From books and drug pamphlets he had learned every
medicinal plant, shrub, and tree of his vicinity, and for
years roamed far afield and through the woods collecting.
After his father's death expenses grew heavier and the
boy saw that he must earn more money. His mother
frantically opposed his going to the city, so he thought out
the plan of transplanting the stuff he gathered, to the
land they owned and cultivating it there. This work
was well developed when he was twenty, but that year
he lost his mother.

From that time he went on steadily enlarging his
species, transplanting trees, shrubs, vines, and medicinal
herbs from such locations as he found them to similar
conditions on his land. Six years he had worked
cultivating these beds, and hunting through the woods on
the river banks, government land, the great Limberlost
Swamp, and neglected corners of earth for barks and
roots. He occasionally made long trips across the
country for rapidly diminishing plants he found in the
woodland of men who did not care to bother with a few
specimens, and many big beds of profitable herbs,
extinct for miles around, now flourished on the banks of
Loon Lake, in the marsh, and through the forest rising
above. To what extent and value his venture had grown,
no one save the Harvester knew. When his neighbours
twitted him with being too lazy to plow and sow, of
``mooning'' over books, and derisively sneered when they
spoke of him as the Harvester of the Woods or the