As our first summer of real farming slipped 

 by, we had plenty of proofs that ours was not 

 bonanza farming. If you were to judge our 

 enterprise for the first two or three years by 

 the figures on our books representing income 

 in dollars and cents, you would be bound to 

 call it a conspicuous failure. A skilled book- 

 keeper with his conventional notions could 

 have argued us inevitably into the poorhouse, 

 without any trouble at all. He could have 

 proved that, the way we were going, with our 

 limited resources, we couldn't possibly escape 

 catastrophe. 



I used to stand rather in awe of bookkeepers 

 and their nice, methodical, exact work; but 

 since we've been at Happy Hollow I've re- 

 joiced a thousand times that we hadn't ac- 

 quired the bookkeeper's habits of mind. A 

 retired bookkeeper taking a farm like Happy 

 Hollow and carrying his professional habits 

 with him must be a desperately unhappy man. 



95 



