God's Green Country

us in our fine raiment and soft manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They wi

ting days of spring when the promise of the year is likely to play tricks with our optimism, but the spring never elated him any more. With the breath of the first white thorn blossoms came the memory of another year when their perfume had blown in through the open window of the little Swamp Farm house where his mother waited; and a wonderful quiet possessed him; the old hardness had almost gone. On the day when he had

ad creek took such a precipitous leap in its course, he would build a dam and drive the water to the buildings-perhaps install a dynamo later on. The glinting blue stones from the rough little rise back of the barn would make the foundation and fireplace and chimneys fo

him to the brink of his first college social adventure, his

y you'd be content to wear overalls and a six days' beard from Sunday to Sunday. I know we've all said we wanted to farm eventually, but not the grubbing, driving, scraping kind of a job that goes with paying for a place. Better make your money at something else and end up with farming as a hobby, when you can afford

money some easier, faster way, and comes back to donate it here and there for rural up

because you want to build a home on it; you know as well as I do, that a farm's the lonesomest place on earth to go to alone. A man can navigate fairly easily on a single craft anywhere else; he can stop to think whether he can afford a wife and a home or not

He knew that if Billy's decision had been made, it had no doubt stood arguments quite as enduring

self there now, you cut yourself off from everything social at least, and I'm afraid you'll just wall yourself in alone for the rest of your life. On the other

tion to see the dull red slowly cover the sober face, for the picture showed nothing more disturbing than Marjorie Evison perched nymph-like on the limb of a blossoming app

at," Jimmy offer

zement. "Don't you

speci

did you

the mantel right

picture again with t

s," he decided, and carefully held it o

t of drama for a long time. He also congratu

e office in her county?" he remarked incide

eemed to his country-bred instincts, while beyond the last flickering lamp in some laborer's cottage, the moist brown earth stretched for miles and miles in limitless freedom. A thin white mist rose from it now like incense from the hearth of the god of production. It was the wonderful season of beginnings on the farm, birth

o or three years of the grindingest kind of work, then returns would begin to come in. The quaint Swiss chalet with its low stone wall and chimney would go up among the trees, and its light blink down through their shelter on the highway at night as he

usual with idealistic natures, he had endowed his idol with every grace he worshipped; it was strengthened and purified as his experience broadened, until no one else would ever have recognized it as belonging to the silky little kitten of a maid who handled her playthings with such soft-pawed heartlessness. The longer he stayed away from her the more she seemed set apart in a world of other interests

reciate the bigness of the job, and his brief experience as assistant made it easy for him to go ahead with the general routine. Against this there was a troublesome undercurrent of dissatisfaction working, a half-ashamed feeling that he was making the

information as they might apply in directing the increase thereof. In the evenings he talked late with labor-harassed farmers who came to get him to negotiat

over the wires the clear, smooth staccato was not reassuring. It had the ring of a woman with mu

flection, then, "Oh, yes, I do remember. I b

y the coming of the new Agricultural Representative, in one case, by some strange acci

ut unhappy. Two things troubled him. When she could be so charmingly cordial, why did she ever assume that tantalizing aloofness which made a man wonder how much discomfort his attention was giving her? And why, when she must have known who he was, did she pretend

n't know much about house furnishings, but he judged from its fantastic twistings and carvings that this was copied from some antique historic period. He knew also that it must have cost about as much as he would have to spend in equipping a whole house. A level shaft

shine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his own ideals and his lover's interpretation of a few of her passing moods had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the assured graciousne

h and damp, and the Department of Agriculture car was at their service. Billy considered her dress, doubtfully; very pretty it was, sheer and wh

ured, "if you'd care to wr

antly. She drew in her brea

here for ages. They're playing The Follies to-ni

ays thought, "Just like the daughter will be twenty years from now." She was very pretty, willowy and girlish with a youthfulness that told of painstaking preservation, effusively

ce Mr. Evison got the farming bug he has become a hopeless recluse. He runs out to the farm almost every day, and I tell him he'll soon be driving his own pigs in to the market." She laughed gaily at t

as trying to do, and received at the end of each

to round up elusive and indifferent farm laborers at night. Personally he saw something very much worth while beneath these externals, but weighed by her sta

tlines of heavily tasselled willows on the roadside, and lamplight pictures caught through the windows of farm houses-mothers bending over children at their lessons, or a late supper group where the day's work had been unusually long, all shot past like dizzy films on a crazy reel; the musi

d take his eyes from the wheel, to fairly look

ll see anyone I

and directed her attention solely to Billy and the stage. Billy didn't look near the stage much; his knowledge of plays was limited, but critical, and on the night when the hope of four years had its first gift of reality, it would have seeme

at her command, nothing, she reflected, could be more effective than to be seen with Billy with his good looks and the unaccountable impression he gave of "being somebody." None of her friends would know who he was, of course, and she didn't intend that they ever should know. Altogether she had spent a very profitable evening. Then there was something very gratifying about Billy's company; he gave so much and asked so little. She was accustomed to l

onal night-burning lamp turned low in a kitchen. They saw one bent, white-bearded old man with a lantern coming from the barn, presum

w they stand it to live here all the time, but I su

d rather farm tha

ge a farm, or to advise other people l

y sm

r service the Department of Agriculture (which is their own) has to give them." And then because he didn't w

e an awful bore, too, dealing with that class of people day after day. Someone's gene

it tiresome at all. You see it's different when you've always been a farmer yo

ne-and they're very nice people-they have a farm that they live on the year roun

out suddenly, and they didn't discuss things agricultural

m. Someone had just kindled a fire on the hearth, and slipping out of her coat she dropped down on a stool. Billy looked down at her with a

ere and there in odd spaces on the walls were photographs; she seemed to have a preference for college graduates in gown and sheep-skin and the smiling assurance that usually goes with a degree before exp

very sober and kind in his eyes when they came back again to the thoughtful face with its starry eyes and childish, pursed-up mouth and the mysterious touch that comes from the glow and shadows of the firelight. He thought how sweet and b

see you agai

nd counted on her fingers a l

said. "I'm never sure of what

acting, uncertain, alluring but promising nothing