__
Net expense $40,404
Previous account 44,000
_______
$84,404

The farm owes me a little more than $84,000. "Not so good as I hoped,
and not so bad as I feared," said Polly. "We will win out all right, Mr.
Headman, though it does seem a lot of money."

"Like the Irishman's pig," quoth I. "Pat said, 'It didn't weigh nearly
as much as I expected, but I never thought it would.'"

There was little to depress us in the past, and nothing in the present,
so we joined the young people for the dance at the Club.

CHAPTER XXXVI

OUR FRIENDS

After our guests had departed, to college or school or home, the house
was left almost deserted. We did not shut it up, however. Fires were
bright on all hearths, and lamps were kept burning. We did not mean to
lose the cheeriness of the house, though much of the family had
departed. For a wonder, the days did not seem lonesome. After the fist
break was over, we did not find time to think of our solitude, and as
the weeks passed we wondered what new wings had caused them to fly so
swiftly. Each day had its interests of work or study or social function.
Stormy days and unbroken evenings were given to reading. We consumed
many books, both old and new, and we were not forgotten by our friends.
The dull days of winter did not drag; indeed, they were accepted with
real pleasure. Our lives had hitherto been too much filled with the
hurry and bustle inseparable from the fashionable existence-struggle of
a large city to permit us to settle down with quiet nerves to the real
happiness of home. So much of enjoyment accompanies and depends upon
tranquillity of mind, that we are apt to miss half of it in the turmoil
of work-strife and social-strife that fill the best years of most men
and women.

It is a pity that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax
their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are
within them. Most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of
the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either
inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world.
I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet,
unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me. When you
discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have