the live hogs."

"I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs
myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could
save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs. We ain't had no
spare-ribs for ever so long."

What with the ache in his back and his chagrin at losing the
pigs, Claude was feeling desperate. "Mother," he shouted, "if you
don't take Mahailey into the house, I'll go crazy!"

That evening Mrs. Wheeler asked him how much the twelve hogs
would have been worth in money. He looked a little startled.

"Oh, I don't know exactly; three hundred dollars, anyway."

"Would it really be as much as that? I don't see how we could
have prevented it, do you?" Her face looked troubled.

Claude went to bed immediately after supper, but he had no sooner
stretched his aching body between the sheets than he began to
feel wakeful. He was humiliated at losing the pigs, because they
had been left in his charge; but for the loss in money, about
which even his mother was grieved, he didn't seem to care. He
wondered whether all that winter he hadn't been working himself
up into a childish contempt for money-values.

When Ralph was home at Christmas time, he wore on his little
finger a heavy gold ring, with a diamond as big as a pea,
surrounded by showy grooves in the metal. He admitted to Claude
that he had won it in a poker game. Ralph's hands were never free
from automobile grease--they were the red, stumpy kind that
couldn't be kept clean. Claude remembered him milking in the barn
by lantern light, his jewel throwing off jabbing sparkles of
colour, and his fingers looking very much like the teats of the
cow. That picture rose before him now, as a symbol of what
successful farming led to.

The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic
value; wheat and corn as good as could be grown anywhere in the
world, hogs and cattle that were the best of their kind. In
return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy
furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded,
clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown. Most of his
money was paid out for machinery,--and that, too, went to pieces.
A steam thrasher didn't last long; a horse outlived three
automobiles.

Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the
neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more
individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine
cottonwood groves on their pl