and
wrong. It hurts me like Sam-Hill, sometimes, to have to hurt my little
man-child. When the inevitable and slow-accumulating spanking _does_
come, I try to be cool-headed and strictly just about it--for one look
out of a child's eyes has the trick of bringing you suddenly to the
judgment-bar. Dinkie, young as he is, can already appraise and arraign
me and flash back his recognition of injustice. More than once he's
made me think of those lines of Frances Lyman's:

"Just a look of swift surprise
From the depths of childish eyes,
Yet my soul to judgment came,
Cowering, as before a flame.
Not a word, a lisp of blame:
Just a look of swift surprise
In the quietly lifted eyes!"

_Saturday the Twenty-second_

I've got my seed in, glory be! The deed is done; the mad scramble is
over. And Mother Earth, as tired as a child of being mauled, lies
sleeping in the sun.

If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we've been doing a heap
of mouth-worship on Alabama Ranch this last few weeks. But the final
acre has been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked and
plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the heavy rains of Thursday
night there's just the faintest tinge of green, here and there, along
my billiard-table of a granary-to-be.

But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, last night, I
trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off most of the handle, and
fastened it upside down in a hole I'd bored at one end of the lower
door-step.

All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though I were what they
call out here a Soil Robber, or a Land Miner, a get-rich-quick
squatter who doesn't bother about mixed farming or the rotation of
crops, with no true love for the land which he impoverishes and leaves
behind him when he's made his pile. I want to make my pile, it's true,
but we'll soon have other things to think about. There's my home
garden to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked after,
and a run to be built for my chickens. The latter, for all their
neglect, have been laying like mad and I've three full crates of eggs
in the cellar, all dipped in water-glass and ready for barter at
Buckhorn. If the output keeps up I'll store away five or six crates of
the treated eggs for Christmas-season sale, for in midwinter they
easily bring eighty ce