy-five dollars.

5. For the best market garden, seventy-five dollars.

6. For the best flower garden, fifty dollars.

7. For the best potato crop per acre, one hundred dollars.

8. For the largest return from chickens according to capital invested, one hundred dollars.

9. For the largest return from cows according to capital invested, one hundred dollars.

10. For the largest return from pigs according to capital invested, one hundred dollars.

11. For the most notable improvement in an old orchard, one hundred and twenty-five dollars.

This seemed at the time and it seems to me to-day a pretty fair division. It gave everyone a chance whether the owner of one acre or fifty, and it was varied enough to interest everyone. As the awards were to be made on the basis of capital invested it gave the poor man an equal chance with the well-to-do.

To some people the main prizes of a hundred dollars may seem small, but just remember that this was a bonus over and above the regular profit a man was sure to make on his six months’ work. Furthermore, a hundred dollars in the country means a good deal more than it does in the city. Furthermore again, one hundred dollars in a lump sum is worth two hundred dollars in installments. And finally, one hundred dollars as a prize looks about as big as a thousand dollars. I’ve known men to spend a hundred dollars in a lottery and consider their money well invested when they finally drew a prize of five dollars. In every newspaper contest you’ll find men doing a hundred dollars’ worth of work to get a chance at a ten dollar prize.

The second meeting was almost as well attended as the first and the committee’s report was received with enthusiasm. But the thing which pleased me most was the fact that it was the young men who came early and crowded up into the front of the hall. Holt noticed this and pointed out a goodly number of youngsters who never before had taken any interest in farming at all. It is doubtful if they did now except as a means for reaching the prizes. However, that point didn’t worry me. I knew that in order to win the money they must first of all make their land pay, and once they got into their heads the fact the soil would pay, half our object was attained.

But this suggested a new idea. In fact, every step we took suggested further development. Our scheme grew by itself like a weed, which to my mind is the logical way for an enterprise of this sort to grow. After we had adjourned until the following Wednesday I called the attention of the board of directors to the fact that so many young men who had always affected to scorn farming showed an interest in our proposition.

“Now,” I said, “it seems to me a pity to let them go at their work in haphazard fashion. The most any of them know, probably, is to plow and harrow the soil, put in their seed, and then wait for results.”

“Well,” said Moulton, “if they keep down the weeds it will keep them out of mischief, anyhow.”

“And they’ll get discouraged in a season, if not sooner,” I said. “No, we want to help them do more than that—we want them to get results. It won’t mean anything to them or to you if they don’t.”

“Right,” agreed Holt. “Swanson, you’re the farmer of the board. It’s up to you to instruct them.”

Swanson had a fifty-acre farm on which he raised hay with better results than some, simply because his land was better.

“They prob’ly think they know more’n I do now,” he answered.

There wasn’t much doubt about that, for no one ever has much faith in local authority. Still I saw the old man was rather proud that the suggestion had been made and I didn’t wish to hurt his feelings.

“Mr. Swanson is a busy man,” I said. “What we want is someone who can come here and address the club as a club. I thought that possibly the State Agricultural School might help us out.”

Swanson threw up his head at this like an old war horse scenting a battle.

“Huh,” he grunted, “what do them fellers know ’bout farmin’? Half of ’em never held a plow handle in their lives.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but if it’s true I’d like to have one of them down here and help show him up.”

“What they don’t know ’bout farmin’ would fill a book,” he growled.

“We’ll put you down in the audience and let you pop questions at them,” I laughed. “Anyway it ought to keep up the interest of the club until spring. No harm done anyway. I put the motion that I be instructed to write the school and see what can be done.”

“Seconded,” chirped in Holt.

Swanson didn’t object, and so the next day I sent off my letter. In it I told briefly what we had done and what we wished to do and asked for advice. To my surprise I received at once an enthusiastic letter from the president himself asking for a personal interview.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW WAY

In conversation with a dozen or more of the better farmers of our town in an endeavor to get at the most important features of what in the way of instructions we needed, I was surprised to find that suspicion of agricultural school methods was general. The farmer looked as much askance at these teachers as he did at college men. They thought them steeped in book learning and without practical experience. If they admitted that at the experiment stations these men produced fine results, it was only to add, “But thet ain’t runnin’ a farm by a long shot.” In some cases farmers had actually sent soil to be analyzed and had followed instructions about seeds and fertilizers, whether accurately or not I don’t know, but certainly without gaining confidence in the new methods. This seemed to me a pity for the farmer if he was wrong and a pity for the taxpayer, who was furnishing funds to support these schools, if the farmer was right. So while I didn’t receive much encouragement for this new feature of our enterprise I went to town to meet the president of the agricultural school, primed with a few opinions which I thought might wake him up at any rate.

I will call him Dennison. I found him a gentle, scholarly-looking man of sixty, with earnest eyes and with an air that impressed me at once with his sincerity. There was, however, about his mouth an expression of weary resignation as of a man who has fought a long fight without particularly encouraging results. He was very cordial and wanted to hear at once just what our scheme was. I told him briefly how our ultimate hope was to arouse the pioneer spirit in the village and of the very practical incentive we had given to rouse, first of all, the ambition of the men to till the soil.

“This prize system,” I explained to him, “is only a quick method of getting the community started. It gives the men something to work for that seems to them tangible. A possible five hundred dollar profit is vague and conditional, while a hundred dollars deposited in the bank is definite and concrete. They’ll work for that.”

“I don’t know but what you’re right,” he said, as though impressed by the new idea. “At any rate the experiment is worth fostering. I’ll send you down all the speakers you’ll listen to.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but right here is where we must use some judgment. These people are queer, and—well, I’ll tell you frankly they haven’t much faith in you fellows.”

He didn’t take offense. He just smiled—a weary, patient kind of smile.

“That’s the pity of it,” he said.

“And what’s the reason of it?” I asked directly.

“I take it you haven’t lived long among them yourself,” he answered.

“No, I haven’t,” I said, “but I expect to live among them from now on. I’ve seen a lot of them as it is, because I’ve taken pains to.”

He nodded.

“And I’ll give you my own theory first,” I said. “What we want down our way are practical men. At this stage we don’t want theoretical farmers. We don’t want to learn just yet the chemistry of farming, but how to make the most out of our land with the materials at hand. We aren’t looking for the best results, but the most practical results. I wish you could teach us how to raise potatoes, hay, corn and garden stuff with the aid of plain old-fashioned manure, a plain old-fashioned plow, and plain old-fashioned sweat and elbow grease. The other can come later.”

Again he smiled.

“Are you a college man, Mr. Carleton?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, wondering what that had to do with it.

Then he took from his bag a catalogue of the school and went over with me the details of the courses given. While there was a background of considerable theory, I must admit the work also covered about every practical branch of farming I had ever heard of.

“Don’t you think a man who mastered these courses would know something about farming?” he asked.

“He should,” I said. “It certainly makes me feel as though I’d like to go through the school myself.”

“You ought to,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “you turn out about forty graduates a year. What do most of the boys do?”

“Teach,” he answered.

“Most of them come from farms?”

“Yes.”

“Few of them go back to the farms?”

“Not many,” he answered uneasily. “But some secure positions as farm managers.”

“Managers of other people’s farms?”

“Yes, of course. Most of the young men have limited means and are without the capital to buy farms of their own.”

“But why don’t they return to the farms they left before they came to school?”

“I suppose they feel the opportunities there aren’t large enough for them.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Now, Mr. Dennison, I’m not a farmer; I’m a business man. I’m taking hold of the possibilities of this village where I live as a business enterprise. And I’m not a teacher. I’m not in a position to criticise your work here except as a business man who wants to use some of it to help along his business enterprise. But right here I’d like to say frankly that it doesn’t seem to me it would pay to hire instruction which ends by making the employee discontented with his work.”

“With equal frankness allow me to say I consider that a very narrow way of looking at it,” he answered.

“Don’t think I’m considering my own pocket,” I said. “I’m only general manager for the group represented by the club. What I mean is that what we ourselves particularly want is instruction which will help every man to thrive and gain content on his own land and won’t leave him ambitious to neglect it for a larger enterprise somewhere else. That tendency is just what we’re fighting. There’s been too much of ‘Go west, young man.’ Our battle cry is ‘Stay at home, young man.’ Honestly now—isn’t that what New England needs?”

“Perhaps,” he nodded.

“Inspiration to stay at home and compete with the old-world pioneers who are pushing him hard, that’s what the native New Englander needs,” I repeated.

“Ah, those foreigners,” he sighed. “If I had stuff like that to handle.”

“You might spoil it,” I said, laughing in my turn.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he joined in. “After all, there’s no substitute for sheer industry.”

Well, the upshot of our pleasant argument was that he offered to do all he could to help us in our project.

“After all,” he said, “there are only five essentials in good farming. The first is to determine what the land lacks by analysis (don’t get frightened—we’ll do that much for you); the second is to supply that lack by proper fertilization; the third is proper selection of seed; the fourth is proper rotation of crops so that one crop will put back what the previous crop has taken out; and the fifth is just hard work in keeping the land cultivated. I don’t see why in a general way that ground couldn’t be covered between now and spring. At any rate I’m willing to try it if you’ll furnish the enthusiasm.”

“I’ll do that if I have to hire a brass band,” I said. But I didn’t need a brass band. With that prize money in prospect there wasn’t a man who dared stay away for fear the other fellow might secure an advantage over him. We had two lectures a week open only to members of the club. We tried to make them as informal as possible and at the conclusion of each talk threw the meeting open for questions. Holt took down each lecture in shorthand and I had a half dozen copies made at my own expense. We kept one of these for the club as a matter of record but the others were at Holt’s office where any member was allowed to take one for not over three days so that he might copy for himself anything he wished. It was surprising how soon those copies became thumb-marked and dog-eared.

The speakers kept true to my requirements and followed substantially the outline laid out by Dennison at our first interview. The first speaker took up the matter of soil and had a difficult task on his hands to convince these men that not all dirt was soil and that not all soils were the same.

“There’s as much difference in land as there is in stock,” he said. “And if you want the best returns you have to handle it just as tenderly and feed it just as properly. The next time you plant a cornfield don’t think of it as a field but as a well bred cow or horse. Groom it as you would groom your horse or cow and feed it with the same care. Remember, too, that just as you don’t expect your horse to give work or your cow to give milk without supplying the necessary material out of which to make work and make milk; you can’t expect your field to give you back corn unless you supply it with the material for making corn. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? The poor farmer is the only workingman in the world except the Wall Street sucker who expects to get something for nothing. Nature supplies most of the elements free of charge, but whatever you take out you have to put back.”

Then he went on to explain how different soils need different foods just as much as different kinds of stock need different foods.

“It all depends upon what you want to get back. If you want back eggs you use the food that will make eggs; if you want back fat you use the food that will make fat; if you want back milk, you use the food that will make milk, and so on. Now, some of your land is already adapted by nature to supply certain things—corn, wheat, hay, potatoes, what not. When that is so, use what is given you. If, however, the land hasn’t those elements you must supply them, either by fertilizers or by planting a preparatory crop that will use what is already present and leave behind what you want for the final crop.”

This likening of land to live stock was a fine idea. It impressed every man in the club. I know that in my own case I had always thought of land as about as fixed and abstract as a problem in geometry. This treating it as something living—as of course it really is—gave a man a new attitude towards it. It made plausible all the theories of care which followed. A man knows he has to feed and care for his live stock. If so, then why not his land, which is also a living thing?

The second man took up the matter of fertilization—the restoring to the land such elements as have been used up by the previous crops and given back to the farmer in the form of produce. It’s an amazingly simple proposition when you stop to think about it. It’s merely paying back money you’ve borrowed. If, after doing that a profit isn’t left, you can’t blame the money.

The third man covered the proper selection of seeds. Like the previous speakers he pleaded for the substitution of horse sense and care in place of the present haphazard methods. No more than all dirt is land are all kernels seeds. You must be sure that the seeds you plant are live seeds. The usual method is to plant them and if you get a crop, the seeds were surely alive; if you don’t get a crop, the seeds were surely dead. But there is no need of risking your season’s work on such an experiment. Take a sample fifty from your seeds a month or so before planting time, place these in a box and cover with earth, keep moist and warm and count the number of seeds which sprout. There you have as accurate a method of determining their germinating value as any chemist could give. If the seeds don’t come up in a decent percentage, get some more. If they do, you have insured your crop so far as the seeds are concerned. The whole scheme of modern farming is to eliminate from the beginning all elements of chance so far as possible, which is no more than every other business man does.

The fourth speaker took up the rotation of crops, which is a somewhat more abstract proposition than the others. It seems that nearly every crop both takes from the land what it needs and gives back to a certain extent something else in its place. Nature is no hog and generally pays her way. The whole secret is to so alternate your crops as to take full advantage of this fact. The matter has been determined to a science.

The fifth speaker dwelt upon the necessity of proper cultivation—of plowing deep and harrowing often. Here again was something that was within the understanding of the average man. Your soil and seeds need air and light as much as your live stock. You wouldn’t expect a cow to thrive shut up in a dark stall with little air. When you harrow you do no more than throw open the barn windows and let in the sunshine.

I have run over in this general way the ground covered by the speakers merely to show how simply and reasonably this subject of business-like farming can be presented when done right. It is neither an abstract nor a complex study and the essentials can be brought home to the every-day farmer in a very few months.

