'em published. A feller in Boston charged him that much, he said. It
seems he would go along fur years, raking and scraping of his money
together, so as to get enough ahead to get out another book. Each time
he had his hopes the big newspapers would mebby pay some attention to
it, and he would get recognized.

"But they never did," said the old man, kind of sad, "it always fell
flat."

"Why, FATHER!"--the old lady begins, and finishes by running back into
the house agin. She is out in a minute with a clipping from a newspaper
and hands it over to Doctor Kirby, as proud as a kid with copper-toed
boots. The doctor reads it all the way through, and then he hands it
back without saying a word. The old lady goes away to fiddle around
about the housework purty soon and the old man looks at the doctor and
says:

"Well, you see, don't you?"

"Yes," says the doctor, very gentle.

"I wouldn't have HER know for the world," says Daddy Withers. "_I_
know and YOU know that newspaper piece is just simply poking fun at my
poetry, and making a fool of me, the whole way through. As soon as I
read it over careful I saw it wasn't really praise, though there was a
minute or two I thought my recognition had come. But SHE don't know it
ain't serious from start to finish. SHE was all-mighty pleased when that
piece come out in print. And I don't intend she ever shall know it ain't
real praise."

His wife was so proud when that piece come out in that New York paper,
he said, she cried over it. She said now she was glad they had been
doing without things fur years and years so they could get them little
books printed, one after the other, fur now fame was coming. But
sometimes, Daddy Withers says, he suspicions she really knows he has
been made a fool of, and is pertending not to see it, fur his sake, the
same as he is pertending fur HER sake. Well, they was a mighty nice
old couple, and the doctor done a heap of pertending fur both their
sakes--they wasn't nothing else to do.

"How'd you come to get started at it?" he asts.

Daddy Withers says he don't rightly know. Mebby, he says, it was living
there all his life and watching things growing--watching the cotton
grow, and the corn and getting acquainted with birds and animals and
trees and things. Helping of things to grow, he says, is a good way to
understand how God must feel about humans. For what you plant and help
to grow, he says, you are sure to get to caring a heap about. You