HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 247 



that was hidden beneath the rough, shabby 

 outer coat. My friend is a man of a sort you 

 meet sometimes a poet who has never writ- 

 ten a verse, an artist who has never made a 

 picture, a prophet whose broad humor won't 

 let his prophecies be taken seriously. It was 

 the poet and artist and prophet in him that led 

 him into buying that great lot of land. But 

 it was the practical man in him that made him 

 set about making the land into a farm. 



There's no need to tell all of his story. It's 

 a duplicate of all the others. He's had the 

 strong zest of the homemaker, but that's been 

 frosted over more than once by irritating little 

 troubles. The labor problem has been for him 

 an unending torment. To turn a bunch of 

 hired hands loose on four hundred acres, with 

 only one man to look after them well, you 

 know about the luck he's had in getting results. 



He's been trying to clear the undergrowths 

 from a couple of hundred acres of timber so 

 that the land might be seeded for pasture. He's 

 had a time of it! As we smoked after dinner 

 he told me about it. He wasn't using the 

 speech of the poet; his words were short, 

 choppy, sizzling hot. 



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



