indignation 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. Council firing this parting
shot:--

"The best thing you can do to-day is t' let her alone. Mebbe the
childern 'll bring her round again. 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 Council, 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; 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' 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
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 got 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
'n thunder _is_ the matter."

The democrats said protection was killing the farmers, the republicans
said no. The grangers growled about the middle-men, the green-backers
said there wasn't circulating medium enough, an