"Good work! I don't blame you. I certainly don't want it—if you do. I hope you won't go back on letting me rent a few acres, though, to try my hand at farming, in the spring?"
"Jarve,"—Max sat down on the kitchen step—"do you seriously think a fellow could make a living off this land—taking into account all the squash-bugs and fruit-tree pests and tomato-grubs and every other thing that I've always understood makes the life of the farmer miserable?"
"I think," replied Jarvis, laughing a little at Max's way of putting it, but awake to the importance of discussing the matter seriously, if Max showed an inclination to do so, "that trying to do it, with the help of all the experience that modern experiment stations have placed at our hands, would be about the most interesting thing possible. You might not want to give up all other business till you had proved that you really could do it, but I certainly do think the thing would be well worth trying. It's being attempted more and more these days by educated men, college graduates and professional men of all ranks, partly for the pure interest of the thing, partly because the out-door life is about the best worth living. Look at Don Ferry, for an example. Could he possibly have the hold he has on that crowd of his at the Old Dutch if he weren't a man made of substantial flesh and blood, his brain as healthy and his heart as warm as exercise and oxygen can make them?—Well, perhaps he could, if he were one of your pale and scholarly ghosts, but I doubt it."
"This idea of living out here in winter—" Max went off on a new tack—"it's seemed to me absolute foolishness. But if Neil Chase is so, confoundedly anxious to move in before we can move out—"
"Neil Chase!"
"Yes. He practically made me an offer for the place to-night."
"Well, well!" Jarvis's eyes gleamed with satisfaction in the darkness. So old Neil was helping the thing along, was he? Nothing could have been better. "Going to consider it?"
"Hardly! See here, could we keep warm in that barracks this winter?"
"You don't have to live all over it. With those fireplaces and waste wood enough in your lot up there to run a blast-furnace, I don't see why you should have any fear of freezing."
"Our little stock of furniture wouldn't go anywhere in furnishing."