understand so quickly. But you were
saying------"

"That's all the story. We took the children, and their father was killed
by the cars the next year, poor man; and so we have done the best we
could ever since by them."

"I should say you had done very well by them."

"No, ma'am; I haven't done very well somehow by anyone, myself included,
though God knows I've tried hard enough!"

Then followed the silence natural after such a confession when the
listener does not know the speaker well enough to parry abasement by
denial.

"I am impressed," said Nelson, simply, "to talk with you frankly. It
isn't polite to bother strangers with your troubles, but I am impressed
that you won't mind."

"Oh, no, I won't mind."

It was not extravagant sympathy; but Nelson thought how kind her voice
sounded, and what a musical voice it was. Most people would have called
it rather sharp.

He told her--with surprisingly little egotism, as the keen listener
noted--the story of his life; the struggle of his boyhood; his random
self-education; his years in the army (he had criticised his superior
officers, thereby losing the promotion that was coming for bravery in
the field); his marriage (apparently he had married his wife because
another man had jilted her); his wrestle with nature (whose pranks
included a cyclone) on a frontier farm that he eventually lost, having
put all his savings into a "Greenback" newspaper, and being thus swamped
with debt; his final slow success in paying for his Iowa farm; and his
purchase of the new farm, with its resulting disaster. "I've farmed in
Kansas," he said, "in Nebraska, in Dakota, in Iowa. I was willing to
go wherever the land promised. It always seemed like I was going to
succeed, but somehow I never did. The world ain't fixed right for the
workers, I take it. A man who has spent thirty years in hard, honest
toil oughtn't to be staring ruin in the face like I am to-day. They
won't let it be so when we have the single tax and when we farmers send
our own men instead of city lawyers, to the Legislature and halls of
Congress. Sometimes I think it's the world that's wrong and sometimes I
think it's me!"

The reply came in crisp and assured accents, which were the strongest
contrast to Nelson's soft, undecided pipe: "Seems to me in this last
case the one most to blame is neither you nor the world at large, but
this man Richards, who is asking YOU to pay for HIS farm. And I notice
you don't seem t