all my friends and relatives prophesied failure. And, of
course, I made my mistakes, plenty of them, but I was saved from still
more by the thorough study I had made and continued to make." She
indicated shelves of farm books and files of farm magazines that lined
the walls. "And I continued to study. I was resolved to be up to
date, and I sent for all the experiment station reports. I went almost
entirely on the basis that whatever the old type farmer did was wrong,
and, do you know, in doing that I was not so far wrong myself. It's
almost unthinkable, the stupidity of the old-fashioned farmers. Oh,
I consulted with them, talked things over with them, challenged
their stereotyped ways, demanded demonstration of their dogmatic and
prejudiced beliefs, and quite succeeded in convincing the last of them
that I was a fool and doomed to come to grief."

"But you didn't! You didn't!"

Mrs. Mortimer smiled gratefully.

"Sometimes, even now, I'm amazed that I didn't. But I came of a
hard-headed stock which had been away from the soil long enough to
gain a new perspective. When a thing satisfied my judgment, I did it
forthwith and downright, no matter how extravagant it seemed. Take the
old orchard. Worthless! Worse than worthless! Old Calkins nearly died
of heart disease when he saw the devastation I had wreaked upon it. And
look at it now. There was an old rattletrap ruin where the bungalow now
stands. I put up with it, but I immediately pulled down the cow barn,
the pigsties, the chicken houses, everything--made a clean sweep. They
shook their heads and groaned when they saw such wanton waste by a widow
struggling to make a living. But worse was to come. They were paralyzed
when I told them the price of the three beautiful O.I.C.'s--pigs, you
know, Chesters--which I bought, sixty dollars for the three, and
only just weaned. Then I hustled the nondescript chickens to market,
replacing them with the White Leghorns. The two scrub cows that came
with the place I sold to the butcher for thirty dollars each, paying
two hundred and fifty for two blue-blooded Jersey heifers... and coined
money on the exchange, while Calkins and the rest went right on with
their scrubs that couldn't give enough milk to pay for their board."

Billy nodded approval.

"Remember what I told you about horses," he reiterated to Saxon; and,
assisted by his hostess, he gave a very creditable disquisition on
horseflesh and its management from a business p