HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 67 



element of luck in it; it shows for just what it 

 is. It's real. 



Lee wasn't passionately fond of it, though. 

 He found it humdrum. His genius didn't run 

 that way. In those days all the genius he had 

 was spent in inventing innocent-seeming ways 

 of getting out of my sight in the brush, so that 

 he might lie down and sleep. When he was 

 gone, by and by I found a sleeping nest he'd 

 made for himself, back in a clump of scrub 

 oaks, screened in by thick hawthorn bush and 

 lined with dry sedge grass. Sleep was with 

 him an obsession. In the middle of a warm 

 day when I'd see the little beads of sweat start- 

 ing out on his forehead, I'd know to a moral 

 certainty that he'd be drowsing off presently, 

 no matter what he was doing. Once, when we 

 were setting fence posts around a little clear- 

 ing we wanted to use for pasture, we took turns 

 swinging the big post maul one driving and 

 one steadying the post under the strokes. 

 When his turn came to drive, I give you my 

 word he managed to snatch a nap between 

 strokes. When I went to the pile for another 

 post, I found him stretched out on the grass 

 and snoring; and when we'd set the sharpened 

 nose of the new post and I hauled off for the 