Each speaker, moreover, at my suggestion, besides treating his special subject took occasion to talk on farming as a profession—and especially farming in New England. They emphasized the fact that farming is a big business proposition, an honorable calling, and not merely an effort to raise food supplies for the home. They all dwelt on the fact that New England always had been and still is a farming region. Modern conditions instead of destroying its value as an agricultural country have really increased that value by giving a larger market. But—they emphasized again and again—hard work is required, concentrated intelligent effort, in order to bring results. This is true of every business. The days of fifty years ago when almost any slip-shod method was bound to bring a profit, have passed. Farming has been the last business to accept modern business conditions, but the time has now come when it must. Waste can no longer be tolerated here any more than in other forms of business. A man to succeed must harbor every resource and use every by-product. As one man said, “So keen is competition to-day, so slight a margin of profit is there between competing houses, that very often the man who shows a profit is the man ingenious enough to make it from the by-products which twenty-five years ago were spurned.”

One speaker spoke of the Chinese and the tender care they bestow upon a few hundred square feet of land and the results secured from this.

“Our ancestors were both hard workers and thrifty,” said he, “and we must get back to their standards. We in the East have been spoiled as well as despoiled by the West. We have listened to stories of thousand-acre farms, steam plows, and million-bushel crops, until our own opportunities seem petty by comparison. We have heard of Oregon fruit farms until our own fruit doesn’t seem worth cultivating. But that’s all wrong. You ought to realize it when in spite of the million dollar crops you find yourselves paying more and more every year for your flour. You ought to realize it whenever you go to the grain mill and pay out your good money for corn that you might as well raise yourselves. As for Oregon apples—don’t let them frighten you. If nature gives them size and color, she makes them pay for it in juice and flavor. They look well in boxes, those apples, but the world is learning to buy New England apples to eat. There isn’t a better apple country on the globe than New England.”

Good straight talk that, and it had its effect. You could see the audience straighten up and hold themselves the better for it. Every meeting was well attended and there was never the slightest sign of restlessness in the audiences, though sometimes the talks lasted nearly two hours.

In the meanwhile Ruth in her quiet way was doing as much as the rest of us to keep up interest in the undertaking. She made it a point to get acquainted with all the farmer wives in the neighborhood. She had them up to the house in groups and dropped many a word of encouragement and gave many a bit of advice which came from a full experience.

“Billy,” she said to me one night, “it’s the deadly uninspired routine of their lives that’s killing the women. They cook and sew and scrub without a single dream to help them along. And that’s because the men don’t dream. If you succeed in rousing the husbands and sons you’ll bring the wives and mothers to life, too.”

“That’s what we want to do,” I said.

“It shows that it isn’t lack of money that makes poverty, Billy,” she said. “All these women have good homes and plenty to eat and wear and yet—and yet I honestly believe they are poorer than our old friends of the tenements.”

“We were never so poor in our lives as when we lived with plenty to eat and wear in the suburbs,” I reminded her.

“That’s just it,” she nodded. “This is the same kind of poverty. It comes from the fact that for these women life ends with the end of each day. They die every time they crawl into bed at night. There is never anything for them to look forward to on the morrow.”

“If we could only make them realize that this condition is largely their own fault—”

“That wouldn’t make any difference at all,” she broke in; “we must change the conditions. Most of our misfortunes are our own fault, but that doesn’t make them any less misfortunes. It’s another misfortune that our misfortunes are our own fault. I don’t know but what that’s the worst misfortune of all.”

She was right. It doesn’t do much good to blame people for their faults. We ourselves, after making public our experiences in the suburbs, received many hard letters from people who couldn’t see anything in our plight but the well deserved consequences of our own folly. If we hadn’t done this or that, if we had done this or that, we were assured that we would have come out all right. To be sure. That applies to every human being who ever tried to live this life. If we were all as wise as Solomon to start with and lived up to all Solomon’s precepts, then would come the millennium. But we aren’t. We all have to learn and in the learning we make many mistakes. Then we make them again.

And the man who blames us and lets it go at that isn’t our friend, and some day is going to make a mistake himself.

CHAPTER IX
SPRING

I don’t think a winter, in our town, ever passed more quickly or more pleasantly than this winter. The months flew by like weeks and the weeks like days. When the first warm melting days came in late April everyone began to get impatient. It seemed as though the snow would never leave the ground, and many didn’t wait for this before plotting out their crops and digging up samples of soil to send to the agricultural school. Seeds were bought and tested and farming tools brought out and put in order.

It’s good to be in the country in the spring. It was my first experience and the change took place like a miracle. I saw trees that looked as dead as fence posts start to life with the stirring sap; I saw little green grass blades appear among the brown waste of dead blades; I saw all manner of living things awake and creep out of their winter hiding places until the earth looked almost as though the resurrection trumpet had blown.

Spring means a great deal more to us farmers than it does to city folk. She comes like a partner returning from a winter vacation, takes down the shutters, sweeps the store clean and stands at the door ready for business. She comes with unlimited capital which is furnished everyone for the asking. If men will have none of it even then she does not stand idle, but for the sake of the housewives and the children proceeds on her own hook to make the world as beautiful as possible; sprinkles the trees with blossoms and perfume, scatters the ground with flowers, sweetens the air with song. You can’t escape her bounty if you will. This year, however, she couldn’t complain of lack of coöperation.

Hardly had the frost fairly left the ground when there was an unprecedented demand in our town for horses and plows. There were not enough to go around. I let Hadley go in order to take the many jobs that were offered him, but with every plow and horse in the neighborhood in use I saw much land that would be late for seed. If tangible evidence was needed of what the Pioneer Club had already accomplished it was in this state of affairs. There had been no difficulty the year before. One Sunday Holt and I scoured the surrounding towns for men and horses and secured six teams on the promise of at least a week’s work for each. They were willing enough to come, even though in doing so they neglected their own work. It was the old story of their being willing for five dollars a day cash in hand to jeopardize a future ten. However, that was their own lookout and I quieted my conscience with the thought that if we made as good as we hoped to do the influence of this would spread to the neighboring towns. They were mighty curious as to what was going on.

“What’s got into you people, anyhow?” asked one man.

“We’re getting ready for the planting,” I said.

“Well, something must have happened to make you so all-fired busy down your way,” one of them answered. Even among neighboring towns our village had a bad reputation.

I told him about the Pioneer Club and the prizes that were being offered. The amount made his eyes stick out.

“Gee,” he answered, “guess I’ll have to move down.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Come and bring your family.”

We certainly did look like a busy community. Drive along the roads in any direction and you’d see acre after acre of upturned land. The smell of new earth was in the air and it was like tonic even to the passerby.

During this busy preparatory season Holt kept his law office open evenings and it came to be a sort of club room. I planned to stay down there every evening until eleven and the two of us tried to straighten out the difficulties that arose. One of these was seeing to it that every man who showed himself to be in earnest had a proper supply of material with which to start his crop. We made arrangements with Moulton and with Gordon the hardware man to extend reasonable credit to everyone even in cases where credit had been withdrawn. Our argument that it was wiser to help a man get on his feet than keep him down was sound on the face of it.

“These fellows mean business now,” I said to Gordon, “and if we go on half as well as we’ve begun there won’t be a man in this village who within a couple of years won’t be able to pay his bills. It’s up to you to do your part. Their success is your success. Give them credit for everything but patent medicines and you won’t lose.”

While it was true that in doing this Gordon was choosing the lesser of two evils I realized that it wasn’t exactly fair either to force him and a few other merchants to bear the burden of financing these men without interest. But the small farmer is in a bad position. When the commercial business house needs money it can go to a bank and upon a statement of its business and its rating obtain money and credit on its signature. A small farmer has no business rating and can get money only upon a mortgage at six per cent., which is almost prohibitive. Of course the banks can’t be blamed for treating with individuals in this way but it struck me that something might be done about this if ever we got the community as a whole firmly bound together. The combined security of all the land and business in the village ought to mean something to a bank.

In the meantime I was not neglecting my own land. I realized that there wasn’t much use in preaching the profits of farming unless I at least made the attempt to demonstrate it on my own acres. While on the one hand I was handicapped by lack of practical training, it struck me that this would make the experiment all the more interesting as showing what could be done by a man who availed himself of the knowledge of others, which, through the government bureaus and the State Agricultural School, was freely offered to everyone.

Before this series of lectures I don’t believe any human being ever knew less about farming than I did. I hadn’t spent even my vacations on a farm. I couldn’t tell wheat in the field from oats. I couldn’t tell a squash from a pumpkin. I didn’t know anything about soils, about seeds, about fertilizers, about cultivation. My mind was a blank on the subject, which at least had the advantage of making me free of prejudices.

I don’t mean to say that even after the superficial course of lectures to which I listened this winter that I felt myself an authority on the subject. I didn’t. But on the other hand everything that was said sounded so much like just plain common sense that I didn’t see why any fairly intelligent man couldn’t put the theories into practice, especially when he had the Agricultural School back of him, ready and eager to give further advice.

Take for example the matter of orchards. I found on my place some seventy-five apple trees all cluttered up with dead limbs. It didn’t require a farmer to realize that any tree was handicapped by such a burden. I took a saw and cut out all this dead wood and a little later, when the shoots had started, trimmed off all those which obviously were useless. Then, still following out instructions, I scraped the bark on the trunks and whitewashed them. This was no more than common sense grooming, such as one would give live stock. Then, I girdled the trunks with burlap to prevent insects from crawling up to the young leaves. After this, I spaded up around the roots so that air and water and sunshine could get in. Until now the dead sod had matted down into a covering that was about as impervious to air and moisture as a rubber blanket.

Hadley watched me with cynical indifference. To him it seemed as foolish to bestow all this care upon gnarled old apple trees as it would to give the same attention to a full grown man that a woman bestows upon an infant. He believed that a tree would grow anyway and was outside the province of farming.

“Only wastin’ your time,” he said. “Them trees won’t never do nothin’.”

Perhaps not, but I felt more than repaid in seeing the orchard look shipshape instead of like a neglected cemetery.

Earlier in the season I had taken samples from a five-acre strip of damp, low-lying land at the foot of the hill which was fairly well drained, and sent them to the school for analysis. I received a report advising me to plant potatoes there and a formula for the best fertilizer to use. Here again it didn’t take a man bred on a farm to carry out the simple instructions. I had the field plowed as soon as the frost was out of the ground, applied my fertilizer of acid phosphate, kainit and nitrate of soda—so many pounds to the acre—and harrowed it in. It didn’t require even ordinary intelligence to have this done or to purchase Early Norwood, New Queen and Green Mountain seed and plant them in rows three feet apart and in sets fifteen inches apart. Hadley and I did the work—work that any day laborer was capable of doing. I reserved a small strip for the planting of Early Horn carrots, Market Model parsnips, Edmand’s beets and Early Milan turnips. These names didn’t mean anything to me, and I didn’t care if they didn’t. Before the end of the season, however, I wished I had reserved an even larger strip for these things. I never ate such vegetables in my life.

I plowed up about an acre back of the barn for the garden and emptied upon this the manure from the cow barn, working it in well. Then I harrowed the ground until it was pulverized almost as fine as dust. According to the Professor not half time enough is devoted by the average New England farmer to the preparation of the soil for his seed. Oftentimes he is content with a shallow plowing and a single harrowing. I noticed that Dardoni and Tony, however, knew by instinct enough to work their soil thoroughly. They depended a great deal on hand labor, because for one reason they could secure help cheap. Newcomers were glad enough to work for them for the experience, and the chance it gave them to look around for places of their own. However, the result was the same and they did their work thoroughly. I planted about one-fourth of this garden to peas in successive sowings. Here was another simple and obvious advantage which I found my neighbors until now had neglected. They sowed perhaps an early and late crop of peas and corn but it never occurred to them to make three or four plantings and many of them didn’t even make two. When peas and corn were ripe everyone had peas and corn but in the intervals no one except Dardoni and his fellows had them at all. They were therefore either scarce or a drug on the market. Under advice I used Suttons, with a few Dwarf Champions.

Another quarter of the garden I planted to beans—some string beans—Plentifuls and Valenties—some wax and Lima beans and a large patch of white pea beans for winter.

Another quarter of the patch I put into sweet corn, using for the early varieties Early Cory and Peep o’ Day; for medium earlies Crosby, and for late corn Country Gentleman. Among these I put in a few squash seeds, Crooknecks and Hubbards.

The last quarter I used for cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes and small stuff, such as lettuce, pepper grass, radishes, Swiss chard, and beets.

Now to get all this done within the space of a few weeks required hard work. I was up at half past four and in the field by half past five. With an hour out at noon I was in the field steadily until six o’clock. Then I ate supper and was in bed by eight-thirty so dog-tired I could hardly get undressed. And yet I woke up at daylight the next morning completely rested and eager to be at it again. This was the kind of hard work that leaves no after effects. I continued to employ Hadley, but without boasting I honestly believe I accomplished each day four times as much as he did. I didn’t do this by unusual exertion, but merely by keeping steadily at it and planning the work in a business-like way. In my thought I kept one step ahead of my hands while he always kept one step behind and had to wait for his head to catch up with him.

