ng went off like clockwork, especially the victuals--and such
victuals!

There was quantity in meats, breads, vegetables--and there was also savor.
There was plenty, and there was style. Ask Mrs. Haakon Peterson, who
yearned for culture, and had been afraid her children wouldn't get it if
Yim Irwin taught them nothing but farming. She will tell you that the
dinner--which so many thought of all the time as supper--was yust as well
served as it if had been in the Chamberlain Hotel in Des Moines, where she
had stayed when she went with Haakon to the state convention.

Why shouldn't it have been even better served? It was planned, cooked,
served and eaten by people of intelligence and brains, in their own house,
as a community affair, and in a community where, if any one should ask
you, you are authorized to state that there's as much wealth to the acre
as in any strictly farming spot between the two oceans, and where you are
perfectly safe--financially--in dropping from a balloon in the dark of the
moon, and paying a hundred and fifty dollars an acre for any farm you
happen to land on. Why shouldn't things have been well done, when every
one worked, not for money, but for the love of the doing, and the love of
learning to do in the best way?

Some of these things came out in the speeches following the repast--and
some other things, too. It was probably not quite fair for B. B. Hamm to
incorporate in his wishes for the welfare and prosperity and so forth of
Jim and Jennie that stale one about the troubles of life, but he wanted to
see Jennie blush--which as a matter of fact he did; but she failed to grow
quite so fiery red as did Jim. But B. B. was a good fellow, and a Trojan
in his work for the cause, and the schoolmaster and superintendent of
schools forgave him. A remark may be a little broad, and still clean, and
B. B. made a clean speech mainly devoted to the increased value of that
farm he at one memorable time was going to sell before Jim's fool notions
could be carried out.

Colonel Woodruff made most of the above points which I have niched from
him. He had begun as a reformer late in life, he said, but he would leave
it to them if he hadn't worked at the trade steadily after enlistment. He
had become a follower of Jim Irwin, because Jim's reform was like dragging
the road in front of your own farm--it was reform right at home, and not
at the county seat, or Des Moines, or Washington. He had followed Jim
Irwin as