nt farm, and
with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their
five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming
business like their neighbors. Besides this, they had the resource,
extraordinary among University families, of an account in the
savings-bank on which to fall back. They had always been able to pay
their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to
acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which
the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr's pride.
Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle
to "keep up the dignity" of the academic profession, they were not
overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking.

So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about
the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father
the right of a teacher to say what he believed. Professor Marshall had
gone of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was
"investigating" him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely
held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their
strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could
find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on
his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his
cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the
processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes
it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to
submit himself to his wife's instruction in the new way of life.

All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had
instantly reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news
for the moment, took that matter up with headlined characterizations
of Professor Marshall as a "martyr of the cause of academic freedom,"
and other rather cheap phrases about "persecution" and "America, the
land of free speech." The legislative committee, alarmed, retreated
from its position. Professor Marshall had not "been obliged to hand in
his resignation," but quite the contrary, had become the hero of the
hour and was warmly complimented by his colleagues, who hoped to
profit by an action which none of them would have dared to imitate.
It had been an exciting drama to the Marshall children as long as it
lasted. They had looked with pride at an abominable reproduction of
their father'