the loss of his soul, I hope," said mother stiffly.

"Souls are not so easy to lose," said father. "Besides, I am counting
on Laddie saving hers."

CHAPTER XIII

The Garden of the Lord

"With what content and merriment,
Their days are spent, whose minds are bent
To follow the useful plow."

That spring I decided if school didn't stop pretty soon, I'd run away
again, and I didn't in the least care what they did to me. A country
road was all right and it was good enough, if it had been heaped up,
leveled and plenty of gravel put on; and of course our road would be
fine, because father was one of the commissioners, and as long as he
filled that office, every road in the county would be just as fine as
the law would allow him to make it. I have even heard him tell mother
that he "stretched it a leetle mite," when he was forced to by people
who couldn't seem to be made to understand what was required to upbuild
a nation. He said our language was founded on the alphabet, and to
master it you had to begin with "a". And he said the nation was like
that; it was based on townships, and when a township was clean, had
good roads, bridges, schoolhouses, and churches, a county was in fine
shape, and when each county was in order, the state was right, and when
the state was prosperous, the nation could rejoice in its strength.

He said Atlas in the geography book, carrying the world on his back,
was only a symbol, but it was a good one. He said when the county
elected him to fill an important office, it used his shoulder as a prop
for the nation, so it became his business to stand firmly, and use
every ounce of strength and brains he had, first of all to make his own
possessions a model, then his township, his county, and his state, and
if every one worked together doing that, no nation on earth had our
amount of territory and such fine weather, so none of them could beat
us.

Our road was like the barn floor, where you drove: on each side was a
wide grassy strip, and not a weed the length of our land. All the
rails in the fences were laid straight, the gates were solid, sound,
and swung firmly on their beams, our fence corners were full of alders,
wild roses, sumac, blackberry vines, masses of wild flowers beneath
them, and a bird for every bush. Some of the neighbours thought that
to drive two rails every so often, lay up the fences straight, and grub
out the shrubs was the way, but father said they w