ng else, so long as he gets his money. I say, won't that gateway be
a corker, when it's put right?"

They walked on out of hearing, but Max had heard all that was necessary
to make him tingle.

"Oh, it will be a corker, will it?" he said to himself, as he made for
the back of the house by way of the pine grove. "Maybe it will, old,
man--but not when _you_ put it right! An office grind, am I? Too dull to
know a good thing when I own it, eh? And you'll try bluffing, will you?
All right, bluff away--and much good may it do you! I'd sell it to Jarve
Burnside before I'd sell it to you, but I--Hello, where are you going?"

He had almost run into Jarvis, hastily emerging from the kitchen door
with a smoking jack-o'-lantern, the declining candle of which had made of
it both a wreck and the source of a horrible odour. Jarvis cast the
pumpkin to one side and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. "Just
prevented a small conflagration of corn-stalks," he explained. "What are
you doing, prowling round your own back door?"

"Making up my mind not to sell this place to you or to anybody else,"
said Max, promptly, speaking under the impulse of his irritation.

"Good work! I don't blame you. I certainly don't want it--_if you do_. I
hope you won't go back on letting me rent a few acres, though, to try my
hand at farming, in the spring?"

"Jarve,"--Max sat down on the kitchen step--"do you seriously think a
fellow could make a living off this land--taking into account all the
squash-bugs and fruit-tree pests and tomato-grubs and every other thing
that I've always understood makes the life of the farmer miserable?"

"I think," replied Jarvis, laughing a little at Max's way of putting it,
but awake to the importance of discussing the matter seriously, if Max
showed an inclination to do so, "that trying to do it, with the help of
all the experience that modern experiment stations have placed at our
hands, would be about the most interesting thing possible. You might not
want to give up all other business till you had proved that you really
could do it, but I certainly do think the thing would be well worth
trying. It's being attempted more and more these days by educated men,
college graduates and professional men of all ranks, partly for the pure
interest of the thing, partly because the out-door life is about the best
worth living. Look at Don Ferry, for an example. Could he possibly have
the hold he has on that crowd of his at the O