ng, Champers; fine morning to live," Asher called out
cheerily.

"Mornin', Aydelot; fine day, fine! Miss Shirley told me last fall she got
her first inspiration for buyin' a quarter of land with nothin' and faith,
and makin' it pay for itself, out of one of Coburn's Agricultural Reports.
I reckon if a book like that could inspire a woman, they's plenty in a
mornin' like this to inspire old Satan to a more uprighteous line of goods
than he generally carries. I never see the country look better. Your wheat
is tremendous. How's the country look to you?" Champers responded.

"I can remember when it looked a good deal worse," Asher replied. "The
Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy boom lots
into harvest fields."

The two men had seated themselves on the sloping driveway before the barn
doors. Asher was chewing the tender joint of a spear of foxtail grass, and
Champers had lighted a heavy cigar.

"You don't smoke, I believe," he said cordially, "or I'd insist on
offering the mate."

"No, I just chew," Asher replied, as he bent the foxtail thoughtfully in
his fingers and looked out toward the wheat fields already rippling like
waves under the morning breeze.

"Say, Aydelot, do you remember the day I come down this valley and tried
my danged best to get you to sell out for a song? I've done some pretty
scaly things, all inside the letter of the law, since then, but never
anything that's stuck in my craw like that. I guess you ain't forgot it,
neither?"

"I remember more of those first years than of these later ones, and I
haven't forgotten when you came to the Grass River schoolhouse one hot
Sunday about grasshopper time, but I don't believe anybody holds it
against you. You were out for business just as we were," Asher replied
with a genial smile.

"Say! D'recollect what you said to me when I invited you to cast your
glims over this very country, a burnt-up old prairie that day, so scorched
it was too dry and hot to cut up into town lots for an addition to Hades?"

Asher laughed now.

"No, I don't remember anything about that. It was just the general line of
events that stayed with me," he said.

"Well, I do; and I'll never forget the look in your eyes when you said it,
neither. I'd told you, as I say, just to look at this God-forsaken old
plain and tell me what you see. And you looked, like you was glimpsin'
heaven a'most, and just said sorter solemn like an' prophetic: 'I see a
land f