"When I'm ready to get my seed, Mr. Strong, just before planting time, I go over the ears I've saved, and what the rats have left me—"
"So you are a friend of the rats, too?"
"What d'you mean—a friend of the rats? I feel about as friendly to them as I do to potato bugs or polecats. Not any!"
"But you feed them—and, what's worse, on your seed corn."
"Like to see you keep rats out of anything that you have to keep corn in," said Daniel Brown energetically. "Not any!"
"We'll take that up at some future time," Hiram said seriously. "I don't believe in letting rats or mice have the run of my seed corn. I think too much of it. Besides, they often nibble the germ of the corn and that particular grain never comes up."
"Well, I count on the planter dropping enough in the hill to overcome that."
"And then you have to go tediously over the field and pull up the superfluous sprouts, don't you?"
"Who don't?"
"I hate to," confessed Hiram.