The boys spent one summer vacation at the country house of an old friend of the family and got ideas. They talked them over, went back to their friend for counsel, then turned their batteries on their parents to gain their consent to an important new enterprise.
Attached to the house was about an acre of ground, three fourths of which was old pasture grown to weeds and a tangle of brier bushes.
By promising to work for a farmer during the coming vacation the boys arranged to have the field, which they cleared and made ready, ploughed, harrowed, and marked in the most thorough fashion.
They planted it with the best variety of mid-season sweet corn. The farmer cultivated it, and the boys hoed it and kept it in almost perfect condition.
The season was very dry, but they laid a hose so as to start a stream of water into the lines between the rows of corn; then with a good pump they filled the trenches they had dug and completely irrigated the entire field.
The crop was a great success. The boys picked and sold at retail prices to private customers twelve hundred dozen ears of the finest corn raised in that section. As it averaged twenty cents a dozen, it footed up the very comfortable sum of two hundred and forty dollars with small ears and left-overs quite sufficient for the use of the family.
Two weeks from the first picking the stalks were cut and set up to cure for the cow that was really the object of their endeavour.
The friend of the family selected the cow. She was a fine, fresh, young Jersey and Alderney cross—a high-grade animal, good for quality as well as quantity of milk and cream.
There was small, well-built barn on the place, and here the cow was stabled. Cleanliness was the first, last, and intermediate law in and about the place. The boys had clothes expressly for barn wear and white aprons with long sleeves to put on when milking.
Such unusual attention to details attracted customers until the demand went far ahead of the supply.