on the vegetable garden, too, and has stores of
knowledge as to seed-time and harvest and the correct succession of
garden crops. She and Johnson planned a greenhouse, which Nelson built,
for flowers and green stuff through the winter, she said; but I think it
is chiefly a place where she can play in the dirt when the weather is
bad. Anyhow, that glass house cost the farm $442, and the interest and
taxes are going on yet. I as well as Polly had to do some building that
autumn. Three more chicken-houses were built, making five in all. Each
consists in ten compartments twenty feet wide, of which each is intended
to house forty hens. When these houses were completed, I had room for
forty pens of forty each, which was my limit for laying hens. In
addition was one house of ten pens for half-grown chickens and fattening
fowls. It would take the hatch of another year to fill my pens, but one
must provide for the future. These three houses cost, in round numbers,
$2100,--five times as much as Polly's glass house,--but I was not going
to play in them.

I also built a cow-house on the same plan as the first one, but about
half the size. This was for the dry cows and the heifers. It cost $2230,
and gave me stable room enough for the waiting stock, so that I could
count on forty milch cows all the time, when my herd was once balanced.
Forty cows giving milk, six hundred swine of all ages, putting on fat or
doing whatever other duty came to hand, fifteen or sixteen hundred hens
laying eggs when not otherwise engaged, three thousand apple trees
striving with all their might to get large enough to bear fruit,--these
made up my ideal of a factory farm; and it looked as if one year more
would see it complete.

No rain fell in October, and my brook became such a little brook that I
dared to correct its ways. We spent a week with teams, ploughs, and
scrapers, cutting the fringe and frills away from it, and reducing it to
severe simplicity. It is strange, but true, that this reversion to
simplicity robbed it of its shy ways and rustic beauty, and left it
boldly staring with open eyes and gaping with wide-stretched mouth at
the men who turned from it. We put in about two thousand feet of tile
drainage on both sides of what Polly called "that ditch," and this
completed the improvements on the low lands. The land, indeed, was not
too low to bear good crops, but it was lightened by under drainage and
yielded more each after year.

The tiles