brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by
its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who were not engaged
in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse shoeing, house
painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small merchant and
professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On summer mornings,
men, women and children went into the fields. In the early spring when
planting went on and all through late May, June and early July when berries
and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed with work and the streets
of the town were deserted. Every one went to the fields. Great hay wagons
loaded with children, laughing girls, and sedate women set out from Main
Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall boys, who pelted the girls with
green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and men who went
along behind smoking their morning pipes and talking of the prevailing
prices of the products of their fields. In the town after they had gone a
Sabbath quiet prevailed. The merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of
the awnings before the doors of the stores, and only their wives and the
wives of the two or three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their
discussions of horse racing, politics and religion.

In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging their
dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with boxes of
berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening meal crowds
gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along the curbing at
the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with baskets on their arms
did the marketing for the next day's living; the young men put on stiff
white collars and their Sunday clothes, and girls, who all day had been
crawling over the fields between the rows of berries or pushing their way
among the tangled masses of raspberry bushes, put on white dresses and
walked up and down before the men. Friendships begun between boys and girls