not what mother thought it ought to be for bringing up children.
So father took us back to Sharon, and there we had sunlight and
grass and trees. We rented a neat little company-house with a big
garden in the rear, where we raised enough potatoes to supply our
table. There were window boxes filled with morning-glories, and
lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted those lilacs to
nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave me joy, and
that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac bushes.

As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money.
Those feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until
we should replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I
have often told how I scraped up some capital and invested it in
a shoe-shining outfit. Nearly every traveling man who came to the
hotel allowed me to shine his shoes. The townsfolk let their
shoes go gray all week, but the gay commercial travelers all were
dudes and dressed like Sunday every day. They brought the new
fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned fellows.
Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys
hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me
revenue. "Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also,"
says the proverb, and my experience proved it true. On my first
visit to the hotel I got acquainted with the landlord and he put
me on his pay-roll. Behind the hotel was a cow pen where the milk
for the guests was drawn fresh from the cows. The cows had to be
driven to a pasture in the morning and back at night. I got a
dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And so I had
found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America.
The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was
less than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of