wouldn't flower until the second season.

"But isn't he going to write, too, Sam?" I asked, a trifle uneasily.
"Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly
good lawyer or bank clerk--or farmer--he wouldn't have been half as much
to the world as he is as a sadly dead poet. Now, would he?"

"Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makes
entry into the heavenly one, and we'll see what he reports when the time
comes. Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field." Sam
answered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as I
went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean
of future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and give
babies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered out
over his crop. "The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five times
last week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the Food
Commission in Washington. Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-old
farmer, eh, Bettykin?" And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure I
was falling before he caught me.

I didn't answer--I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hair
into my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.

Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner's report, and
I sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front of
Grandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pride
in Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and to
Tennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, or
maybe--