HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 81 



the bookkeeping part just now. However the 

 charges may be sifted out, you will see that 

 our dollars have come back to us, over and 

 over again. It's just as plain that some of our 

 dollars had to be put in with no expectation of 

 getting them back again from this year's har- 

 vest, or next year's, or the next. All we could 

 feel sure of was that they would come back to 

 us in good time, many fold. 



This sounds a little bit over-sure, maybe, as 

 if we claimed to have made our plan with a 

 sort of infallible foresight, free of all error. 

 Don't take it that way. Our work has been 

 marked by nothing so much as freedom of 

 change in details. We've changed in matters 

 of detail as often as we've found we were mis- 

 taken and that's been very often. It's only 

 our central idea that has persisted, unchanged. 

 That's not subject to change, because it's right. 



Through the first winter, whenever it was 

 possible, we were cutting brush and cleaning 

 out fence-rows and corners, to square up our 

 fields. When we got the farm the fields were 

 shapeless; wherever one of them edged up to 

 a rough place, there it would stop. The farm 

 was gashed and torn with unsightly hollows 

 and steep banks and rain- washed gullies; the 



