barn and the purchase of stock; gave it to them in words, and with
the fullest assurance that it was theirs to improve, to live on,
to add to. Each of them had seen and handled his deed, each had
to admit he never had known his father to tell a lie or deviate
the least from fairness in a deal of any kind, each had been
compelled to go in the way indicated by his father for years; but
not a man of them held his own deed. These precious bits of paper
remained locked in the big wooden chest beside the father's bed,
while the land stood on the records in his name; the taxes they
paid him each year he, himself, carried to the county clerk; so
that he was the largest landholder in the county and one of the
very richest men. It must have been extreme unction to his soul
to enter the county office and ask for the assessment on those
"little parcels of land of mine." Men treated him very
deferentially, and so did his sons. Those documents carefully
locked away had the effect of obtaining ever-ready help to harvest
his hay and wheat whenever he desired, to make his least wish
quickly deferred to, to give him authority and the power for which
he lived and worked earlier, later, and harder than any other man
of his day and locality.

Adam was like him as possible up to the time he married, yet Adam
was the only one of his sons who disobeyed him; but there was a
redeeming feature. Adam married a slender tall slip of a woman,
four years his senior, who had been teaching in the Hartley
schools when he began courting her. She was a prim, fussy woman,
born of a prim father and a fussy mother, so what was to be
expected? Her face was narrow and set, her body and her movements
almost rigid, her hair, always parted, lifted from each side and
tied on the crown, fell in stiff little curls, the back part