“I just discovered them this noon,” she answered. “You were working at the time. I was saving them for a surprise after supper. I’m glad Gladys and Gaynor brought no grandchildren, though. It would have been hard to name so many correctly right off the bat, and it’s terrible to start life with a wrong name.”
“As Mike would say, it is surely,” I answered. “That is why they were careful to call you Stella.”
“Do you like the name?” she whispered, creeping close to me. “Oh, John, I’m glad we’re not rich like them”–with a gesture toward the pack of calling cards–“I’m glad we can work in the garden with our own hands and play games with toads and just be ourselves. Let’s never be rich!”
“I promise,” said I, solemnly.
Then we laughed and went to hear the hermit thrush.
Chapter XXI
AUTUMN IN THE GARDEN
I SPENT considerably more money in July and August. Some of the items would be regarded as necessities even by our rural standards; some my farming neighbours would deem a luxury, if not downright folly. I was a green farmer then; I am a green farmer still; but as I began to get about the region a little more that first summer, especially at haying time, I was struck with the absurd waste of machinery brought about by insufficient care and lack of dry housing, and I began to do some figuring. All my rural neighbours, even Bert, left their ploughs, harrows, hay rakes, mowers, and even their carts, out of doors in rain and sun all summer, and many of them all winter. A soaking rain followed by a scorching sun seemed to me, in my ignorance, a most effective way of ruining a wagon, of shrinking and splitting hubs, of loosening the fastenings of shafts even in iron machinery. Neither do rusted bearings wear so long as those properly protected. I began to understand why our farmers are so poor, and I sent for Hard Cider.
Just behind the barn he built me a lean-to shed, about seventy-five feet long, open toward the east, and shingled rainproof. It cost me $500, but every night every piece of farm machinery and every farm wagon went under it, and the mowing-machine was further covered with a tarpaulin. For more than a year my shed was the only one of the kind in Bentford, and that next winter I used to see machinery standing behind barns, half buried in snow and ice, going to pieces for want of care. I verily believe that the New England farmer of to-day is the most shiftless mortal north of the Mason and Dixon line–and he hasn’t hookworm for an excuse.
My next expenditure was for a cement root cellar, which scarcely needs defence, as I had no silo on the barn, and it would not pay to install one for only two cows. But the third item filled Mike with scorn. I had been making him milk the cows out of doors for some weeks, taking a tip from one of the big estates, and keeping an eye on him to see that he washed his hands properly and put on one of the white milking coats I had purchased. His utter contempt for that white rig was comical, but when I told him that I was going to have a cork and asphalt brick floor laid in the cow shed, he was speechless. He had endured the white apron, and the spectacle of the tuberculin test (the latter because the law made him), but an expensive floor in the barn was too much. He gave me one pitying look, and walked away.