I never felt more alert in body and mind than I did this spring. I was used to physical labor, but I found myself responding with even greater vigor now than when I was younger and digging for the subway as a day laborer. For one thing I had none of the mental strain with which I was burdened then. Of course I was in a far better position financially and everything was going well with my own. Dick was making good and the kiddies were as rosy and plump as fall apples. Ruth, too, was happier than I had ever seen her, so that while I took this new work seriously it was with a light-hearted seriousness that added to the zest of life.

In the meantime we were holding a meeting of the Pioneers every two weeks in order that interest might not flag, and to discuss any difficulties that arose. These gatherings were informal, and as time went on had the effect of binding us together into one big family. Sometimes I spoke and sometimes Holt spoke, and twice we had a man down from the school. So far as it was possible we tried to prod up everyone’s pride. We told them that as descendants of the people who founded this nation we had a certain responsibility of blood. We were still the backbone of this nation, but this inheritance didn’t amount to anything unless we lived up to it. We tried to impress everyone with the fact that other pioneers were coming in (and they saw this for themselves) and that if we meant to retain our title and position it must be by proving ourselves worthy of it. We avoided carefully anything which might stir up class hatred.

“The race is open to all,” said Holt. “It’s right that it should be. A man wouldn’t have much of a horse race if he only allowed his own horses to enter—horses he was sure of. A victory wouldn’t mean anything. It would be like betting with yourself. It’s only in the free-for-all that you get a real race and a real victory. We’ve made a good start and now all we have to do is to sit tight and drive hard.”

Holt had a catchy way of talking and always succeeded in putting the crowd into good humor and also in throwing a glamour of romance over everything. We couldn’t have had a better man.

But as I said, the greatest good of these meetings came in the community idea which was fostered. Associating here week after week for a common purpose we began to feel friendly and intimate with one another. Farmers are naturally an independent lot and the worse farmers they are the more independent they are apt to be. Lack of success instead of humbling them makes them even cockier, as it does for that matter with people in any walk of life who have any backbone. They find plenty of excuse for their failure outside themselves. Newspapers and muckraking magazine articles and politicians furnish them with arguments enough to explain how they are being robbed and abused. These things sink in deep among farmers when they sink in at all, because they have time to think them over and digest them. But it sinks into them as individuals and not as a body. The result is that not only do they become suspicious of the outside world but suspicious of one another. It makes them even more pronounced separate units. Up to a certain point this is not only a good thing but the best possible thing. It has preserved their individuality. Organization after organization has tried to herd them together and reduce them to a mere class so as to drive them in one direction for their own selfish ends, but happily without result. They won’t be driven. Even the organizations which have had a less sordid interest in the task have failed to hold them together for any length of time, which in my opinion has saved them from being swallowed up.

But this independence is carried to extremes in the smaller communities and it was so in our town. Every man was suspicious of his neighbor. Though engaged in the same work and with many interests in common every man felt himself a competitor, not with the outside world, but with his nearest neighbor. They wouldn’t pull together on anything.

We didn’t overcome this feeling in a minute but we did accomplish a lot towards it even during this first summer. In a way this prize system might be expected to increase individual competition, but even to the end of winning the prizes we forced everyone to work together which more than made up.

It wasn’t long before we all of us realized that we had opened up a field even larger than any of us had dreamed. When we saw almost two hundred acres spring to life as a result of our initial effort; as we saw front dooryards blossom with flower gardens and back dooryards become alive with truck gardens; as we saw orchard after orchard, which until now had been about as sightly as a patch of dead hemlocks, step forth trim and neat and full, not of dead hopes, but of big promise; as we noted the absence of village loafers and grocery store hangers-on, we caught an inkling of what a power we had set in motion. And the joy of it came in the realization that this was no new and imported power, but native energy which all the while had been here latent. These acres, this labor which had been lying idle, was now waking up. It represented thousands of dollars when aroused and only so many cents when dormant. A man couldn’t have come in here and bought this plant—houses, barns, fields, stock, men, for much less than a million dollars at any time, and yet it hadn’t been worth to those who possessed it what it was taxed. Quick with life as it was now it was coming to its own.

CHAPTER X
RESULTS

From the moment my seeds began to show in tiny sprouts above the ground until the full grown produce was safely garnered, I lived with a hoe in my hands. Much to Hadley’s disgust I also kept a hoe in his hands most of the time. I didn’t allow a weed either in my truck garden or my potato patch ever to get more than two inches high. Instead of hoeing once I hoed a half dozen times. The advantage of this is not so much in keeping down the weeds as it is in stirring up the soil so that the earth keeps fresh and alive and porous. Hadley was disgusted.

“Lawd-a-mighty,” he exclaimed, as we started for the potato patch with hoes over our shoulders for the fourth cultivation, “ye’ll hoe your stuff to death.”

“You wait and see the results,” I said.

“Ye b’lieve every darn thing them school teachers tell ye?”

“Pretty nearly,” I said.

“It’s all right for them to preach,” he said, “but I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut thet they’d quit preachin’ hoein’ mighty quick if ye gave them this five-acre patch to hoe theirselves.”

But I was satisfied with results at the end of the first month. No one could ask for hardier looking plants than I had. But Hadley was not convinced even with this visible proof.

“They’ve grown spite of ye,” he said. “Anyhow the tarnation bugs will eat ’em up afore you’re through. Always do.”

Doubtless they would if I had given my permission, but when I wasn’t hoeing I was spraying with Paris Green. More than this I went around with a tin can and knocked off into this all those bugs which did succeed in reaching maturity. A couple of sprayings a season was the most anyone around here ever did. So long as the bugs were kept down enough not actually to kill the plants most people hereabout were satisfied. I don’t believe an even hundred of the pests succeeded in getting a square meal off my potatoes.

Now in all this I insist, and it’s evident on the face of it, that such attention didn’t imply on my part any scientific knowledge of farming. I did what I was told to do and did it thoroughly. I did what it seems to me I should have known enough to do even if I hadn’t been told. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too; you can’t let bugs eat your potatoes and have your potatoes, too. It was queer sort of reasoning that until now had convinced my neighbors that this was possible. They had almost fatalistic theories about farming. They seemed to think that the most any man could do was to plant his seed and then trust to Providence for what might result. This pious faith in the bounty of the Almighty was fundamentally of course merely an unconscious excuse for their own laziness, but it seems to me it really must have been at the root of their shiftlessness—an inheritance perhaps. Hadley was a fine example of it. I gave up early in the season trying to inspire him even with the help of the prizes. He did plant a few hills of corn but he refused to hoe them more than once.

Now what I did myself, a large part of my neighbors were also doing in a more or less earnest way. The young men I found were doing more than the old men. The latter had taken advice in the matter of fertilizers and seeds but it came hard to them to give the later attention to their crops that I did. However, it was possible to see a general and notable improvement even in this. The semi-monthly meetings did much to spur them on and the noticeable results which followed their efforts also did something more. Some of them remained skeptical, but both Holt and myself insisted that they must keep at it until the end of the season. We never missed a chance to dangle before their eyes the prize money. Holt did one clever thing that had a very good effect. He secured one hundred crisp new dollar bills and kept them displayed in the window of Moulton’s grocery store with a sign over them which read:

“Only One of the Ten Prizes.”

The display of so much money caught the eye of everyone who passed. More than that about everyone in town who was competing went down and had a look at it every so often. It acted like a tonic to many a man who was getting disheartened by the amount of labor involved in the new system.

Holt and I made a rough estimate of the land now under cultivation that last year was idle and figured that it amounted to about one hundred and eighty acres. In addition to this there was of course the land that was always farmed to a more or less extent amounting to some two hundred acres more. Out of this last lot there wasn’t an acre that didn’t show improvement over the year before.

The new hundred and eighty acres counted for a lot more in value than shows in the mere statement, because it included gardens for nearly everyone in the village and this meant an actual saving in cash for every householder from the moment the produce began to mature. Moulton noted the effect of this when as usual he started to bring in early vegetables from the city market. He had all he could do to get rid of the first lot and after that gave it up. No one wanted city vegetables with the prospect ahead of vegetables of their own. Martin, the local butcher, also noticed the effect in a way he didn’t like. He was the only man in the village who opposed us and he can’t be blamed, for his meat sales began to fall off in June and dropped fifty per cent. during July and August. With green peas to be had for the picking, followed by string beans, new potatoes, green corn, turnips, parsnips, beets, shell beans and what not, most people thought twice before paying him forty cents a pound for rump steak. Personally I’d like to have seen him put out of business, for he was a robber if ever there was one. He had set me to wondering a long while before this why it wasn’t possible for us to raise our own meat. With plenty of corn and hay upon which to feed our cattle, with grazing ground for sheep, with practically everyone able to keep his own pig on ordinary waste I didn’t see any reason why in the end we shouldn’t make use of this opportunity. Our forefathers raised whatever meat they needed and I believed we could do it to-day. This was one of the things I resolved to bring up at one of the fall meetings.

But when crops began to mature we were confronted with another and more urgent problem. Just as soon as the green peas began to come along we realized that we were face to face with the problem of distribution. We had killed the local market, which was decidedly a good thing. In one sense we hadn’t killed it, for now every man was supplying himself, but we had killed it for our surplus. It didn’t take me long to see that this would be wasted, for all that a majority of the individuals themselves might do. The farmers were helpless partly because they had no selling knowledge and partly because it was almost impossible for them to get produce to the market and sell at a profit in small lots. Holt and I made a round of the commission merchants in town and the very best we could do with any of them was at a price forty per cent. below retail. We figured that transportation would eat up another ten per cent. which left the man who raised the crop some fifty per cent. This was dead wrong on the face of it, but we didn’t have any time to argue the point and it wouldn’t have done us any good if we had. As we were now situated, fifty per cent. was better than nothing. However, this opened my eyes to some of the reasons why in the suburbs we couldn’t make both ends meet.

I called a special meeting of the club and told the members what I had learned and outlined the plan Holt and I had devised to save what we could. The situation had come unexpectedly and was due of course to our ignorance. We didn’t realize it at the time but as it happened this crisis was the best thing that could have come about. It forced us on the spur of the moment and at the psychological moment into a plan that promised to develop big things in the end; the coöperative selling plan. I proposed that every member of the club should gather early each morning such things as were fit for the market over what he couldn’t use himself and bring them to my barn. There the produce would be measured and sorted and each man given a credit slip. A committee of three was to be appointed by the club to oversee without pay this work for a week. The committee would hire a team to transport the goods to the early train which left at five fifteen. At the end of each week an accounting would be made, the cost of transportation deducted and profits distributed pro rata. I offered to look after the bookkeeping myself if the club so desired and at the next meeting this task was delegated to me.

Now it is possible that in advance of the present urgent situation which demanded that they accept this or nothing, a minority at least might have viewed this scheme with suspicion. They were not used to doing things in a body and the novelty of it, like all novelties, might have frightened them. As it was, the plan was received with instant enthusiasm and when put to a vote carried without a single dissenting voice. Anyway if a man disapproved all he had to do was not to bring in his produce. The action of the club didn’t bind a man to anything except to abide by results if he chose to contribute his stuff.

We appointed three men to appear at my barn at four o’clock the next morning. They turned up on time and by four-fifteen the produce began to arrive. Everyone brought what he had, whether it was a bushel of sweet corn, a peck of beans, a dozen heads of lettuce, a half dozen cucumbers or a barrel of apples or potatoes. In most cases the individual lots didn’t amount to much but collectively we made a good showing that first morning. We had enough to fill a two horse load. I went to the station and supervised the loading myself and then went on to the market with it. Barnes, the commission man, looked it over and admitted that he was well pleased on his part with the venture. At the end of the first week I received a check for four hundred and eighty-three dollars and sixty-five cents—not in itself a large amount or as much as it should have been, but when considered as money, a large per cent. of which would otherwise have gone to waste, a creditable showing.

And really the working out of the scheme as it continued from week to week was wonderfully simple. There was nothing either difficult or complicated about it. The three men appointed every week gave about two hours of their time for six days which in no way interfered with their farm duties. They all looked upon their selection as an honor and rather enjoyed their position.

Nor was my part of it burdensome. I received an itemized accounting from Barnes and had nothing to do but divide these items as the dated credit slips were produced. I didn’t even have to do that, for Ruth did the figuring herself. Before the end of the season we found we had handled thirty-eight hundred dollars, but this included the apple and potato crop which went through us. And there wasn’t a single kick or complaint heard during the whole business.

In the meantime, as the end of the season approached, the matter of the prize distribution loomed big. I wanted to make the most of that event. I wanted it to be a big spectacular finish that would cling in the minds of all during the ensuing winter. The committee held several meetings to discuss the best way of doing this and we finally hit upon the idea of an old-time country fair. There hadn’t been one in town for twenty years because the last ones held had degenerated into nothing but two-cent horse races in which the prizes had all been carried off by semi-professionals. The chief objection to the plan was the lack of fair grounds. The old society had gone into bankruptcy and sold off what property it had and the grounds had since then grown up to scrub pine. Ruth solved the difficulty by suggesting that we go back again to the early days for our idea. Originally the fairs were held on the village green. In fact, in parts of New England they still are to-day. Her idea was to revive this custom in our town.

The idea had several advantages, not the least of which was that it incurred no expense, and met with instant approval. We appointed a committee to look after the details, a second committee to arrange a field day for the youngsters, and a third committee with Ruth at its head to arrange some sort of entertainment for the women.

