and cheese, not for home consumption, but for sale at the store
in exchange for necessary groceries. The Waltons were too poor to
indulge in these luxuries.

The father was a farmer on a small scale; that is, he cultivated
ten acres of poor land, out of which he extorted a living for his
family, or rather a partial living. Besides this he worked for
his neighbors by the day, sometimes as a farm laborer, sometimes
at odd jobs of different kinds, for he was a sort of Jack at all
trades. But his income, all told, was miserably small, and required
the utmost economy and good management on the part of his wife to
make it equal to the necessity of a growing family of children.

Hiram Walton was a man of good natural abilities, though of not
much education, and after half an hour's conversation with him one
would say, unhesitatingly, that he deserved a better fate than his
hand-to-hand struggle with poverty. But he was one of those men
who, for some unaccountable reason, never get on in the world. They
can do a great many things creditably, but do not have the knack
of conquering fortune. So Hiram had always been a poor man, and
probably always would be poor. He was discontented at times, and
often felt the disadvantages of his lot, but he was lacking in
energy and ambition, and perhaps this was the chief reason why he
did not succeed better.

After breakfast Elihu Perkins, the "cow doctor," came to the door.
He was an old man with iron-gray hair, and always wore steel-bowed
spectacles; at least for twenty years nobody in the town could
remember ever having seen him without them. It was the general
opinion that he wore them during the night. Once when questioned