Tomorrow's Harvest 349 



Agricultural Adjustment Administration began to pay the 

 farmers not to plant their corn acres. Men and women who 

 had lived all their lives in the cities were horrified at this 

 interference with the business of the earth. They feared 

 Coatlicue's revenge. It is true that man frequently cheats his 

 neighbor with impunity. He does not get off so easily when 

 he attempts to cheat Nature. Nature has a feminine way of 

 going on with her business of creation and procreation sub- 

 limely regardless of whether man decrees that it is legal or 

 illegal for her to do so. 



When Peyton Locker was a small boy on the farm in 

 Virginia, he wanted a horse of his own. He said so to his 

 mother. Gentle and religious, she had a horror of what a horse 

 could carry a man to. Horses took young men from home to 

 sow wild oats. 



"What about a dog?" she suggested. "Didn't I hear Cousin 

 Lulie Buchanan saying the other day that somebody had given 

 Cousin Joe another bird dog? And that she'd just have to 

 put her foot down? Why don't you go over to Burnside and 

 see Cousin Joe about it?" 



The dog which had occasioned that gesture of Cousin 

 Lulie's foot was a beautiful Llewellyan setter bitch. Peyton 

 took her to his heart and named her Sally after his favorite 

 cousin. His mother, rocking on the veranda, sighed relievedly. 

 A dog wasn't like a horse. A dog was safe. 



Sally's pups, when they came, were as beautiful as she. Pey- 

 ton swapped two of them for a Poland China shoat which he 

 put into the pen with his father's pigs and watched it fatten 

 with silent satisfaction. Corn was plentiful. 



His father said, "That hog of yours will be about right to 

 butcher in January." 



"I don't aim to butcher her this year," his son replied. "I 

 aim to keep her till she farrows." 



His father agreed there was sense in this. The hog was bred, 

 and ultimately produced a litter of nine piglets. Every day 



