ir fifty
progeny, for which I had established a price of twenty dollars per head,
through the two lambkins I had bought from Rufus for ten dollars, Mother
Cow and the calf, the hundred and fifty pearls in the incubators, half of
which I had sold to Owen and Bess and ten of which I had sold to a real
chicken dealer who knew Mr. G. Bird's pedigree and had come all the way
from Georgia to buy them. The whole inventory, including the wheat I had
paid Matthew for and the improvements I had made on the barn, or rather
Adam had made, also including the prospects in the garden, amounted to
eighteen hundred dollars. Then I thought still longer and finally after my
own name wrote one hundred and fifty dollars' worth of "education." The
total was nineteen hundred and fifty dollars, thus making a profit on my
investments of about eight hundred dollars. After this calculation I sat
and chewed the pencil a long time, then turned a fresh page, wrote, "Evan
Adam Baldwin," on the one side, "Profit" in the middle, and a large cipher
opposite.

Then I closed the book forever with such decision that the Leghorn lady and
Mrs. Ewe, who was helping her explore me, both jumped, and I rose to my
feet.

"I got eight hundred and fifty dollars out of the deal, and Evan Adam
Baldwin only got a few mediocre and amateur kisses, which he shared with
me, for all his hard labor in plowing and tilling and restoring Elmnest and
me to the point of being of value in the scheme of things. I got the best
of that deal and why should I sulk?" I said to myself in a firm and even
tone of voice. I didn't.

If I had worked like a couple of women when speeded up by a weird chant on
my heartstrings, which I now recognized was just a part of the system used
in my reorganization, I worked like five when my heart became perfectly
dead and silent. I got out of my bed the very minute that the first gleam
of consciousness came into my mind, before I could have a second to think
about anything unprofitable, plunged into the old brass-bound cedar tub of
cold water, which I had carried up from the spring in a bucket that matched
it the night before, got into my corduroys and smock, and was out in the
barn and at work before it would seem possible for a woman to more than
open her eyes of understanding upon the world. All day long I weeded and
hoed and harvested and fed and cleaned and marketed that farm until I fell
dead between the posts of the old bed at night.

I didn'