aces, and to set osage orange hedges
along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being
cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished
the land... they made the snow drift... nobody had them any
more. With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody
wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The
orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty
years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble
to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to
raise it.

The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the
farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now
they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either
stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were
always stirring up trouble. Evidently, it took more intelligence
to spend money than to make it.

When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the
Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's
degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph
would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make
anything the world needed.

Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was
twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no
ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he
admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs.
Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably
it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth
the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use
of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs.
Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this
security was what was the matter with everybody; that only
perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in
people and develop the mean ones.

Ernest, too, said "it's the best life in the world, Claude."

But if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake
in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you. To
be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep,
was like being assured of a decent burial. Safety, security; if
you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would
never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to
them.

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was
something wrong with him. He had been un