bilities of managing the family household.

Farming was not the calling he would have chosen. He neither liked it, nor
was he endowed with that intuitive sixth sense on which so many farmers
rely for guidance amid the mazes of plowing and planting. By nature, he
was a student. The help he had sporadically given his father had always
been given rebelliously and been accompanied by the mental resolve that
the first moment escape was possible, he would leave the country and its
nagging round of drudgery and take up a broader and more satisfying
career.

To quote Martin's own vernacular, farming was hard work,--_damned hard
work._ It was not, however, the amount of toil it involved that daunted
him, but its quality. He had always felt a hearty and only thinly veiled
contempt for manual labor; moreover, he considered life in a small village
an extremely provincial one.

It was just when he was balancing in his mind the relative advantages of
becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and speculating as to which of these
professions appealed the more keenly to his fancy, that Fate intervened
and relieved him of the onerousness of choosing between them.

Martin could have viewed almost any other vocation than that of farmer
through a mist of romance, for he was young, and for him, behind the
tantalizingly veiled future, there still moved the shadowy forms of
knights, dragons, and fair ladies; but with the grim eye of a realist, he
saw farming as it was, stripped of every shred of poetry. Blossoming
orchards and thriving crops he knew to be the ephemeral phantasms of the
dreamer. Farming as he had experienced it was an eternal combat against
adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and
weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from
its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision.
One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see
in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing
_finis_ beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of muscle-racking
labor.

The farmer stopped work at twilight only because his strength was spent
and daylight was gone. The aching back, the tired muscles, could do no
more, and merciful darkness drew a curtain over the day, thereby cutting
off further opportunity for toil until the rising of another sun.

But although night carried with it temporary relief from exertion, it
brought wi