“You mustn’t leave them out,” Ruth insisted. “They play a more important part in this work than you imagine.”

We had arranged with the Agricultural School to send down men to act as judges so that everything should be judged impartially. A man had come down just before the haying season and had overseen the weighing on the town scales of all hay entered for the competition. Quality and quantity were the two things taken into account for the best crop on land already used for that purpose, while the prize for the best crop on reclaimed land required a somewhat nicer judgment. The nature of the land here had to be considered. When the expert had completed his work he made his report and placed it in a sealed envelope which was not to be opened until the public award.

This same method was used in making the awards for the most notable improvement in orchards, for the best corn crop and the best potato crop. As for the other prizes the committee itself acted as judges. The results here were a matter of self-evident facts. In the live stock competition each man was required to show a receipted bill for all money expended and a record of some sort for all money received. The garden competition had to be judged in a more general way, as it was observed by the committee during the entire season. I had put a good deal of time into this myself and it had been a genuine pleasure. There was hardly a family in the village who didn’t have a garden of some sort that year, for even those who didn’t intend to compete caught the contagion and planted something. I wish there had been some way of computing the saving in cash that resulted from this alone. It certainly amounted to a good many times the money which had inspired the movement. It seems almost impossible of belief that to many residents of this country village the raising of their own green stuff was a decided novelty. But such is the fact. With a man coming daily to the door, as until this season Tony and others had done, with peas, lettuce, corn, cucumbers and what not, people had bought of him as a matter of convenience. It had cost them only a little at a time and they hadn’t realized to how much the sum total amounted.

I know that Ruth and I found a big difference in our household expenses once the garden began to bear. Not only this but we did away with meat almost entirely and never lived so well in our lives. In addition to what I used myself I loaded down Dick’s machine every morning with such stuff as couldn’t be put away for winter use, to be distributed among members of the gang—among families with children or those temporarily in hard luck through sickness. Moulton was certainly mistaken when he had prophesied that it would cost me more to raise than buy my own vegetables. But he hadn’t planned on any such modern methods as I and the whole village used that season.

As the day for the fair grew nearer the town became on edge with excitement. Here was a holiday which appealed to everyone, whether farmer or not. It brought the whole village together as a unit. I was surprised to find how much local spirit really existed below all the apparent indifference. I found there wasn’t a man or woman who didn’t have some town pride, however slight. The trouble was that they seldom had an opportunity to express it. Holt kept up a running fire of comment in the local paper, which was glad to give us all the space we wished. It made the most readable and inexpensive copy they had received for a long time. We also got out posters and distributed them among the neighboring towns, bidding everyone come as guests of the village. Every merchant decorated his store a week in advance and the Woodmen band in anticipation of the event practiced new pieces every night.

Ruth secured the town hall for the women and arranged there for an exhibition of New England cooking, preserving and needle work, which instantly gave the women an active interest in the undertaking. She also arranged to serve here a free lunch of coffee, sandwiches and cakes to out-of-town visitors. Her committee decorated the interior of the old building with wild flowers and flowers from the home gardens, with a background of evergreens gathered by the small boys.

We received requests for street privileges from a number of fakirs and sold these for enough to purchase settees to go around the band stand. We used some care, however, in giving out our permits and barred all gambles of whatever kind. About a dozen came into town the day before and erected their booths which gave the village still more of a holiday aspect. That night there wasn’t a livelier village in the State. It was so full of anticipation that I don’t believe more than half the population got their full night’s sleep for the first time in twenty years.

“Are we dead yet?” demanded Holt of Ruth as he prepared to leave us long after midnight and after being up since four A. M.

“Some of you will be if you don’t go right home this minute and get some sleep,” she answered.

CHAPTER XI
A GREAT DAY

The morning of October first dawned cool and clear with just frost enough in the air to make everyone feel as fit as a fighting cock. As early as seven o’clock carriage loads of people passed my house from the neighboring villages. Old men and young came, women and children, glad of an excuse no matter how slight to journey to a common meeting place and see and be seen. They came from as far away as twenty miles and people who had not met for ten years took this opportunity to visit with one another. Former residents, friends of present residents and total strangers poured into town, obeying the instinct to herd together for a day. The whole village kept open house and so far as it was possible we tried to have everything free—to act as a town as hosts. I for my part extended a general invitation to the gang and all my old friends from Little Italy and spread a big table in the barn for them because there wasn’t room in the house. As many as seventy-five women and children came in the afternoon, while that evening about the whole gang came along. They pretty nearly ate us out of house and home but I had a big bonfire built in the yard and in this they roasted apples and potatoes when everything else was gone.

The prize award was set for eleven o’clock and for an hour before the band gave a concert. At the conclusion of this I estimated that fully nine hundred people were gathered around the band stand. It was as intense and excited a gathering as you ever saw. Not an inkling of who had won the prizes leaked out although in most cases the general discussion and known facts had narrowed the possibilities down to a half dozen in each class. I myself didn’t know the winners except in the cases where I acted as judge. When the band finished its programme with “America” and Holt and the committee and the judges from the Agricultural School who were present as guests, and myself stepped to the platform you could have heard a pin drop. As president of the club it was my duty to make a brief speech and in this I outlined for the benefit of strangers present the object of the club, the money that had been offered, what had been accomplished and on what basis the awards were to be made.

“It seems to me,” I said at the end, “that every man and woman and boy who is a member of this club ought to feel that he has won something whether he draws a money prize or not.”

This was greeted with noisy cheering which it did my heart good to hear.

“Every one of you who planted a seed and cared for it has reaped the reward of seeing it multiply at a rate possible in no other business. Nature is the grand prize giver. Every farmer ought to consider himself a partner with Nature—with God. Men give you for the use of a dollar for one year four cents, possibly five or six cents; Nature gives us for a dollar’s worth of seed as high as a thousand and two thousand per cent. There isn’t a family in this village who planted a garden last spring who hasn’t been paid by Nature in produce representing good hard cash the wages of a skilled artisan. We’ve had all we wanted to eat, some of us have put away enough for the winter and over and above that we have sold in garden stuff alone thirty-eight hundred dollars’ worth. And that doesn’t represent the sum total of our products by a good deal. So I insist that we’ve all won richer prizes than any offered here to-day. And with the knowledge we’ve gained this year I look to see this result doubled next year. I look to see our farms grow better and better with good care; I look to see our orchards improve; I look to see us raise all our own beef and mutton and pork and the grain to feed the stock upon. I look to see us do all our hardy ancestors did and with opportunities such as they never dreamed of wax so prosperous that men in the business world outside will be forced to reckon with us and give us the position that is our right—abreast of the leaders in the productive enterprises of the world. This bit of extra money here, in spite of all that Mr. Holt would have us believe, doesn’t represent our goal. We’ve attained that already, and this is only just so much more pin money. We’ve proven as individuals, we’ve proven as a club, we’ve proven as a town, that farming can be made to pay. To prove that is to have received our pay.”

I didn’t want any soreness left as a result of disappointed hopes and so when I heard my words received with shouts and handclapping and smiling faces I was very glad. I reached for the first sealed envelope and tore it open. The noise subsided until you could have heard a pin drop.

“For the best crop of hay on one acre of fresh broken land the prize is one hundred dollars in cash. It gives me pleasure to announce that this has been awarded to Horatio L. Harrison.”

I saw Harrison’s face. It went white, then red. A good many other faces went white, too, and for a second there was an ominous silence. Then Holt sprang to the front of the platform.

“Fellow citizens,” he shouted, “let’s give three cheers for Harrison. Now—hurrah!”

Perhaps fifty voices joined him. At the second hurrah a hundred came in, while at the third the whole crowd let themselves loose in a fashion that was good to hear.

“Tiger,” shouted Holt.

And it came full throated from nine hundred people. Then someone called for Harrison—he was a young man of thirty—and before he could escape he had been pushed to the platform. Holt seized an arm and drew him up while a dozen others boosted him. He faced the crowd an instant and bowed. I handed him his money in greenbacks and he ducked out of sight.

I took up the second envelope and opened it.

“For the best crop of hay on an acre of land already used as hay land the prize is seventy-five dollars. This has been awarded to Seth Edgar Lovejoy.”

Lovejoy was a man of sixty and one of those who had followed the instructions of the agricultural expert in the matter of proper fertilization with constant grumbling. I think his idea had been to prove what a tarnation fool the expert was. In spite of this, however, he had succeeded in raising a ton and three-quarters of hay on an acre that last year had yielded him less than one ton. I was more than glad therefore for this award as it left him nothing more to say. At my announcement the younger men cheered lustily and demanded a speech from him—calling him by his nickname Killjoy.

“Tell us how ye done it in spite of yerself,” yelled one man.

Lovejoy, much against his will, was forced to the platform, Holt dragging him up as he had Harrison. He faced the crowd a second in a daze.

“I dunno,” he muttered, “it’s th’ only piece of luck I ever hed.”

“Not luck,” broke in Holt. “Science and hard work did it. Three cheers for Lovejoy who wasn’t too old to learn.”

They were given good naturedly and I opened the third envelope.

“Prize of one hundred dollars for the best crop of corn on an acre of land. This has been awarded to George A. Wentworth.”

Everyone expected this. Wentworth was a lad of eighteen who had devoted his whole time to this one acre of corn and had watched over every stalk of it like a widow with one child. Where ordinarily twenty bushels to the acre was considered a fair crop about here, he had reaped thirty-seven—an increase of almost one hundred per cent. I had watched the boy all summer long. He was the type of young man we needed hereabout. He was earnest, industrious and with ambition to make a good living. His father had a farm of some seventy acres which wasn’t more than forty per cent. efficient and I hoped to see the boy come into possession of it. He had confided in me that if he won a prize he was going to buy a couple of acres of his father. The selection was popular and he was given a great ovation. He was the only man so far who was able to reach the platform unaided but perhaps he had learned from the previous examples the uselessness of protest. Those who hadn’t won were anxious to get as much sport as possible out of those who had. Holt seized his arm and addressed the crowd.

“Here’s the type of boy who’s going to be one of the big men of this town some day,” he said. “And it’s going to mean something to be a big man in this town, for this is going to be a big town. Three cheers for the boy who knows enough to stay East. Now—let ’em out!”

Holt was proving that a college education was good for one thing at least; it taught him how to get noise out of a crowd. Leaning over the rail with his two fists clenched and his arms swinging he looked as though he were forcing every man to shout in spite of himself. I know I joined in this time and the sedate committee back of me clapped their hands noisily. As for Dick and Ruth they stood up on their seats and shouted, looking straight into Holt’s eyes as though hypnotized. I handed Wentworth his crisp new bills and saw that there were tears in his eyes. It certainly does stir a man to hear eight or nine hundred people shouting his name as these people did.

The fourth envelope contained the name of the winner of the best house garden. Seventy-five dollars was the prize. I had largely to do with this selection. I waited until there was a dead silence and then announced: “It gives me great pleasure to report that this prize has been awarded to Mrs. Lydia A. Cumberland.”

I think this came as a surprise, for nearly every man in the village had considered himself a possible winner in this event. My own garden approached the nearest of anyone’s to hers and in the matter of the amount raised really excelled Mrs. Cumberland’s. However, I was of course automatically barred from the competition, owing to my position as judge. Mrs. Cumberland had planted about a half acre in the rear of her house. This soil was naturally rich and she had bestowed infinite pains upon her plants. She was a widow with two children and had supplied her own table out of the produce, put up in glass jars almost enough vegetables to last her through the winter and made a few dollars’ profit in cash besides. I particularly wished to encourage this practice of putting up our own vegetables for winter use and I had brought here with me a sample jar of each vegetable. When the cheering subsided I held up a jar of peas.

“Look at them,” I said.

Then I did the same with a jar of string beans, a jar of turnips, of squash, of pickled small beets. Each exhibition was greeted with cheering.

In the meanwhile Holt had found Mrs. Cumberland, and with her arm through his was escorting her up the steps to the platform. She was a dear, lovable lady of fifty with shy, gentle manners that won everyone’s heart. As she approached, every man including the band rose to his feet and faced her standing.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” she choked.

Holt led her to a position in front of the crowd.

“The mother of our future pioneers—a pioneer herself,” he said with fine feeling.

Then without any prompting on his part the crowd let itself loose. She took out a little white handkerchief and waved it a second. Then she pressed it to her eyes and shied back, and Holt stepping in front of her shielded her from further view of the audience.

It was fine—fine. I don’t know what there is about such little incidents to so touch the heart of a gathering of men and women but I do know they are mighty good for men and women. There wasn’t a person there who wasn’t left mellowed and almost hallowed by those few tense seconds. In and of itself and apart from all else we had done, this was worth all our labor. It sweetened the whole of us and left us with a finer human feeling.

The prize for the best market garden went to Higginbotham and the prize for the best flower garden went to Mildred Cunningham, the minister’s daughter. You ought to have seen the pride with which Cunningham escorted the girl to the platform. The man since the inception of the movement had really done what he could to help us both in his sermons and his rounds of the parish. But to my mind the little girl had done more than he. I’d give more any time for a person who actually gets into a forward movement than one who merely talks about it. She had kept half the sick people of the village supplied with posies all summer long.

