Mother Atterson's letter continued in this strain and to great length. But Hiram was very glad to hear the particulars of Sister's good fortune. For there would always be in Hiram Strong's heart a very tender place devoted to Sister. The little slavey of the boarding house was developing now into an intelligent and attractive girl.
Of course, Hiram told himself, she would never be like Lettie Bronson or the other girls who attended St. Beris, for instance. But there was something very sweet about Sister's character that Hiram felt and liked. She was almost like a real sister, and more.
Hiram went on to his living quarters and made his seed testing boxes, using the canton flannel instead of earth in which to germinate the corn selected from the ears he had bought of Daniel Brown. He made his boxes two inches deep and about thirteen inches wide, allowing for the width of the flannel, which was twenty-seven inches, folded once and taking into consideration the slight shrinkage of the cloth.
Hiram considered the flannel better in the seed boxes than either sand, soil, or sawdust. Three or four thicknesses of cloth in the bottom of the box and two thicknesses over the seed, all well dampened, makes the ideal seed testing bed.
He washed the new cloth thoroughly and after it was dried and folded in the box as a bed, he marked it off into checkers of two inches each with an indelible pencil. He then soaked the cloth and replaced it in the box.
Shelling off and discarding the small and irregular grains from the tips and butts of the ears he intended to test, he selected the kernels to be germinated and placed those from ear number one in the first square on the canton flannel, germ side up, from ear number two in the second square, and so on. Wetting the other strip of flannel he covered the corn, and on top of the box laid a pane of glass that fitted tightly.
This method of testing seed enables one to examine the seed at any time without injury to it; the amount of water condensed upon the under side of the glass will usually show whether the cloths are drying out or not.
The numbered ears Hiram stacked upon a hanging shelf in one of the laying houses, confident that neither rats nor mice would reach the seed corn in that place.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BLUEBIRD