ly with a spoon,"
said Sol.

The joke was not entirely new; it could not have been original with Sol
by at least three hundred years. But it did very well as an excuse for
Sol to laugh. He was always looking for excuses to laugh, that was the
one virtue in him. Without his big laugh he would have been an empty
sack without a bottom.

"Joe got them rows mighty purty and straight," said Sol, squinting along
the apple trees.

"Yes, he set 'em out accordin' to geog'aphy," said she.

"Which?" said Sol.

"Ge-og'a-phy, I said. Didn't you never hear tell of that before neither,
Sol Greening?"

"Oh," said Sol, lightly, as if that made it all as plain to him as his
own cracked thumbs. "How much does Joe reckon he'll git off of that
patch of berries when it begins to bear?"

"I never heard him say he expected to make anything," said she, "but I
read in one of them fruit-growin' papers he takes that they make as much
as three hundred dollars an acre from 'em back in Ellinoi."

Sol got up, slowly; took a backward step into the yard; filled his
lungs, opened his mouth, made his eyes round. Under the internal
pressure his whiskers stood on end and his face grew red. "Oh, you git
_out_!" said he.

"I can show it to you in the paper," she offered, making as if to put
aside her sewing.

Sol laid a finger on his palm and stood with his head bent. After a bit
he looked up, his eyes still round.

"If he even makes a hundred, that'll be two thousand dollars a year!"

It was such a magnificent sum that Sol did not feel like taking the
familiarity with it of mentioning it aloud. He whispered it, giving it
large, rich sound.

"Why, I reckon it would be," said she, offhand and careless, just as if
two thousand a year, more or less, mattered very little to Joe.

"That's more than I ever made in my whole dad-blame life," said Sol.

"Well, whose fault is it, Sol?" asked she.

"I don't believe it can be done!"

"You'll see," she assured him, comfortably.

"And Joe he went and stuck to the old place," reflected Sol. "He might
'a' got some better land for his sperimentin' and projeckin' if he'd 'a'
looked around."

"He was offered land, all the land a man could want," said she. "Ollie
wanted him to take over the Chase home place and farm it when she and
Morgan married and left, but Joe he said no; the Newbolts had made their
failures here, he said, and here they was goin' to make their success.
He had to redeem the past, Joe