The seventh envelope contained the winner of the prize for the best potato crop—one hundred dollars. I hadn’t any idea whom the Agricultural School experts had decided upon. I tore open the envelope and read automatically as follows:

“For the best crop of potatoes raised upon an acre of land—one hundred dollars. It gives me great pleasure to announce as the winner—”

Then I stopped. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. The name which followed was my own.

“Go on,” someone yelled impatiently.

“I think there must be some mistake,” I said, turning to the judge. “I didn’t consider myself a competitor.”

“Name! Name!” came a chorus.

“Name!” insisted Holt.

I turned to the crowd.

“The name is William Carleton,” I said, “But I don’t feel—”

I didn’t get any farther. The crowd began to cheer and Holt stepped forward to egg them on. When the clamor died down a little, Holt seized my arm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “Mr. William Carleton—a farmer from the city but now a citizen of the farm. He’s the greatest pioneer of us all. I’ve seen his potato field and watched him care for it until I almost wished I was a potato. He’s done everything except make feather beds for ’em and tuck ’em in at night. Three cheers more for Pioneer Carleton.”

As soon as I could get my voice I responded.

“I’m glad of the honor,” I said, “I don’t remember anything which has ever made me feel prouder. I shall always remember this. But, the hundred dollars I want to turn back right here to the Pioneer Club.”

It was a minute or two after I had torn open the eighth envelope before I could make myself heard. This was a prize of one hundred dollars for the largest return from chickens according to capital invested. This went to Guy Holborne, who had invested eighteen dollars for six Plymouth Rocks with a rooster, five dollars in eggs to set and three dollars in miscellaneous expenses. He had sold five dollars’ worth of eggs up to date and had sixty fine pullets worth seventy-five cents a piece ready for the market. He had fed his chickens largely on waste collected from his neighbors.

The prize for the largest return from cows according to capital invested went to Ebenezer Blunt, the prize for the largest return from pigs to Arthur Libby and the prize for the most notable improvement in an old orchard was divided between Henderson and Talbot, two of our largest land owners. They followed my example and turned the money back to the Pioneer Club.

As the last announcement was made Holt roused the band and they played “America,” everyone standing.

The athletic events under Dick’s direction followed and kept the crowd amused until dinner time. During the afternoon the fakirs did a brisk business while the town hall was packed until dark. A goodly number of automobiles loaded with city folks anxious to see an old-fashioned country fair came and went, adding to the general holiday atmosphere.

It was late that night before I really had a chance to talk over things with Ruth.

“Well,” I said when we were alone, “how did it go?”

“Don’t see how it could have gone any better,” she answered.

“That was a great move of Holt’s in leading the cheering,” I said.

“Fine! Fine!”

“Think the decisions left any hard feelings?”

“Only the usual per cent., Billy,” she answered, “and they won’t last. I heard most of them talking about what they were going to do next year.”

“That’s the stuff,” I said.

“You see they had worked out the results pretty well for themselves before the announcement. No; it has been a success—a success from beginning to end.”

“And the women?”

“There isn’t one who isn’t going to bed to-night tired and happy.”

“It isn’t unusual for them to go to bed tired,” I said.

She nodded.

“But you can be tired in twenty different ways,” she said. “And this is the kind of tired that’s good for them.”

CHAPTER XII
NEW VENTURES

It’s natural to be over optimistic in the first flush of success in a new venture, but in this case there was no reaction. Outside of the financial success the experiment had been for every member of the club, which meant practically every member of the village, our most notable achievement had been in rousing the community spirit. We had all got together in a fashion that distinguished us from our neighboring towns. People from outside began to speak of us residents of Brewster as Brewsterites, which to my mind was significant. If our prize system hadn’t accomplished any more than this it had been worth while. This was just the spirit we wanted as a basis for working out more in detail our pioneer idea. Ruth and I hadn’t forgotten our lesson from the pioneers of Little Italy, that half the secret of earning more money is to save more money, and that to do this means a simpler standard of living. This was one of the things that I had talked over with Holt and Barclay and the committee with the result of a hearty endorsement from Holt, a mild endorsement from Barclay, and an agreement from the committee not to oppose. They all admitted anyway that something must be done to keep interest alive during the long winter months.

Now I had no definite plan in mind beyond a vague notion to rouse if possible an interest in the romantic lives of our ancestors—to bring home to those of to-day the possibility of making our own lives just as romantic and independent and venturesome. Whatever we accomplished grew out of talks between Holt, Ruth and myself, but to a still larger degree out of incidents that grew out of the undertaking itself. Our whole enterprise developed from within itself. We planned nothing except along general lines and forced nothing.

For example, here is one thing that turned up unexpectedly. Holt came to me one day and said he had run across a moving picture man who was in town with a view to installing a moving picture show. The latter had been to Moulton, who owned the opera house beneath which his store was located, and had tried to make a bargain with him to rent the hall.

“Why in thunder don’t we do it ourselves?” was Holt’s question to me.

“As a personal business venture?” I asked.

“As a business venture for the club,” he answered. “There’s no doubt but what a moving picture show is going to be started here sooner or later. You can’t prevent it. If an outsider conducts the business he carries off the good money of our members, he forces us to buck against a rival interest and he runs any old films he chooses. If we run it ourselves we can make it part of our winter’s amusement, select our films, and turn back into the club treasury everything over running expenses.”

“And if we lose?”

“We can’t lose. Wouldn’t do any harm to try it anyway, and if we do lose it’s a safe bet it would scare off any outsider from ever trying it.”

Holt’s argument seemed sound. The capital required was not much; enough to pay the rent of the hall which we had to hire once in two weeks anyway and the price of installing the plant which was only a matter of a few hundred dollars. But the most attractive feature was the opportunity this would give us to select films that would serve our ends—picture plays of the landing of the Pilgrims, Indian fights and what not to say nothing of purely educational features on plant growing, proper sanitation and so on. Then the negative side was also worth something—the chance to cut out the plays that might have an unwholesome tendency. The more I thought of this the better the idea seemed, so that I offered to advance the necessary capital without interest to be paid back out of the profits—if any there were.

We put the matter before the club at the next semi-monthly meeting and the idea received enthusiastic endorsement, as it naturally might be expected to do when it promised amusement, a possible profit and no risk. Whereupon we closed with Moulton and opened negotiations with a leading film house for the lease of a machine. Holt undertook the business management of the enterprise and nothing could have suited him better. He was a born publicity man.

“I’m going to make the neighboring towns pay most of the running expenses,” he declared.

“How?” I inquired.

“You wait and see.”

I waited and did see. He ran two shows a week—one on Wednesday which he called Pioneer Club night, and one on Saturday evening. The films for both were identical but for the Wednesday night show he charged members of the Pioneer Club only five cents’ admission with the result that they filled every available seat in the hall. The Saturday night show cost ten cents and being a repetition of the first naturally didn’t attract but a few of the members. But he plastered the neighboring towns within a radius of ten miles with green handbills that again filled his hall. He let himself loose on these and had as much fun as a schoolboy out of his attempts to whet curiosity.

We held our semi-monthly meetings on two of the four Wednesday nights and on this occasion had one or more of the films as a free entertainment following the business meeting. It was in connection with this that we also inaugurated our pioneer talks.

At the beginning Holt and I were the speakers, although later as our treasury grew fat with the proceeds of our picture show we used some of the money to bring in lyceum lecturers and at least once a month some specialist from the Agricultural School. Our subjects were limited either to American pioneer history of the East or to practical talks on farming. One thing we insisted upon was that they must be put into popular and entertaining form. For instance, I in my first talk had as my subject “Early Tillers of New England Soil.” I spent a good deal of time at the city public library in looking up my material, picking out interesting facts about the nature of the soil at that time, the implements in use, the difficulties that had to be overcome and the results obtained. I put a good deal of emphasis on the difficulties as compared with those of to-day and yet pointed out how cheerfully the early settlers went at their task because they worked at it in freedom. In connection with this we ran a film that was supposed to describe the departure of the Pilgrims from England and their landing in this country. It was wonderfully vivid and made it seem almost like an event of yesterday.

Holt treated in much the same fashion “The Fighting Spirit of Our Ancestors.” I tell you he made a warrior of every man in the audience before he was through and a warrior’s mother of every woman. We ran with this a realistic Indian fight film.

At another talk Ruth spoke on the “Women of Early New England,” describing their lives and their work and what the women of to-day owed to them. “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” was the film we used with this and it was so popular that it led later on to the acting of a series of tableaux founded on Longfellow’s poem. This was the big social event of the winter, coming at Christmas time and ending with a dance.

The Lyceum speakers took up various phases of New England life in a more scholarly fashion, and all were well received. But the serious work of the winter came with the lecturers from the Agricultural School who considered the subject of live stock in New England—an interesting question if not a particularly romantic one. They discussed the matter of why we should raise our own meats instead of importing them from the West. And really, for a community like ours, there didn’t seem to be anything at all to be said against the proposition. If there were obvious objections to keeping chickens, pigs, and cows in a tenement, they certainly didn’t hold here. And yet there hadn’t been a steer raised for meat in our town for twenty-five years. We didn’t even raise the corn to feed our cows on. Even pigs were scarce, while eggs and chickens were actually bought to a large extent from the city market. On the face of it nothing could seem more absurd. With land enough and labor enough to supply ourselves we allowed ourselves to be supplied from land several thousand miles away. And it wasn’t because we got our goods cheaper. We paid prices that almost drove us into bankruptcy. We might with as much logic have imported our water.

Now the only explanation of this that anyone could see was that convenience, which is another word for laziness, had led us into the habit and this habit had become so fixed that it now seemed like a necessity. Of course it wasn’t argued that we could raise meat on any such wholesale scale as is done in the West where the plains furnish free fodder, or in the corn belt where corn could be raised at a price for stock feeding impossible to us. But raising enough to supply at least the home market didn’t involve those conditions. There wasn’t a man with a farm who couldn’t feed a portion of his hay and corn to beef to better advantage than he could sell it, who didn’t have grazing land available for that purpose that at present was only growing up to useless small growth. Even when balanced against the question of whether the feed couldn’t at a better profit be turned into milk, a field was still left open for beef enough to supply the local market.

Another lecturer took up the matter of sheep raising. It wasn’t so very long ago that every farmer in New England had a small flock of sheep as much as a matter of course as he had a horse. To-day with the price of mutton and lamb soaring, with wool at a premium, a flock of sheep on a New England farm is a curiosity.

Now if there were dearth of land, if the advancing population from the cities had sent up real estate values this would be a perfectly natural result. But the exact opposite is the case. The deserted farms sprinkled all through New England, farms left to grow up to waste timber, farms on the market for a song, would seem to prove that much. Idle pasture land around such farms as are worked further disproves that it isn’t lack of land that has brought this about. Then what in Heaven’s name is the cause of this wasted opportunity?

I can answer only so far as I studied the men about me. The opening of the big western grazing fields did at first have its effect in sending down eastern values of live stock. Thousands of sheep fed by nature permitted a price even with a terrible waste, even with expensive marketing, that discouraged eastern farmers. But that was twenty-five years and more ago. To-day prices are different and should again encourage eastern stock raising at least for local markets. But in the meanwhile our eastern farmers have fallen out of the habit. It has become a proverb that sheep don’t pay—just as, for that matter, it has become a proverb that chickens don’t pay, cattle don’t pay, pigs don’t pay, hay don’t pay or, in brief and as Hadley was constantly reminding me, “Nothin’ don’t pay.” He spoke with more truth than he thought when he said that. It’s a fact that “nothin’ don’t pay,” but everything else does pay.

Now as the Agricultural School expert insisted, a flock of one hundred sheep carefully looked after in the East can be made worth as much as five hundred or a thousand half neglected on the western plains. The only condition modern methods impose on modern farmers is that such things as are raised shall be cared for. There must be no waste. That is doing nothing more than carry to the farm the principles which govern all modern businesses. The day of allowing sheep, cattle, chickens, or produce to care for themselves and taking what is left, has passed. The only unfortunate feature of this new system is that it involves on the part of the farmer hard work. In getting out of the habit of raising such things as are raised to-day in a big way in the West, the New England farmer has gotten out of the habit of hard work. That’s the gospel truth in a nutshell as it was shown up in our town. With the pioneer movement shifted to the West, all the pioneer qualities went with it. Deserted farms don’t necessarily mean bad farm lands; they mean bad farmers, lazy farmers, uninspired farmers. Once again I find myself getting back to this as a fundamental truth and once again I bring up as proof the fact that the minute you place upon these acres an old-world pioneer like Dardoni you see the land spring to life as by magic.

Pigs and chickens, how to select the stock, how to feed them and house them were treated in the same manner by other speakers from the school. I was surprised in how scientific a manner this business has been worked out. Take for example the matter of the by-product, manure. One speaker made the statement—it sounded rash enough but he assured us that it was based on statistics—that the annual loss in America through the incompetent handling of barnyard dressing, amounted to six hundred million dollars. This represents just so much wasted nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. One speaker presented a table showing the value in dollars and cents of dressing per one thousand pounds, live weight. Sheep produce thirty-four and one-tenth pounds per day, valued at twenty-six dollars a year; calves sixty-seven and eight-tenths, valued at twenty-four dollars a year; pigs eighty-three and six-tenths, valued at sixty dollars a year; cows seventy-four and one-tenth pounds, valued at twenty-nine dollars and twenty-seven cents a year; horses forty-eight and eight-tenths pounds, valued at twenty-seven dollars and seventy-four cents a year. And this is merely a by-product.

