held checks. Literary folk used to turn up now and then to interview
Andrew, but generally I managed to head them off.

But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and more
of a literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would hang over the
pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset instead of mending the
weather vane on the barn which took a slew so that the north wind
came from the southwest. He hardly ever looked at the Sears Roebuck
catalogues any more, and after Mr. Decameron came to visit us and
suggested that Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became
simply unbearable.

And all the time I was counting eggs and turning out three meals a
day, and running the farm when Andrew got a literary fit and would
go off on some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book.
(I wish you could have seen the state he was in when he came back
from these trips, hoboing it along the roads without any money or a
clean sock to his back. One time he returned with a cough you could
hear the other side of the barn, and I had to nurse him for three
weeks.) When somebody wrote a little booklet about "The Sage of
Redfield" and described me as a "rural Xantippe" and "the domestic
balance-wheel that kept the great writer close to the homely
realities of life" I made up my mind to give Andrew some of his own
medicine. And that's my story.



CHAPTER TWO