and smoldered out
over his crop. "The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five times
last week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the Food
Commission in Washington. Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-old
farmer, eh, Bettykin?" And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure I
was falling before he caught me.

I didn't answer--I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hair
into my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.

Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner's report, and
I sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front of
Grandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pride
in Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and to
Tennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, or
maybe--

Daddy says that when a man owns a bottom field, a hillside, and a creek
in the Harpeth Valley all he has to do is to go out and swing his hoe
around his head a few times and he'll have a living before he is ready
to harvest it. I don't know about that, and I do know that since I came
home in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more. But his
harvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sat
around at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea of
his farming by government books, with no experience. They came to sit on
the rail fences around his fields and to spit out of the other side of
their mouths before the end of July, and I never went out to marvel,
myself, that I didn't step on that Commissioner of Agriculture, who
couldn't seem to keep away more than a few hours at a time.

As things grew and bloomed and burst and flowered and seeded, Sam went
calmly on his way of work with the crops from dawn to dark, and Peter
did likewise. I never saw anything like his friendly pride in every
successful test of Sam's work. And his own fat was getting packed on him
at a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, clean
pens that Sam maintained in the condition of a sanitary detention
hospital. Also Peter never mentioned the play, I never mentioned it, and
Sam appeared to have completely forgotten it.

I didn't quite like for Sam to forget Peter's play like that, and I
liked it less when I heard Julia say that she thought it was so
fortunate that Sam had cured Peter of being a poet, so he could go into
his father's office to learn to take care of his great fortune. Pet