I tell you those figures did us good. Those of us who were in the habit of holding our breath in awe at mention of the capitalization of the steel trust, held up our heads and felt more like men when we realized that we were in a sense stockholders in a business that put that trust completely in the shade. For example, the annual production of eggs in the United States is about 1,293,800,000 dozens. At the average price of eggs the total value of these is $452,830,000—nearly five hundred million dollars a year. Added to this, more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of poultry is consumed. And this is only one item. Consider that in the State of Wisconsin alone the value of the butter and cheese products for a single year runs over eighty million dollars; consider that the wheat crop is worth annually considerably over a billion; that vegetables alone represent another annual value of over two hundred and fifty million and you get some idea of what a business the same farmer who is laughed at in the comic weeklies is doing. The crop for the year nineteen hundred amounted to more than three billion dollars. And that represents without a doubt another three billion of waste, for there isn’t a nation on the face of the earth that so uneconomically plants and reaps and markets its harvest. Why shouldn’t we farmers carry ourselves proudly? Why instead of being the butt and plaything of financiers shouldn’t we hold those same men at our mercy? These were questions that before the winter was out more than one man asked of himself.

One other point came up for discussion in the course of the winter and that was the question of specialization; of whether as a community it would pay us better to center our efforts upon some one line such as dairy products, meat products, vegetable products or what not, or whether it wasn’t better as small farmers with no particular advantages of soil or market for us to carry on diversified farms. On the whole the latter was the opinion of the school experts and also carried the strongest appeal to the majority of us. If every man kept at least one cow, a hog or so, a few sheep and a few hens, he first of all was then in a position to supply himself—and after all a man is his own best market—and secondly it gave him a more regular income as his stock didn’t develop for the market all at one time; and thirdly, he didn’t put all his eggs in one basket. A man specializing for instance in poultry is apt by disease to lose his whole flock and the same is true of his herd or his hogs. A diversified farm makes a man independent of market conditions. If poultry is low and eggs high he can keep his pullets for eggs. If beef is low and butter high, he can keep his cows for milk and vice versa. In other words, he isn’t forced to sell at certain times regardless of what the market is.

One thing, however, was insisted upon, that so far as possible a man should keep the best of each kind. This led to the subject of breeding, and this led in turn to the question of whether to this end it wasn’t possible for us as a group to invest in a common breeder—a blooded bull, a blooded ram, which as individuals none of us could afford. And this again led, as about everything we touched upon that winter had led, to the question of closer coöperation. Two hundred years ago the Indians and various other forces which to-day seem to us only romantic led our ancestors to coöperate in a certain way; to-day economic conditions are bringing about the same result. In February the one thought that was uppermost in the minds of us all was coöperation.

CHAPTER XIII
GETTING TOGETHER

For two winters we had met together and amused ourselves together. That was what counted—counted even more than the work we had done together. Perhaps you wouldn’t think that this social intercourse and the establishment of this common pioneer background was of any great importance, but if you had been one of us you would surely have felt its importance. It made us one big family as nothing else in the world could have done. Church societies build up as many barriers as they break down; so, too, do fraternal and political societies. But here we went back to a meeting ground which kept us shoulder to shoulder with one another and with our common past. Men and women can be entertained together when nothing else is possible.

Then again, I don’t suppose city folks know what a New England winter means to a New England farmer. Winter doesn’t mean much in the city except a complication with coal bills. Routine work goes on in the same routine way and the amusement of the beaches is shifted to the amusement of the theaters. But in the country Nature shuts up shop and there is a complete change of work and way of living. It’s a period of exile for many and a period of loafing. Men and women are shut up with themselves, or at best with their own. Six months of this isn’t good for anyone. Every old spite and grudge and grouch fattens and grows strong. Men get surly and women get cranky. Men eat too much and women cook too much. If a man hasn’t any pet grievance of his own he has plenty supplied him by the press and magazines. Farmers read too much of murders and sudden death, of corruption in business and politics and society. They have too much time to think over that stuff after they’ve read it and they don’t exercise enough to work it off. City folk stand it because they read and forget and don’t take it seriously. But I tell you some magazine publishers have something to answer for in the picture of city life they have drawn for country people whether true or not. As I’ve heard Hadley say, “’Pears to me like everything’s rotten to-day.” It makes men careless about being rotten themselves when they think all the rest of the world is.

The value of our meetings didn’t end with the meetings themselves. People who had been born and brought up together met in true neighborly fashion for the first time through the Pioneer Club. This was because we furnished them a common interest. This led to more every-day intercourse that winter—to neighborhood calls and neighborhood parties. Ruth helped this along wonderfully. She entertained a good deal herself and helped others entertain, but I tell you she had her own ideas how this should be done. She wouldn’t have any fuss and feathers, such as we had experienced in the suburbs. People didn’t have to dress up in their best bibs and tuckers to call on her, and there was neither bridge nor cakes nor teas nor ices. People dropped in just as they were and brought their sewing with them. For the younger people she devised the Miles Standish play with such materials as she had at hand. Then there were charades and old-fashioned games and what not—everything simple, everything inexpensive, everybody friendly and at ease. She kept the women, both young and old, astir all winter long and gave them something else to think about besides the next day’s cooking, washing or mending. She even helped them simplify these necessary duties and taught them a more wholesome standard of living. From morning till night she was a teacher, but no one except myself realized this. She set everyone an example in her house and astonished them with the ease with which she did her own work and cared for three children without wearing herself out. They never found her too busy to stop for a moment and never discovered her with either a headache or a lame back. Over and over I’ve heard her say to them, “Housekeeping is only a play game.” Then she would laugh until you couldn’t help believing that it really was. And to her it was. God bless her—to her it was. It was wonderful how far the influence of her laughter carried.

And all this while we had been strengthening the pioneer idea, too. We found that older people responded to its spirit almost as eagerly as boys do to the same thing in a simpler form as expressed in the Boy Scout movement. There isn’t a boy with red blood in his veins, whether raised in New York, London or a country village, who isn’t stirred by the hardy principles that govern your true scout. It’s amazing to see how much of that spirit is in their blood; how gladly they return to more primitive conditions. Boys brought up in luxury taste their first real meal when they munch a slice of bacon sizzled over the embers of a wood fire or a potato cooked in the ashes. They learn the real meaning of sleep when at the end of a hard day’s hike they roll up in a blanket in the open. Boys are born pioneers the world over—even to-day. The spirit is educated out of them in many cases, more’s the pity, but after all it remains at the basis of every real man.

So when at our meetings, directly and indirectly, we harped upon this idea and argued that the fun of living was within ourselves and not outside ourselves; when we insisted that the more we depended upon things outside ourselves for happiness, the less we responded; when we argued for a simpler standard in our clothes, our food, our surroundings, our amusements and a heartier dependence upon our work, we saw its effect. Much has been said about the advantage to farmers of the telephone, the rural mail which keeps them in daily touch with the outside world and labor-saving devices which make their work easier, but honestly I believe that if in the end this saves them from some evils it brings evils of its own which they haven’t yet learned to overcome. If these things save them from drudgery and monotony of one type it isn’t long before they face drudgery and monotony of another type, when they are allowed to dwell upon that feature of their work. There isn’t in the world a bigger drudge leading a more monotonous life than your city clerk who keeps agents scouring the world to furnish him amusement for his idle hours and to make the routine of his work lighter. And he’s just as apt to go crazy as your lonely farmer if he doesn’t learn to seek the joy of living within himself and not in his surroundings.

We tried particularly to get at the young man in our town and make him feel it isn’t the wilderness and virgin land and homesteads that makes your pioneer, but facing bravely whatever conditions may confront him, relying upon his own efforts to win through them. It takes as much of a pioneer to work three acres as one hundred and sixty; a man is as much of a pioneer who forces worn-out land to yield, as one who clears virgin land of rocks and stumps. It isn’t the nature of the work but the attitude of the man towards his work which distinguishes the plodder from the pioneer.

It is especially easy to appreciate this fact when dealing directly with Nature. Every farm is a newly claimed homestead, if you choose to look at it that way. And even if it has been worked a hundred years there isn’t a season when there is not real pioneer work to be done. As for the raising of live stock, it is done to-day much as it was two hundred years ago, except for greater attention to details.

It may seem strange to some that just a fresh point of view on the same old world makes so great a difference. It didn’t, however, surprise me, because I had sensed the effect of this in my own life. If in the days when things were going well with me as a clerk with the United Woolen Company anyone had told me that I’d come down to digging in the subway as a day laborer, I’d have felt disgraced. Such work seemed like sheer animal-like drudgery. So it is, if you go at it that way. On the other hand, when I saw it as the pioneer work it really is, I went at it with better spirit than ever I did adding up another man’s figures for him.

Two abstract things then we had accomplished besides the practical: the establishment of both the social spirit and the pioneer spirit among ourselves. We were together like one big family and we were working in a movement that might fairly be called the Man Scout movement. That’s just exactly what it was. It was alive with just the same wholesome out-of-doors adventurous spirit that characterizes the boy scout movement. I guess it’s a pretty safe bet that anything which appeals universally to boys will appeal universally to men. It was so in our town anyway.

The next step then—the coöperative step—came about naturally and almost inevitably. No one planned it and no one so far as I remember suggested it. It would have been a dangerous thing to suggest directly. As a phrase it smacked of socialism and there were mighty few socialists in our town. Our inheritance and our training was all against it. There wasn’t a man so poor that even if he was willing to make a martyr out of himself would let anyone else make a martyr out of him. The worse off he was, the more independent he became. He would rather play a lone hand at a losing game than win by joining his troubles with those of someone else. Your bred-in-the-bone New Englander is a solitary man who, when pressed to the wall, turns and fights his own fight. He’ll unite against a common outside enemy but not against his own. It’s this spirit that made our nation, but it’s this spirit too which is to-day destroying the man himself. With a closer knit civilization demanding coöperation he is as a rule so jealous of his personal rights that he balks. And after all, that’s the pioneer spirit too.

Coming into town as an outsider I was in a position to see certain things that were not apparent to those born and brought up here. That is always possible to anyone approaching a new business with his eyes open. I had found it so when I began work as a ditch digger. Within a year I detected flaws to which those who had given their lives to construction work were blind. I was unburdened with bewildering details and prejudices. So in this town my eyes were fresh and I viewed the village not altogether from the unit of my own farm but as a whole. I was a stockholder in a corporation owning a million and more dollars’ worth of buildings and land, and employing hundreds of hands. Consequently I was able to consider any new project not only as it affected my own small interest but as it affected the whole corporation. The question of raising our own meats then was not with me merely a question of keeping a beef, some sheep, pigs and chickens for myself but a matter of saving the corporation the thousands of dollars which would result in the general undertaking. So it was natural enough to me when the matter of buying full-blooded breeders came up which were beyond the means of any one individual, to suggest that the Pioneer Club, which represented the corporation, should do something towards making this easy. I had no idea of any general coöperative plan in doing this, but the idea was just the spark needed to kindle that whole burning issue.

We wanted a good Dorset ram which would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars; we wanted a good bull which would cost in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. Unless a man went into either business extensively such an investment wouldn’t pay. It seemed natural enough then for us all to club together and buy shares. But if we did this, why shouldn’t we do more? There was the whole problem of marketing still confronting us. We had solved it in a crude way last spring but that only served to show us what might be done with a perfected organization. Out of this was born with scarcely any talk, scarcely any planning and almost full grown, the scheme which finally welded us into one compact business firm—the Pioneer Products Company. The idea had been growing all this time and we didn’t know it. When we did recognize it, it seemed so natural and obvious that everyone marveled that we hadn’t thought of it from the beginning. It’s merely another example of what a rut farming folk have fallen into.

There isn’t any business on the face of the earth that lends itself so readily to coöperation as farming. Every country village consists of a small compact body of men living side by side and almost to a man engaged in buying the same products, manufacturing the same products and selling the same products to the same market. And these products are the universal necessities of life. It might be possible for men to get along without coal, without oil, without steel, even without beef, but they surely could not get along without wheat and corn, without vegetables, without eggs and milk. And yet these communities instead of holding the world by the throat are themselves the prey of the world even with their own products. With common interests, common foes, with a common plant and a common organization they still are the common victims of a hundred diversified outside interests. This is solely because the outside interests—like the banks—are allowed to treat with them as small weak units instead of as one large strong unit. And this after coöperation has been taught them by their government, by every business in the land, by every labor organization. It is, as I have said, this branch of the pioneer spirit which has been both their salvation and their undoing. But that it is possible both to preserve this and curb it we proved to our satisfaction with the Pioneer Products Company.

