the Byrd for overnight. I'll return him to his fate to-morrow. Poor Peter! Poor Peter!
I wish I could have seen Sam's face when he found it! The next morningmother's black beauty found my old grass basket full of delicious littlepeas on the front steps with this note in it:
You'll be docked a quarter of a cent every hour you are off your job. Bring that brat home and both of you get to work. SAM.
_P.S._--Something is sprouting in your garden that I don't understand.
I knew those hollyhocks would rise up some day and bear witness againstme. For the life of me I couldn't make up my mind what to say aboutthem, so I sent the Byrd home by Tolly, who was going to take Edith outto see how her okra was progressing, and stayed in the safe shelter ofmy home. On the Byrd's rompers I pinned this note:
Strike, if you will, my young back, But spare, oh spare, this little brat!
BETTY.
There are all kinds of poetry in the world.
That night when I was beginning to get restless and wish I had gone outto my fate, even if it included being throttled with a pea-vine, Tollyand Edith came into town and stopped at my gate in such a condition thatI was positively alarmed about them.
"Five baskets of peas!" gasped Tolly, as he fell forward limp over hiswheel.
"My thumb! my thumb!" moaned Edith, with the afflicted member in hermouth.
"But, say, Betty," Tolly revived enough to say, "we are not going totell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink. They are going out to-morrow tocall. Let 'em go--it's coming to 'em."
"Oh no, I won't say a word," I agreed, with the intensest joy. "Comeover to-morrow, Edith, and let's finish _My Lady's Fan_. I'm dying toknow what happened to her at the court ball. Good night!"
"No, you come over to my house; I'll be in bed," Edith wailed from themiddle of the road as Tolly turned and made his machine buzz for home.
Then for five days--glorious, warm, growing, blooming days--I stayed intown in a state of relapse from gardening of which the sorenesses in thecalves of my legs and my thumbs were the strongest symptoms, andlistened to my martyred friends' accounts of what Sam was doing toPeter. I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-deliveryroute. That is, they were in Peter's handwriting, but they read morelike government crop reports than a poet's letters to the girl to whomhe considered himself engaged. I sent them on to Judge Vandyne, and Igot a glorious written chuckle in return for them.
Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about thehollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, fora time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It wasfull time--maybe past time--for thinning out my sugar-beets andresetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed thanI had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of myneglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched,ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloofexpression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratchacross the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, whenhe held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased bySam for lice under her wings.
"Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?" I asked, after we had weededand dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seatedourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.
"The play--oh, Betty, it is--" And his old look of rapture shot acrosshis face. Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.
"Come on and help tie up onions," he called. "You Byrd!"
We went and we tied up--a whole white smelly mountain of them; but Ididn't care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week hisbalance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden. Agreat big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold withoutwaiting for me.
"I'll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty," he said, in abusiness-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and mybeets. "And isn't old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?"he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blushpeonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed,though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that theywouldn't flower until the second season.
"But isn't he going to write, too, Sam?" I asked, a trifle uneasily."Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectlygood lawyer or bank clerk--or farmer--he wouldn't have been half as muchto the world as he is as a sadly dead poet. Now, would he?"
"Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makesentry into the heavenly one, and we'll see what he reports when the timecomes. Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field." Samanswered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as Iwent with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green oceanof future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and givebabies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered outover his crop. "The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five timeslast week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the FoodCommission in Washington. Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-oldfarmer, eh, Bettykin?" And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure Iwas falling before he caught me.
I didn't answer--I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hairinto my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.
Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner's report, andI sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front ofGrandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pridein Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and toTennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, ormaybe--
Daddy says that when a man owns a bottom field, a hillside, and a creekin the Harpeth Valley all he has to do is to go out and swing his hoearound his head a few times and he'll have a living before he is readyto harvest it. I don't know about that, and I do know that since I camehome in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more. But hisharvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sataround at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea ofhis farming by government books, with no experience. They came to sit onthe rail fences around his fields and to spit out of the other side oftheir mouths before the end of July, and I never went out to marvel,myself, that I didn't step on that Commissioner of Agriculture, whocouldn't seem to keep away more than a few hours at a time.
As things grew and bloomed and burst and flowered and seeded, Sam wentcalmly on his way of work with the crops from dawn to dark, and Peterdid likewise. I never saw anything like his friendly pride in everysuccessful test of Sam's work. And his own fat was getting packed on himat a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, cleanpens that Sam maintained in the condition of a sanitary detentionhospital. Also Peter never mentioned the play, I never mentioned it, andSam appeared to have completely forgotten it.
I didn't quite like for Sam to forget Peter's play like that, and Iliked it less when I heard Julia say that she thought it was sofortunate that Sam had cured Peter of being a poet, so he could go intohis father's office to learn to take care of his great fortune. Peterlikes Julia so much that I think she ought to have appreciated the greatthing in him more than she did. When the copy of the _Review_, withPeter's poem on the Ultimate, came, he read the whole poem to her whileshe embroidered an initial in the corner of a handkerchief for him. Thenext day she told me that she couldn't understand a word about it, andthat it made Pink mad because she wouldn't tell him what to say to Peterabout it. Pink has grown fond of Peter, but he wouldn't try to read thepoem after the third stanza. But Peter went on back to help with the ryecrop, knowing nothing of all that.
Of course, I had all the confidence that there is in the world in Sam,but I, about the first week in July, again began to feel responsible tothe world for Peter's play; and I might have made the awful blunder ofremonst
rating with Peter or Sam or both of them if I hadn't got into somuch trouble with Edith and Tolly.
Now, Clyde Tolbot is a very business-like young man, and he ought to berespected and considered for it, but that is just what Edith doesn'tseem to understand how to do. She wants to go on with her head levelwith the moon, and Tolly wants to get married in November, and I thinkhe is perfectly right. He hasn't any family, and he says Edith's"highstrikes," as he calls her moods and tenses, and the food at theHayesboro Inn, are making him thin and pale, and hurting the prospectsof The Electric Light Co.
"She acts as if she thought I was a cinnamon bear if I put my paw on herfair hand. And she seems to