out-door life. "I can work and not overwork," she said to her
friends; and in any case the crops seemed to grow better under the
eye of the mistress.

Some years she employed a neighbor boy or girl, and always hired
such other help as she needed. Prices were sometimes low and crops
were not always good; and only widowed mothers can know the full
story of her labor, love and sacrifice. With Percy's help he was
sent to school and finally to the university, choosing for himself
the agricultural college, much to the surprise and disappointment of
his devoted mother.

"Why," she asked, "why should my son go to college to study
agriculture? Have you not studied farming in the practical school of
experience all your life? Surely we have done as much as could be
done on our own little farm; and you have also had the benefit of
the longer experience of our best farmers hereabout, and of the
accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. Oh, I had hoped and truly
believed that you would become interested in engineering, or in
medicine, or may be in the law. I cannot understand why you should
think of going to college to study farming. Surely you already know
more than the college professors do about agriculture."

Percy's mother had too much good sense to have raised a spoiled boy.
He had been taught to work and to think for himself. She loved her
boy far better than her own life,--loved as only a widowed mother
can who has risked her life for him, and who has given to him all
her thought and all her energy from the best twenty years of her own
life; but she had never let herself enjoy that kind of selfishness
which prompts a mother to do for her child what he should be taught