HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 59 



very plain: His trouble wasn't bodily laziness. 

 Every day and every day lie was out in the 

 morning early; and aD day long; tfll darkness 

 stopped him, he worked at the very limit of 

 his strength. No man could have put in longer, 

 harder hours. Yet, as the season advanced, it 

 was plain as print that he wasn't getting any- 

 where; he seemed to he just standing on (Hie 

 spot and turning dizzily round and round. By 

 the middle of the summer he was buying chops 

 and baled hay for his mules, going in debt for 

 the stuff, expecting to pay the debt out of his 

 half of the crop. But there wasn't going to be 

 any crop worth mentioning, though the sea- 

 son had been an extra favorable one, with 

 plenty of rain falling at exactly the right times. 

 The cornstalks were dwarfed and pale, with 

 half their ears mere "nubbins"; the patches of 

 wheat looked like the patent-medicine pictures 

 of "before taking." The wheat harvest was in 

 mid-June. Those patches harvested six bush- 

 els to the acre, and the yield of straw was 

 hardly enough to stuff a bedtick. Everything 

 else on the place figured out in just about that 

 way. 



The tenant sold his half of the wheat at har- 

 vest for seventy cents a bushel. That gave him 



