“Whatever you say, Miss Mercer! Though I’d never thought of having a name for the place before.”
“Lots of things are going to be different for you now, Mrs. Pratt. You’re going to be a business woman, and to make a lot of money, you know. Yes, that will look well on your boxes. When I get back to the city I’ll have a friend of mine make a drawing and put that name with it, to be put on your boxes, and on all the paper you will use for writing letters.”
“Dear me, it’s going to be splendid, Miss Mercer! Why, that fire is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to us, I’m sure!”
“I think we can often turn our misfortunes into blessings if we take them the right way, Mrs. Pratt. The thing to do is always to try to look on the bright side, and, no matter how black things seem, to try to see if there isn’t some way that we can turn everything to account.”
“Well, I would never have done it if you hadn’t come along, Miss Mercer. You gave us all courage in the first place, and then you got Jud Harkness and all the others to come and help me this way.”
“Oh, they’d have done it themselves, as soon as they heard. I didn’t suggest a thing—I just told them the news, and they thought of everything else all by themselves. The only thing I thought of was using your farm so that it would really pay you.”
“Now that you’ve told us how, it seems so easy that I wonder I never thought of it myself.”
“Well, lots and lots of farmers just waste their land and themselves, Mrs. Pratt. You’re not the only one. My father has a farm, and in his section he’s done his level best to make the regular farmers see that there are new ways of farming, just as there are new ways of doing everything else.”
“That’s what my poor husband always said. He had all sorts of new-fangled ideas, as I used to call them. Maybe he was right, too. But he didn’t have money enough to try them and see how they’d do, though we always made a good living off this place.”
“Well, the advantage of my idea is that you don’t need much money to give it a trial, and if you don’t succeed, you won’t lose much.”