mind--the average mind--was
weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had
got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and
suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty.

Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to Burns's
lack of management. Jim Butler, who owned a dozen farms (which he had
taken on mortgages), and who had got rich by buying land at government
price and holding for a rise, laid all such cases as Burns's to "lack of
enterprise, foresight."

But the larger number, feeling themselves in the same boat with Burns,
said:--

"I d' know. Seems as if things get worse an' worse. Corn an' wheat
gittin' cheaper 'n' cheaper. Machinery eatin' up profits--got to _have_
machinery to harvest the cheap grain, an' then the machinery eats up
profits. Taxes goin' up. Devil to pay all round; I d' know what in
thunder _is_ the matter."

The Democrats said protection was killing the farmers; the Republicans
said no. The Grangers growled about the middle-men; the Greenbackers
said there wasn't circulating medium enough, and, in the midst of it
all, hard-working, discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on,
unable to find out what really was the matter.

And there, on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and
thought, till he rose with an oath and gave it up.

IV

It was hot and brilliant again the next morning as Douglas Radbourn
drove up the road with Lily Graham, the teacher of the school in the
little white schoolhouse. It was blazing hot, even though not yet nine
o'clock, and the young farmers ploughing beside the fence looked
longingly and somewhat bitterly at Radbourn seated in a fine top-buggy
beside a beautiful creature in lace and cambric.

Very beautiful the town-bred "schoolma'am" looked to those grimy, sweaty
fellows, superb fellows too, physically, with bare red arms and
leather-colored faces. She was as if builded of the pink and white
clouds soaring far up there in the morning sky. So cool, and sweet, and
dainty.

As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the
poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew
distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped
and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of
some time in the far future standing a chance of having an introduction
to her, caused them to wipe their palms