and she says careful-like, "It is awful good lettuce, Jacky bye,
but that we had yesterday was most as good," and then Tom goes on
eating. Jack has just finished his farm schooling, and he is dippy about
it. Onions is his graft. Why, he will talk about an onion for an hour.
He got me in a corner one day, and he talked about the money there was
in raising onions, how many bushels there was eaten in the world, and
how many thousands of bushels there was brought in from some place down
south, and the price of onions a bushel, and how many million could be
raised on an acre, well, my head whirled before he got through, and I
felt as if everybody had made a mistake by not turning the whole earth
into an onion farm. I said to him one day, "What are you studying
farming for, that don't pay? Why don't you go into the police like your
father and like Tom?" "Ah," he said, "who wants to walk up and down a
hot street all day and bat a drunk over the head or pinch a kid for
hooking a watermelon. I am going out in the country where I can see
things grow." His mother said, "He do be taking after my people. He is
just like me feyther, who always had to have his little bit of garden
and his pig." Here Jack started in again talking so fast you could
hardly understand him, he gets so excited and his eyes get bright and he
waves his hands around in the air--he is awful funny. Tom and his mother
set back in a chair and laugh at him, just like I did when he started on
pigs. He said, "Now for pigs, there is more money in pigs--" Just then
Tom hollered, "Choke him, Nan, choke him, if he gets started on pigs we
are done for. Onions is bad enough, but pigs is pigs." Jack gets awful
mad and hates to be laughed at, and his mother has to smooth him down.
She says to him running her hand soft up and down his coat sleeve,
"Never you mind, Jacky me bye, it is yourself that will be making the
family fortune one of these days, with your onions and your pigs." Tom
laughed and says, "Yes, if he feeds the onions to the pigs." But I think
Jack is right, and I hope some day he has a chance to get a farm, cause
it would be a shame for a person to love a thing the way he loves it,
and not be able to work at it. I asked him one day if he thought he
could make it pay, and he said, "Sure, don't the Italians and the
Chinamen out West make truck farming pay? The trouble with us is, we
don't go at it right. We go at it too big, and raise corn and oats and
barley inste