said. Another boy is in a
drug store, and the man that hires him says he is a royal feller."

"Kind of a castor royal feller," I said, with a shriek of laughter.

He waited until I had laughed all I wanted to and then he said:

[Illustration]

"I've always hollered for high terriff in order to hyst the public debt,
but now that we've got the national debt coopered I wish they'd take a
little hack at mine. I've put in fifty years farmin'. I never drank
licker in any form. I've worked from ten to eighteen hours a day, been
economical in cloze and never went to a show more'n a dozen times in my
life, raised a family and learned upward of two hundred calves to drink
out of a tin pail without blowing all their vittles up my sleeve. My
wife worked alongside o' me sewin' new seats on the boys' pants,
skimmin' milk and even helpin' me load hay. For forty years we toiled
along to-gether and hardly got time to look into each others' faces or
dared to stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health
failed. Ketched cold in the spring house, prob'ly skimmin' milk and
washin' pans and scaldin' pails and spankin' butter. Any how, she took
in a long breath one day while the doctor and me was watchin' her, and
she says to me, 'Henry,' says she, 'I've got a chance to rest,' and she
put one tired, wore-out hand on top of the other tired, wore-out hand,
and I knew she'd gone where they don't work all day and do chores all
night.

"I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while
previous to that, and then I called in the boys. After the funeral it
was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin' we had
to put up with, and nobody spoke up around the house as we used to. The
boys quit whistlin' around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves
about going to town and gettin' a job.

"They're all gone now and the snow is four feet deep on mother's grave
up there in the old berryin' ground."

Then both of us looked out of the car window quite a long while without
saying anything.

"I don't blame the boys for going into something else long's other
things paysbetter; but I say--and I say what I know--that the man who
holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually
makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good,
simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at nine o'clock, so that
future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm