operly those muscles of the body (and
of the soul) which have to do with honest laughter.

I've never supposed I was an especially amusing person, but before I got
through with it I had the Clark family well loosened up with laughter,
although I wasn't quite sure some of the time whether Mrs. Clark
was laughing or crying. I had them all laughing and talking, asking
questions and answering them as though I were an old and valued
neighbour.

Isn't it odd how unconvinced we often are by the crises in the lives of
other people? They seem to us trivial or unimportant; but the fact is,
the crises in the life of a boy, for example, or of a poor man, are
as commanding as the crises in the life of the greatest statesman or
millionaire, for they involve equally the whole personality, the entire
prospects.

The Clark family, I soon learned, had lost its pig. A trivial matter,
you say? I wonder if anything is ever trivial. A year of poor crops,
sickness, low prices, discouragement and, at the end of it, on top of it
all, the cherished pig had died!

From all accounts (and the man on the porch quite lost his apathy in
telling me about it) it must have been a pig of remarkable virtues
and attainments, a paragon of pigs--in whom had been bound up the many
possibilities of new shoes for the children, a hat for the lady, a new
pair of overalls for the gentleman, and I know not what other kindred
luxuries. I do not think, indeed, I ever had the portrait of a pig
drawn for me with quite such ardent enthusiasm of detail, and the more
questions I asked the more eager the story, until finally it became
necessary for me to go to the barn, the cattle-pen, the pig-pen and
the chicken-house, that I might visualize more clearly the scene of the
tragedy. The whole family trooped after us like a classic chorus, but
Mr. Clark himself kept the centre of the stage.

How plainly I could read upon the face of the land the story of this
hill farmer and his meagre existence--his ill-directed effort to wring
a poor living for his family from these upland fields, his poverty, and,
above all, his evident lack of knowledge of his own calling. Added to
these things, and perhaps the most depressing of all his difficulties,
was the utter loneliness of the task, the feeling that it mattered
little to any one whether the Clark family worked or not, or indeed
whether they lived or died. A perfectly good American family was here
being wasted, with the precious