ove heels over, Betsy, for the first time in all
my life. If any man ever was a bigger fool than I am to-day, it would
comfort me to know about it. I am acting like an idiot, Betsy. I know
that, but I wish you could understand how I feel. Power! I am the
head-waters of Niagara! I could pluck down the stars and set them in
different places! I could twist the tail from the comet! I could twirl
the globe on my palm and topple mountains and wipe lakes from the
surface! I am a live man, Betsy. Existence is over. So don't you go at
any tricks or I might pull off your head. Betsy, if you see the tallest
girl you ever saw, and she wears a dark diadem, and has big black eyes
and a face so lovely it blinds you, why you have seen Her, and you balk,
right on the spot, and stand like the rock of Gibraltar, until you
make me see her, too. As if I wouldn't know she was coming a mile away!
There's more I could tell you, but that is my secret, and it's too
precious to talk about, even to my best friends. Bel, bring Betsy to the
store-room."

The Harvester tossed the hitching strap to the dog and walked down the
driveway to a low structure built on the embankment beside the lake.
One end of it was a dry-house of his own construction. Here, by an
arrangement of hot water pipes, he evaporated many of the barks, roots,
seeds, and leaves he grew to supply large concerns engaged in the
manufacture of drugs. By his process crude stock was thoroughly cured,
yet did not lose in weight and colour as when dried in the sun or
outdoor shade.

So the Harvester was enabled to send his customers big packages of
brightly coloured raw material, and the few cents per pound he asked in
advance of the catalogued prices were paid eagerly. He lived alone,
and never talked of his work; so none of the harvesters of the fields
adjoining dreamed of the extent of his reaping. The idea had been his
own. He had been born in the cabin in which he now lived. His father and
grandfather were old-time hunters of skins and game. They had added to
their earnings by gathering in spring and fall the few medicinal seeds,
leaves, and barks they knew. His mother had been of different type. She
had loved and married the picturesque young hunter, and gone to live
with him on the section of land taken by his father. She found life,
real life, vastly different from her girlhood dreams, but she was one of
those changeless, unyielding women who suffer silently, but never rue a
barg