Holt read up on the subject and he found that coöperative farming which was so novel to us in the East had long been in successful operation in the West and South. That’s just the point. So are a hundred other good things. We in the East have urged our young farmers West until we have drained the East of its best. We have sent them forth like missionaries in such numbers that now we need some of them back as missionaries to ourselves. It’s those same men in the West who have been first to seize upon the new ideas in agriculture, while their eastern brothers have gone along in the same old ruts. New England as a whole has been treated like one vast deserted farm not worth anyone’s trouble. The Government itself treats it as such. It’s eager enough to spend millions on draining projects in Florida or irrigation projects in the West while there are whole townships in the State of Maine in as primeval a condition as they were at the landing of the Pilgrims. It’s actually so. If Maine were located in Oregon it would be to-day the richest State in the Union. But as sure as fate the old-world pioneers will soon rediscover it if we don’t ourselves, for to them Maine is the Far West.

I find I get switched back to that theme every time I trace a new feature of our development.

As I said, Holt read up on the subject of coöperative farming as he always read up on every new subject before tackling it. About the first thing he ran into was the history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange—an enterprise which reads like romance. Every farmer in New England ought to read it. Holt gave a talk on it before the club and everyone listened in amazement. Here was a good farming country settled by industrious well-meaning farmers who raised good stuff, but who in 1899 found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. It was each man for himself and sometimes they sold their crops for half what it cost to raise them. As individuals they couldn’t reach their market without giving up their profits to commission men and railroads. Then someone organized the exchange and so poor were its members that a membership fee of only five dollars was charged with the privilege of paying only twenty-five cents down and the rest in installments. During the first year the organization shipped four hundred thousand barrels of produce; ten years later it was shipping one million four hundred thousand barrels. It now handles every year one million barrels of Irish potatoes and eight hundred thousand barrels of sweet potatoes. During the last three years it has done an average business of two million five hundred thousand dollars a year. It has lifted a stagnant community into a prosperous community within a decade.

Another example was the Southern Texas Truck Growers’ Association which was organized in 1905. At that time the farmers were producing about five hundred car loads of onions a year and not making a living from them. The following year they shipped nine hundred cars; the next year one thousand cars; the next year two thousand cars, and in 1910 twenty-five hundred cars valued at one million five hundred thousand dollars.

We had twenty more such examples for encouragement but we didn’t need any of them. Our own needs suggested our own remedy and that spring the Pioneer Products Company took out its charter.

CHAPTER XIV
FINDING OURSELVES

The Pioneer Products Company was capitalized for three thousand dollars. Shares were sold for a dollar each, but each member was required to purchase five shares and not allowed to purchase more than twenty. Our object as set forth in the constitution was “the buying, selling, and handling of produce; the selling and consigning of produce as agent of the producer; the inspection of all produce so consigned; and the owning and operating of whatsoever shall be deemed to the advantage of the producer.”

The active management was to be in the hands of the general manager, who was to receive a small salary, and the secretary-treasurer. One of the most important provisions reads as follows: “All stockholders in the company shall be compelled to ship through the company.”

This was inserted as a protection against the bribing of members by city commission men whose object might be to break up the organization by offering, for a time, higher prices.

Our plan for distribution of profits provided that after all expenses were paid a dividend not exceeding ten per cent. might be voted; that after this a sum amounting to a tax of not over one dollar a share should be reserved from the surplus as a reserve fund, and the remainder distributed among members in proportion to the amount of business done.

A board of five directors elected by members was to have general supervision of the business with power to adjust all grievances.

There you have it in a nutshell. Our organization was unique in that it was founded on a social club already well established. We elected for the company the same board which had so successfully governed the club. I was elected secretary-treasurer and accepted the duty because I knew I was in a better position to undertake the work than anyone else. We elected Holt as manager and he accepted the position in a like spirit, although he knew it would demand a great deal of time from him. We couldn’t have had a better man. He jumped into the office like one whose fortune depended upon the outcome. He began to make a thorough study of market conditions, and got into touch at once with two or three big commission men. He haunted the markets and asked as many questions as though he were a member of a congressional investigating committee. He studied the transportation problem, and as a result soon sprang a brand new idea on us which went a long way towards making that first season successful. He had nosed around the city and found a second-hand auto truck which could be bought at a bargain. Our town was on a state road which was kept in good condition and he figured that by using the truck, counting in depreciation, interest and running expenses, we could effect a freight reduction of over fifty per cent. by transporting our own produce. Furthermore, this would leave us independent of train schedules and free to ship early or late as might suit our convenience. He was so enthusiastic over the project that he offered to contribute towards its purchase the salary of six hundred dollars we had voted him. I mention this to show what a fine spirit this man Holt had. It’s the sort of spirit that would make a success of any reputable venture. I’m also glad to mention that the company for its part showed an equally fine spirit. The board recommended the purchase, and the stockholders to a man voted to accept the recommendation, but to a man voted not to accept Holt’s contribution. Now that’s the sort of feeling that lies at the basis of real coöperation. That’s the sort of feeling which the two previous winters had made possible. There wasn’t a man in the club who didn’t appreciate Holt’s efforts and want him to get a fair return for his work. That feeling was worth ten thousand dollars to the club.

The next thing we did was to make a canvass of the club to find out how many men were able and willing to add to their live stock. It was urged that every Pioneer Club member should keep at least a few hens and a pig, and there was none who was not ready to accept this suggestion.

“We oughtn’t to find a member of this club buying an egg or a fowl from this time on,” I said. “If by any chance a member does find it necessary he ought to buy of another member. It’s absurd for any live dweller in the country ever to spend his good money for such things. It’s more; it’s a disgrace.

“Moreover we shouldn’t find within another year any member of this club paying from twelve to fourteen cents a pound for salt pork, or sixteen cents a pound for lard, or twenty-five cents a pound for bacon, when it would almost pay every man in the club to keep pigs for the dressing alone. Our forefathers would no more have thought of getting along without a pig than they would a well. No more should we. The packers have made it easy for us to buy rather than raise. So does everyone else who wants our money. That’s the big temptation which has been our undoing—this biting to the bait of the easiest way. It’s nothing but a new form of taxation which we have been too indifferent to throw off, until now we have the habit and think we can’t. It’s a pretty safe guess that the easiest way is never the profitable way in anything. We’ve tried the other with poor results; now let’s try the new way—the pioneer way.”

The question of raising beef and lamb, however, was not quite so general a one, as it took more capital. However, we found some twenty men who were willing to undertake the experiment to an extent which made it seem worth while for the rest of the club to help finance the undertaking. It resulted in the purchase of a Dorset ram and a good Holstein bull. A member was found who was willing to care for the animals in return for the free use of them himself. In addition he was allowed to charge a nominal fee which should cover the interest of the money invested by the club.

This was in February, and a few weeks later with the stock fully subscribed we began our second campaign. As Holt made clear in a talk to the club this company was not in and of itself any royal road to fortune. It was no short cut to success.

“It means harder work than ever on our part,” he said. “The company will prosper or fail by our own efforts. Don’t forget that before we can sell anything we must have something to sell. It may be different in Wall Street, but that’s a cold fact in our business. We must have more produce and better produce. Understand, it must be better. Now that we have given ourselves a name, that name must be made to stand for something. Up to now we have been anonymous, but from this point on we can’t be. I want our name to be not only for our own protection, but for the protection of our customers. I want the Pioneer Products Company to stand for the best and freshest and cheapest vegetables to be purchased. That’s the boast I’m making; that’s the boast I’m going right on making and you must back me up in it. You must turn more soil this year than last and you must give more care to your stuff. You must work harder. Don’t forget that this isn’t any easy way. For twenty years you’ve fooled around with the easy way—raising as little as you could with as little work as possible. This is the hard way—raising all you can and putting into the effort every ounce in you. But it’s the only way, and if you’ll stand back of me we’ll make this the biggest year our village ever had. Are you back of me?”

“You bet we are,” came a chorus.

They proved it, too, by the preparations they made. We announced the same prize awards that we made last year. With the money which had been turned back and with the surplus we had made on our moving picture show we were able to do this without going to the local merchants. I’m confident, however, we could have raised from the latter twice as much as we needed if we had tried. For the first time in a generation they had found their credits decreasing to an amount that more than paid for their investment in the Pioneer Club. At the same time their business had increased. However, we didn’t want our prizes to be so large as to make them an end in themselves, and we didn’t wish to increase their number to a point that would destroy competition. Furthermore we didn’t have half the need of stimulation that we had last year. Our people were now stockholders in a company and had the company to work for. Furthermore they had the inspiration of last season’s success to urge them on. I tell you that just the decreased household expenses of last winter made them realize what it meant to keep their land busy.

I figured that at least thirty per cent. more land was turned this spring. If our town had looked busy last year it was a regular bee-hive this year. We were also better prepared to do our own work. Several horses had been bought during the winter and many men had invested in plows and harrows so that they were able not only to do their own work but that of their neighbors too. We called in some outside help, but not much, which was a big satisfaction.

There was little skepticism this season about the worth of the methods we had followed last. Everyone had had better crops than ever before, even if in some cases they hadn’t come up to all that had been hoped for. Also there had been a good deal of swapping of experiences during the winter with a result of much information in regard to seeds that was of value. I realized that in a general way we already were beginning to sift out the things for which our land was best adapted. It was the beginning of specialization. I hoped, however, that this wouldn’t be carried too far, because I believed and still believe that our success would lie more in the line of general farming than special farming. Above all things I believe that every community should first of all supply itself. That is a pioneer idea that spells safety. Every dollar saved is more than a dollar earned in most cases; it often amounts to two dollars earned.

I had had such success last year with my potatoes that I determined to put in another five acres, making ten in all. I expected Hadley to approve of this inasmuch as results had contradicted every prophecy he had made. However, he only shook his head.

“I say let well ’nuff be. Ye was just plumb lucky last year, but ef ye try again ye’ll lose all ye made.”

You can’t beat Hadley’s pessimism. If you fail he’ll tell you he knew you would; if you succeed he’ll advise you not to tempt fate again. So far as I know he was the only man in the village who was still stuck in his tracks. I tried once more to persuade him to till his own soil but he refused. He was living fairly comfortably on the wages I paid him and was content to let matters rest there. Even in the face of the profits he had seen me reap, he only replied, “Ain’t no use farmin’ round here. Farmin’s dead.”

I kept my vegetable garden much as I had it before, but I put in another acre of white beans. Beans and potatoes—it looked to me as though any farmer in New England ought to make a living from those two things alone. They are as staple as gold and the market for them is unlimited. That is especially true of beans, for they keep indefinitely.

I ought also to say that my apple trees this second spring showed the result of the care that had been given them. They looked so hardy and strong that it was almost impossible to believe that they had the burden of fifty years’ neglect back of them. They blossomed well and I expected a good deal from them.

In the meanwhile Holt was working harder than ever with a view to providing us with the best possible market. We talked over any number of schemes. We considered the advisability of hiring a market stall in the city market for our own produce, but that involved not only a good deal of expense but active competition with men who made retail selling their business. We couldn’t afford to hire more help and it looked unwise to attempt to undertake this without the aid of an experienced man.

Then we considered an attempt to work up a line of private customers and deliver our produce to them direct. This again involved an initial expense for teams and men that we couldn’t afford and also the services of someone who could give more time to the management of the project than Holt could spare.

In the end it seemed inevitable that we should use a commission man. But—here’s the point—we were now collectively in a position to come to fairer terms with a middle-man than we had been as individuals. If one man handled all our produce he could afford to pay us more. Our experience with Barnes had been fairly satisfactory but he was only a commission agent and it didn’t seem to Holt that he offered now as good terms as we ought to get. Undoubtedly we should have had to accept those if Holt hadn’t run across a young fellow by the name of Burlington. He was just the man we needed. He was a young fellow starting in the retail business for himself and needed our produce as much as we needed him. Holt made fast to him at once. After his first interview with Burlington, Holt came back to me enthusiastic.

“He’s the temporary solution of the selling end,” he exclaimed. “He has the market stall, he knows the game, and he has a clientele. That much he has already invested for us. Now what I propose to do is to take him into partnership.”

“Have you got as far as that with him?”

“Not yet,” answered Holt, “but that’s what it’s coming to. If we give him stuff enough he can afford to handle it on a basis of ten per cent. over his expenses, which will be another five per cent. That’s some better than the thirty per cent. that we’ve been paying.”

“It surely is,” I agreed, “but he hasn’t agreed to it yet.”

“Not yet,” answered Holt without showing any sign of being worried. “I’m going to bring him out here some Sunday and show him our plant.”

A week or so later Holt brought Burlington out. He was a clean-cut, wide-awake young fellow of thirty and I liked him at once. We had him up to dinner and after that took him to drive around the village. We showed him some five hundred acres of land under cultivation—under real cultivation. We showed him acres upon acres which had been harrowed and worked until they looked like front lawns ready for seed. We told him that the produce from every inch of that ground would pass through the Pioneer Company except what was used at home. It was just like one big farm.

He was amazed. Then he exclaimed, “Say, you fellows have hit it right if you can keep it up.”

“Just you watch us,” I said.

He laughed. “I don’t need to watch anyone but Holt here,” he answered. “And, believe me, I certainly have got to watch him if I’m going to make a cent out of the deal.”

“Don’t get that idea,” Holt broke in, taking him seriously. “We want you to make a fair profit and we’ll see that you do. We want you to feel like one of us—a sort of partner.”

“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” answered Burlington, “but I believe that’s the right way to look at it. And say, I wouldn’t mind living out here myself. Anything in farms to be had around here at a reasonable figure?”

“Is now,” I answered, “but there won’t be five years from now.”

