ating cow.

To walk humbly with the hens, that's the thing--after the classes are
dismissed and the office closed. To get out of the city, away from
books, and theories, and students, and patients, and clients, and
customers--back to real things, simple, restful, healthful things for
body and soul, homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents per
dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the 5-pound box! As for me, this does
"help immensely," affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't want
the "Eugenic Review"), and allowing Her to send the family washing
(except the flannels) to the laundry.

Instead of crippling normal man's normal work, country living (chickens
and a cow) will prevent his work from crippling him--keeping him a
little from his students and thus saving him from too much teaching;
keeping him from reading the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him from
too much learning; curing him, in short, of his "constitution" that is
bound to come to some sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by
chickens and a cow.

"By not too many chickens," she would add; and there is no one to match
her with a chicken--fried, stewed, or turned into pie.

The hens are no longer mine, the boys having taken them over; but the
gardening I can't give up, nor the seed catalogues.

The one in my hands was exceptionally radiant, and exceptionally full
of Novelties and Specialties for the New Year, among them being an
extraordinary new pole bean--an Improved Kentucky Wonder. She had
backed away, as I have said, and instead of looking at the page of
beans, looked solemnly at me; then with something sorrowful, something
somewhat Sunday-like in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in
the Catechism, she asked me--

"Who makes you plant beans?"

"My dear," I began, "I--"

"How many meals of pole beans did we eat last summer?"

"I--don't--re--"

"Three--just three," she answered. "And I think you must remember how
many of that row of poles we picked?"

"Why, yes, I--"

"Three--just three out of thirty poles! Now, do you think you remember
how many bushels of those beans went utterly unpicked?"

I was visibly weakening by this time.

"Three--do you think?"

"Multiply that three by three-times-three! And now tell me--"

But this was too much.

"My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly. It was--"

"No, I don't believe you do. I cannot trust you at all with beans.
But I should like to know why you plant ten