tion oozing away. She never "_could_
stay mad," her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to
talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got out
their team and started for home, Mrs. Councill firing this parting
shot:

"The best thing you can do to-day is t' let her alone. Mebbe the
children 'll bring her round ag'in. If she does come round, you see 't
you treat her a little more 's y' did when you was a-courtin' her."

"This way," roared Councill, putting his arm around his wife's waist.
She boxed his ears, while he guffawed and clucked at his team.

Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the
cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running
and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then
lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a bare
spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.

Burns was not a drinking man; he was hard-working, frugal; in fact, he
had no extravagances except his tobacco. His clothes he wore until they
all but dropped from him; and he worked in rain and mud, as well as dust
and sun. It was this suffering and toiling all to no purpose that made
him sour and irritable. He didn't see why he should have so little after
so much hard work.

He was puzzled to account for it all. His mind--the average mind--was
weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had
got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and
suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty.

Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to Burns's
lack of management. Jim Butler, who owned a dozen farms (which he had
taken on mortgages), and who had got rich by buying land at government
price and holding for a rise, laid all such cases as Burns's to "lack of
enterprise, foresight."

But the larger number, feeling themselves in the same boat with Burns,
said:

"I d' know. Seems as if things get worse an' worse. Corn an' wheat
gittin' cheaper 'n' cheaper. Machinery eatin' up profits--got to _have_
machinery to harvest the cheap grain, an' then the machinery eats up
profits. Taxes goin' up. Devil to pay all round; I d' know what in
thunder _is_ the matter."

The Democrats said protection was killing the farmers; the Republicans
said no. The Grangers growled about the middlemen; the Greenbackers
said there wasn't circulating medium enough, and,