26 THE FAT OF THE LAND 
The best way to get good farm hands who 
would be happy and contented, I thought, was 
to go to the city and find men who had shot 
their bolts and failed of the mark; men who 
had come up from the farm hoping for easier or 
more ambitious lives, but who had failed to find 
what they sought and had experienced the unrest 
of a hand-to-mouth struggle for a living in a 
large city ; men who were pining for the country, 
perhaps without knowing it, and who saw no 
way to get back to it. I advertised my wants 
in a morning paper, and asked my son, who was 
on vacation, to interview the applicants. From 
noon until six o’clock my ante-room was invaded 
by a motley procession — delicate boys of fifteen 
who wanted to go to the country, old men who 
thought they could do farm work, clerks and 
janitors out of employment, typical tramps and 
hoboes who diffused very naughty smells, and 
a few—a very few—who seemed to know 
what they could do and what they really 
wanted. 
Jack took the names of five promising men, 
and asked them to come again the next day. 
In the morning I interviewed them, dismissed 
three, and accepted two on the condition that 
their references proved satisfactory. As these 
men are still at Four Oaks, after seven years of 
steady employment, and as I hope they will stay 
twenty years longer, I feel that the reader should 
know them, Much of the smooth sailing at the 
