umans will eat it--for there's no sale
for it over in town. Seems like everybody's got a patch of it nowadays.

"Well, it's fillin', as the old woman said when she swallowed her
thimble, and that boy Joe he's going to be a drain on me to feed, I can
see that now. I'll have to fill him up on something or other, and I
guess pie-plant's about as good as anything. It's cheap."

"Yes, but it takes sugar," ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between
her fingers.

"You can use them molasses in the blue barrel," instructed Isom.

"It's about gone," said she.

"Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around--it'll come out
sweet enough for a mess or two."

Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and
stood a moment looking down at his wife.

"Don't you worry over feedin' that feller, Ollie," he advised. "I'll
manage that. I aim to keep him stout--I never saw a stouter feller for
his age than Joe--for I'm goin' to git a pile of work out of him the
next two years. I saw you lookin' him over this morning," said he,
approvingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse,
"and I could see you was lightin' on his points. Don't you think he's
all I said he was?"

"Yes," she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy
with the crumbs on the cloth, "all you said of him--_and more_!"

CHAPTER III

THE SPARK IN THE CLOD

It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of
his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries
followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that
Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.

Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees
had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a
season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So
there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that
Isom broached.

If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had
for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been
admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon
the human creatures around him. Isom's beasts wallowed in plenty and
grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he
had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.

All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said