tating fury that the soil, caught up from the
field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,--a cloud which darkened
the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the
forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust,
almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even
for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered
and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away.

As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid
face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to
him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the
bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our
loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the
extra care with which we had pulverized the ground.

"If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in
reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making
every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!"

Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line
fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt,
his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that
nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this
land had to be resown.

Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out
experiences like this--they omit the mud and the dust and the grime,
they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells
and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the
traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of
fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We
hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with
their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they
stood in crowded malodorous stalls.

In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of
jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking
into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that
they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his
boot straps once--and regretted it almost instantly.--No, no, it won't
do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too
well--and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are
supposed to be. To the b