"I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while previous to that, and then I called in the boys. After the funeral it was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin' we had to put up with, and nobody spoke up around the house as we used to. The boys quit whistlin' around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves about going to town and gettin' a job.
"They're all gone now and the snow is four feet deep on mother's grave up there in the old berryin' ground."
Then both of us looked out of the car window quite a long while without saying anything.
"I don't blame the boys for going into something else long's other things paysbetter; but I say—and I say what I know—that the man who holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good, simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at nine o'clock, so that future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the Senate and Congress and the While House—he is the man that gets left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States—I see by the papers—has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else and hollered for the Union and the Republican party and free schools and high terriff and anything else that they was told to, is left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over."
"Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress."
"That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced him and holds his head as high as a holly-hock. He bellers for protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivvers, and he has to wear his own son's lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the winter in the flannel that was wore at the riggatter before he went to Congress.
"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me. Damn a farmer, anyhow!"
He then went away.
