advertisement from one year's end to another, and my kitchen was a
battlefield where I set my teeth and learned to love hard work.
Our literature was government agriculture reports, patent medicine
almanacs, seedsmen's booklets, and Sears Roebuck catalogues. We
subscribed to Farm and Fireside and read the serials aloud. Every
now and then, for real excitement, we read something stirring in the
Old Testament--that cheery book Jeremiah, for instance, of which
Andrew was very fond. The farm did actually prosper, after a while;
and Andrew used to hang over the pasture bars at sunset, and tell,
from the way his pipe burned, just what the weather would be the
next day.

As I have said, we were tremendously happy until Andrew got the
fatal idea of telling the world how happy we were. I am sorry to
have to admit he had always been rather a bookish man. In his
college days he had edited the students' magazine, and sometimes he
would get discontented with the Farm and Fireside serials and pull
down his bound volumes of the college paper. He would read me some
of his youthful poems and stories and mutter vaguely about writing
something himself some day. I was more concerned with sitting hens
than with sonnets and I'm bound to say I never took these threats
very seriously. I should have been more severe.

Then great-uncle Philip died, and his carload of books came to us.
He had been a college professor, and years ago when Andrew was a
boy Uncle Philip had been very fond of him--had, in fact, put him
through college. We were the only near relatives, and all those
books turned up one fine day. That was the beginning of the end,
if I had only known it. Andrew had the time of his life building
shelves all round our living-room; not content with that he turned