be past time--for thinning out my sugar-beets and
resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than
I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my
neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched,
ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof
expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch
across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when
he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by
Sam for lice under her wings.

"Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?" I asked, after we had weeded
and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seated
ourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.

"The play--oh, Betty, it is--" And his old look of rapture shot across
his face. Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.

"Come on and help tie up onions," he called. "You Byrd!"

We went and we tied up--a whole white smelly mountain of them; but I
didn't care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week his
balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden. A
great big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold without
waiting for me.

"I'll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty," he said, in a
business-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and my
beets. "And isn't old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?"
he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush
peonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed,
though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that they
wouldn't flower until the second season.

"But isn't he going to write, too, Sam?" I asked, a trifle uneasily.
"Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly
good lawyer or bank clerk--or farmer--he wouldn't have been half as much
to the world as he is as a sadly dead poet. Now, would he?"

"Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makes
entry into the heavenly one, and we'll see what he reports when the time
comes. Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field." Sam
answered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as I
went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean
of future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and give
babies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me