I didn’t know whether he was in earnest or not, but less than two months later he bought the Smalley place—a good house and ten acres of land at the lower end of High Street. That was a good move for him and a good move for us. It gave us confidence in him and made him really one of us. He joined the Pioneer Club at once and I sold him five shares of stock out of my twenty in the Pioneer Products Company so that he could join us, though I hated to part with it. There were some who were suspicious of his motives, but I wasn’t, and it wasn’t long before he proved himself one of the live wires of the company. His knowledge of the market was invaluable to us, and later on was an important factor in guiding us concerning what to plant.

CHAPTER XV
THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH

Things went well with us that second season. Much of the novelty of the undertaking had worn off but none of the enthusiasm and everyone settled down to hard, steady work. The prizes were still a big incentive and the hundred dollars in new bills which Holt continued to exhibit in Moulton’s store window was still as much a center of interest and excited curiosity as money in a museum. But there was more a feeling of security and confidence than the year before. Our past success was somewhat responsible for this, but the Pioneer Products Company was more so. There seemed to be a feeling now that we were on a solid business basis. The coöperation idea—the mere fact of organization—and the sight of stock certificates made our members feel more like real business men than ever before they had felt in their lives. And that was good for them. It steadied them and made them take their work more seriously.

That was a good season for crops. Our small stuff came along early and did well. By the last of June we were shipping lettuce and radishes and by the first week in July early peas. Of course hothouse stuff had been in the market long before this but Burlington was able to quote prices that furnished him a ready market. Not only were the prices right but the produce was right. There isn’t much doubt but what stuff grown in a normal way without being forced has certain qualities that you can’t get in hothouse products. The longer I farm the more respect I have for Nature as a business partner. She is always square and above board but she is also a stern mistress in the matter of justice. You can’t ever get something for nothing from her. She’ll beat you every time you try it. If you try to hurry her well and good, you can, but you’ll pay for your early stuff at cost of flavor. If you go in for flavor, well and good, but you’ll pay for that at the cost of size. Let her alone and she’ll balance things.

We shipped eight hundred dollars’ worth of produce the last week in June and through July our shipment amounted to three thousand dollars a week, jumping in August to five thousand dollars and over a week. Holt appointed an assistant to see that everything submitted was up to standard. This man had authority to discard anything offered, but any farmer who felt that he was being discriminated against could submit the refused article that night to Holt. It may be well to mention that not a man disputed the first judgment that summer. As members of the corporation they realized that it was as much to their interest as anyone’s to preserve our standard.

Our motor truck was a great success, reducing our transportation charges almost fifty per cent. Not only this, but as time went on we found that at the same cost it would have paid for itself in the matter of convenience alone. We reached the market earlier and were able to make, as we did later in the season, two and three trips a day, so always getting our stuff to the market fresh.

Early in September, when we began to get new potatoes and early apples, our sales jumped to six thousand dollars a week. Some of this we shipped by freight. Never before had anyone in our town, except Dardoni, ever marketed his early apples. A few bushels would be taken to the store but as a rule what couldn’t be made into pies or eaten by the small boys were allowed to rot on the ground. As for crab apples—and nearly every farm had at least one tree—what a few housewives did not put up in jelly met the same fate. I’ve seen bushels of plump red crabs rotting on the ground. But not this season. In the first place, Ruth all winter had urged the wives to put up more preserves and the result was marked. Farmers had to get up early to get ahead of their wives and gather any to send to town, but they found a ready market for all they could send. I reckoned as clear profit to the village every apple sent and the total amounted to a good many dollars.

For that matter you could reckon as clear profit about all the garden stuff we sent for it’s certain it represented money which until now had not been coming in. Potatoes and beans were all that had ever found their way to market until now. When I look back I wonder how these people ever lived on what they raised. In any real sense they didn’t and what was true of our town is true to-day of a hundred other towns in New England. You can find conditions of poverty right out under God’s blue sky that would make your hardened settlement worker shudder with horror.

Everything went well with us that second season as I said, and for that reason it isn’t particularly interesting to me. On the first of October we found that we had done a business of sixty-seven thousand eight hundred dollars. In round figures this left after deducting commission and expenses sixty thousand dollars. Out of this we declared a ten per cent. dividend to stockholders, which amounted to six thousand dollars. Three thousand more, or one dollar a share, we put aside into our reserve fund. This left fifty-one thousand dollars to be distributed on the basis of the amount of produce turned in. We had that year four hundred and twenty-one members which made our net profits figure up per capita a little over one hundred and twenty dollars.

Now it’s impossible for anyone to figure on whether that was a fair return for the amount of capital invested in our plant or not. In the first place that doesn’t by any means represent the value of our produce. You must take into account the amount consumed by our home market, the amount in hay and corn and potatoes and beans and what not which we kept on hand for winter consumption and a hundred other things. And besides—and this is something I want to emphasize over and over again—if you could figure the total it would all be beside the point. The fact which counted with us wasn’t whether or not we were getting full value from our plant as yet. We weren’t, and we knew it. The point was that we were getting something where before we got nothing. If we hadn’t shipped five thousand dollars’ worth of produce that second season we should have called our enterprise a success. We had waked up! We were trying! We were using our opportunities! Our old men were interested and our younger men enthusiastic and our women were alive.

In looking back—and I don’t have to look back very far—I realize more than ever that the Pioneer Products Company, which expresses the result of our labors in dollars and cents, is by no means as important even now as the Pioneer Club which expresses itself principally in pleasant memories. The Pioneer Products Company is making us secure with modest bank accounts, but it is the Pioneer Club which has made us Sam and Josh and Frank and Bill to one another, and our wives Sam’s wife and Josh’s wife and Frank’s wife and Bill’s wife. It’s the Pioneer Club that has made us glad we’re living even if it’s the P. P. C. that has made it possible for us to live. It’s the Pioneer Club that has made our town dear to us and has made us proud that we live here. It’s the Pioneer Club that is the heart of us through the long winter months, though we are busier then than we used to be. And it’s the Pioneer Club again that is keeping us sane and healthy in our prosperity.

We are becoming better pioneers every year, though there are people who think we are going back. We don’t care an awful lot about electric lights and cement sidewalks as some of our progressive neighbors do. We have the best streets within fifty miles of us and we are content to walk in them or in footpaths along the sides. We get along very well with kerosene lamps and on a pinch can use candles. We have good schools and in them are using some methods copied from our Southern neighbors. We try as far as possible to teach arithmetic and farming together, reading and farming together, geography and farming together. It’s just as good exercise we find for our young folks to figure out how much five bushels of potatoes at a dollar ten a bushel will amount to as it is for them to figure out how much five times one, decimal, one and a cipher is. It’s just as easy for them to learn to read by reading about flowers and simple gardening as it is about how the cat caught the rat. It’s just as interesting for them to learn the physical geography of the world, not as a separate study, but as part of their dry-as-bones boundary statistics.

We are encouraging athletics in the schools. We are backing the school teams with our attendance at their games and our applause. It’s a fact that the average country boy needs gymnasium work more than the average city boy. He needs the training, the drill and routine work.

We are teaching our girls to cook and sew. We are teaching them to cook and sew economically. Both our women and our girls were getting into the baker shop habit. When we started in we were buying city-made bread. Think of it, in the country of home-made bread, where we have both material and time! We don’t buy much baker stuff now.

We don’t buy as much patent medicine as we did. In the first place, there isn’t a store in town—not even the drug store—which carries it any more. A man wouldn’t dare. If you want any of the stuff you have to send to town for it, and while this is still being done no one lets anyone know he’s doing it. Those with the habit get it and swallow it the way they do their rum and most of them know pretty well that this is all it is.

A sad event, which was at the same time a mighty good thing for our town, was the death of Dr. Wentworth. “Doc” Wentworth as he was known to everybody, had been here forty years. He was a big-hearted, well-meaning type of family physician, but the amount of morphine he prescribed would have disgraced Chinatown. It was his one antidote for pain and he’d give it for a toothache. He gave it to man, woman and child. Half the children in town took paregoric from the time they were born until they were old enough to take straight morphine. It was wicked. I went to one of the big medical schools and had a talk with the Dean and recommended this village as a promising field for some good young physician. The result was that a young man settled among us of whom we have grown very fond. He is with us heart and soul in preventing disease instead of fostering it.

We don’t own as many automobiles as some of our neighbors, but we have some good horses—good work horses and good driving horses. I hope to see better stock every year. I’ve a two year old I wouldn’t swap to-day for the finest automobile ever manufactured. Our annual fair is developing more and more along the lines of the old-time fair. We are exhibiting more horses and cows and pigs and chickens because we have some now worth exhibiting. We have developed quite a business of selling off some of our surplus stock at this time. We find that the neighboring towns wait for this event to select their breeders.

To go back to the Pioneer Products Company for a moment I may say that our business has increased steadily every year. Some things we have dropped because we find no further need of them. For instance the company owns no more breeding stock. Our more prosperous members conduct that end of the business themselves. We have, however, bought a store house.

We are planning a new experiment. We found that a surprising lot of our trade was among my old Little Italy friends. They became permanent customers. As time has gone on we have also developed a regular clientele outside of these—people who know the Pioneer Products Company by name. Our scheme for next season is to put up a family hamper to be delivered regularly through the season. This will contain enough of the new vegetables to last a family a week. We divide our produce into firsts and seconds and deliver the firsts to those who can afford to pay a little more. The seconds will go mostly to Little Italy. The latter will be good vegetables—fresh and sound, differing from the firsts only in size. Burlington is to have charge of the distribution on his usual commission basis. He is our manager now, by the way, paying his salary out of his commission. This method will give us a steadier market.

Now about our experiment in raising our own meat. That, too, has been a fair success. The local butcher fought us for a little while but his fight was hopeless. Understand, there was no attempt to boycott him or anything of that sort, but we were most of us raising our own poultry and pork and besides that we weren’t eating as much meat as we did. Still there was some demand chiefly for beef. We made a proposition to the man; that we turn in to him what meats we produced for the local market and that he handle them on a basis of ten per cent. net profit. He thought it over for a little while and then accepted. He has made a good thing out of it and so have we.

I don’t want anyone to get the idea that our town is any Utopia. It isn’t. It is nothing but a steady, prosperous farming community where everybody is a hard worker. We aren’t doing half of what we might, but our satisfaction comes in knowing we are doing more than we did. As the years go by we hope to do more. There isn’t any reason I can see why as a town we shouldn’t be in the position of any well-conducted city business increasing our efficiency and with that our profits. Real estate has almost doubled here, and this hasn’t been a fictitious doubling. It is based on what land is worth to the investor who becomes one of us and uses his land intelligently. No one can buy land in our town, loaf on it and share our prosperity. We aren’t dividing any profits except among those of us who earn them.

People have come to our town and tried to locate the secret of our modest success in our land, in the coöperative idea, in our favorable position to the market, in just our bull luck. Most of these men and women haven’t sense enough to be worth bothering with. I haven’t much patience with those who look to find the solution of all our difficulties in some arbitrary system that doesn’t take the individual into account. But now and then comes along a man who is in earnest. Then I take him around and introduce him to Josh Chase. He sees a long-legged, thin-faced fellow with skin as bronze as a skipper’s. Then Josh takes the visitor over his ten acres of land with the pride of a king. He shows him a new barn and all his carefully cared for farming implements. He takes him into a modest story and a half white house and introduces him to Mrs. Josh and a couple of rosy-cheeked children. With half an eye the man can see that here is prosperity of the best kind.

“Well?” the man is apt to ask me.

“He isn’t afraid of the rain any more,” I say.

“Well?”

“That’s all. It means he isn’t afraid of work. He’s up at daybreak every morning in the year and his work isn’t done till dark. But you wouldn’t pick him out as a slave, would you? He doesn’t look like a poor downtrodden savage, does he? He’s a man with a hoe all right but is he making any bid for your sympathy?”

“That’s because your coöperative idea—”

“The company would have failed the second year if Josh had been dependent upon that idea and not the idea upon him. No, sir, that man came over in the Mayflower but he didn’t land till about five years ago. If you don’t believe it I’ll show you another man who came over a little earlier and who isn’t a member of our company because he doesn’t need even that help.”

Then I take him round and introduce him to Dardoni.

He meets the smiling black-haired Italian and sees the latter’s busy acres and meets another type of pioneer.

If, after this, the investigator is of a mind that prosperity is so common hereabout that anyone can succeed, then I introduce him to the awful example. That’s Hadley.

Poor old Hadley—even he confided in me the other day that if he felt real pert next spring he thought he’d put that patch back of his house into potatoes.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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Table of Contents

- NEW LIVES FOR OLD
- CONTENTS
- CHAPTER I A NEW BEGINNING
- CHAPTER II MY NEIGHBORS
- CHAPTER III COLD FACTS
- CHAPTER IV A TOWN ASLEEP
- CHAPTER V STIRRING THINGS UP
- CHAPTER VI A GAME WORTH PLAYING
- CHAPTER VII THE PIONEERS
- CHAPTER VIII THE NEW WAY
- CHAPTER IX SPRING
- CHAPTER X RESULTS
- CHAPTER XI A GREAT DAY
- CHAPTER XII NEW VENTURES
- CHAPTER XIII GETTING TOGETHER
- CHAPTER XIV FINDING OURSELVES
- CHAPTER XV THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE