“We certainly have!” said Mrs. Pratt, and there was sincerity, as well as pleasure, in her tone. “I’ve often heard that good came out of evil, and joy out of sorrow, but I never had any such reason to believe it before this!”
Before the final parting, Eleanor had shown Mrs. Pratt exactly what she meant about the new way in which the butter was to be made.
“Of course, as your business grows, you will want to get better machinery,” she had said. “That will make the work much easier, and you will be able to do it more quickly too, and with less help than if you stuck to the old-fashioned way.”
“I’m going to take your advice in everything about running this farm, Miss Mercer,” Mrs. Pratt had replied. “You’ve certainly shown that you know what you’re talking about so far.”
“Take a trip down to my father’s farm some time, Mrs. Pratt, and they’ll be glad to show you everything they have there, I know. My father is very anxious for all the farmers in his neighborhood to profit by any help they can get. The only trouble is that a good many of them seem to feel that he is interfering with them.”
“Well, if they’re as stupid as that, it serves them right to keep on losing money, Miss Mercer.”
“But it’s natural, after all. You see they’ve run their farms their own way all their lives, and it’s the way they learned from their fathers. So it isn’t very strange that they’re apt to feel that they know more, from all that practice and experiment, than city people who are farming scientifically.”
“Does your father enjoy farming?”
“He says he does—and it’s a curious thing that he makes that farm pay its way, even allowing for a whole lot of things he does that aren’t really necessary. That’s what proves, you see, that his theories are right—they pay.
“Of course, he could afford to lose money on it, and you can’t make a whole lot of those farmers in our neighborhood believe that he doesn’t. So now he is having the books of the farm fixed up so that any of the farmers around can see them, and find out for themselves how things are run.”