ain, no matter how badly they are cheated. Her only joy in life had
been her son. For him she had worked and saved unceasingly, and when he
was old enough she sent him to the city to school and kept pace with him
in the lessons he brought home at night.

Using what she knew of her husband's work as a guide, and profiting by
pamphlets published by the government, every hour of the time outside
school and in summer vacations she worked in the woods with the boy,
gathering herbs and roots to pay for his education and clothing. So
the son passed the full high-school course, and then, selecting such
branches as interested him, continued his studies alone.

From books and drug pamphlets he had learned every medicinal plant,
shrub, and tree of his vicinity, and for years roamed far afield and
through the woods collecting. After his father's death expenses grew
heavier and the boy saw that he must earn more money. His mother
frantically opposed his going to the city, so he thought out the plan
of transplanting the stuff he gathered, to the land they owned and
cultivating it there. This work was well developed when he was twenty,
but that year he lost his mother.

From that time he went on steadily enlarging his species, transplanting
trees, shrubs, vines, and medicinal herbs from such locations as he
found them to similar conditions on his land. Six years he had worked
cultivating these beds, and hunting through the woods on the river
banks, government land, the great Limberlost Swamp, and neglected
corners of earth for barks and roots. He occasionally made long trips
across the country for rapidly diminishing plants he found in the
woodland of men who did not care to bother with a few specimens,
and many big beds of profitable herbs, extinct for miles around, now
flourished on the banks of Loon Lake, in the marsh, and through the
forest rising above. To what extent and value his venture had grown, no
one save the Harvester knew. When his neighbours twitted him with
being too lazy to plow and sow, of "mooning" over books, and derisively
sneered when they spoke of him as the Harvester of the Woods or the
Medicine Man, David Langston smiled and went his way.

How lonely he had been since the death of his mother he never realized
until that morning when a new idea really had taken possession of him.
From the store-house he heaped packages of seeds, dried leaves, barks,
and roots into the wagon. But he kept a generous supply of