ve we can do it, but we haven't."

"Wal," said Mr. Hofmyer, "I d'know as I'd call that a failure. The fact
that you're tryin' of it shows you've got the right idees. We'll write ye,
and mebbe pay your way down to look us over. We're a pretty good crowd,
the neighbors think."

CHAPTER XX

THINK OF IT

Ames was an inspiration. Jim Irwin received from the great agricultural
college more real education in this one trip than many students get from a
four years' course in its halls; for he had spent ten years in getting
ready for the experience. The great farm of hundreds of acres, all under
the management of experts, the beautiful campus, the commodious classrooms
and laboratories, and especially the barns, the greenhouses, gardens,
herds and flocks filled him with a sort of apostolic joy.

"Every school," said he to Professor Withers, "ought to be doing a good
deal of the work you have to do here."

"I'll admit," said the professor, "that much of our work in agriculture is
pretty elementary."

"It's intermediate school work," said Jim. "It's a wrong to force boys and
girls to leave their homes and live in a college to get so much of what
they should have before they're ten years old."

"There's something in what you say," said the professor, "but some
experiment station men seem to think that agriculture in the common
schools will take from the young men and women the felt need, and
therefore the desire to come to the college."

"If you can't give them anything better than high-school work," said Jim,
"that will be so; but if the science and art of agriculture is what I
think it is, it would make them hungry for the advanced work that really
can't be done at home. To make the children wait until they're twenty is
to deny them more than half what the college ought to give them--and make
them pay for what they don't get."

"I think you're right," said the professor.

"Give us the kind of schools I ask for," cried Jim, "and I'll fill a
college like this in every congressional district in Iowa, or I'll force
you to tear this down and build larger."

The professor laughed at his enthusiasm.

More nearly happy, and rather shorter of money than he had recently been,
Jim journeyed home among the companions from his own neighborhood, in a
frenzy of plans for the future. Mr. Hofmyer had dropped from his mind,
until Con Bonner, his old enemy, drew him aside in the vestibule of the
train and spoke to him in the