第46章 THE COUNTY FAIR(2)

Why, how AIR you? How's everything? That's good. Let me make you acquainted with my wife. Molly, this is Mr. - " But she says: "Now don't you tell me what his name is. Let me think. Why, Willie Smith! Well, of all things! Why, how you've changed! Honest, Iwouldn't have knowed you. Do you mind the time we went sleigh-ridin'

the whole posse of us, and got upset down there by Hanks's place?"And then you start in on "D' you mind?" and "Don't you recollect?"and you talk about the old school-days, and who's married, and who's moved out to Kansas, and who's got the Elias Hoover place now, and how Ella Trimble - You know Ella Diefenbaugh, old Jake Diefenbaugh's daughter, the one that lisped. Course you do. Well, she married Ed Trimble, and he died along in the early part of the summer. Typhoid.

Was getting well but he took a relapse, and went off like that! And now she's left with three little ones, and they guess poor Ella has a pretty hard time making out. And this old schoolmate that you start to tell a funny story about is dead, and the freckle-faced boy with the buck teeth that put the rabbit in the teacher's desk, he's dead, too, and the boy that used to cry in school when they read:

"Give me three grains of corn, mother, Only three grains o f corn;To save what little life I have, mother, Till the coming o f the morn."well, he studied law with old judge Rodehaver, and got to be Prosecuting Attorney, but he took to drinking - politics, you know - and now he's just gone to the dogs. Smart as a steel-trap, and bright as a dollar. Oh, a terrible pity! A terrible pity. And as you hear the fate of one after another of the happy companions of your childhood, and the sadness of life comes over you, they start to tell something that makes you laugh again. I tell you.

Did you ever see one of these concave glasses, such as the artists use when they want to get an idea of how a picture looks all together as a whole, and not as an assemblage of parts? Well, what the concave glass is to a picture, so such talk is to life.

It sort of draws it all together, and you see it as a whole, its sunshine and its shadow, its laughter and its tears, its work and its play, its past and its present. But not its future. The Good Man has mercifully hidden that from us.

It does a body good to get such a talk once in a while.

And there are the young fellows and the girls. This young gentleman in the rimless eye-glasses, who is now beginning to "go out among 'em" the last time you saw him was in meeting when Elder Drown was preaching, and my gentleman stood up in the seat and shouted shrilly:

"'T ain't at all, man. 'T ain't at all!" And this sweet girl-graduate - the last time you saw her was just after Becky Daly, in the vain effort to "peacify" the squalling young one, had given her a fresh egg to play with. I kind o' like the looks of the younger generation of girls. But I don't know about the young fellows. They look to me like a trifling lot. Nothing like what they were in our young days. I don't see but what us old codgers had better hold on a while longer to the County Clerk's office, and the Sheriff's office, and the Probate judgeship, and the presidency of the National Bank. It wouldn't be safe to trust the destinies of the country in the hands of such heedless young whiffets. Engaged to be married!

Oh, get out! What? Those babies?

I kept awake most of the time the man was lecturing on: "The Republic: Will it Endure?" but I don't remember that he said anything in it about the crops. (We can't go 'round meeting the folks all day. We really must give a glance at the exhibition.)And I am one of those who hold to the belief that while the farmers can raise ears of corn as long as from your elbow to your fingertips, as big 'round as a rollingpin, and set with grains as regular and even as an eight-dollar set of artificial teeth; as long as they grow potatoes the size of your foot, and such pretty oats and wheat, and turnips, and squashes, and onions, and apples and all kinds of truck, and raise them not only in increasing size but increasing quantities to the acre I feel as if the Republic would last the year out anyway. Not that I have any notion that mere material prosperity will make and keep us a free people, but it goes to show that the farmers are not plodding along, doing as their fathers did before them, but that they are reading and studying, and taking advantage of modern methods. There are two ways of increasing your income. One is by enlarging your output, and the other is by enlarging your share of the proceeds from the sale of that output.

The Grand Dukes will not always run this country. The farmers saved the Union once by dying for it; they will save it again by living for it.

The scientific fellows tell us that we have not nearly reached the maximum of yield to the acre of crops that are harvested once a year, but in regard to the crops that are harvested twice a day it looks to me as if we were doing fairly well. Nowadays we hardly know what is meant by the expression, "Spring poor." It is a sinister phrase, and tells a story of the old, cruel days when farmers begrudged their cattle the little bite they ate in wintertime, so that when the grass came again the poor creatures would fall over trying to crop it. They were so starved and weak that, as the saying went, they had to lean up against the fence to breathe. They don't do that way now, as one look at the fine, sleek cows will show you. A cow these days is a different sort of a being, her coat like satin, and her udder generous, compared with the wild-eyed things with burrs in their tails, and their flanks crusted with filth, their udders the size of a kid glove, and yielding such a little dab of milk and for such a short period.

Hear the dairymen boast now of the miraculous yearly yield in pounds of butter and milk, and when they say: "You've got to treat a cow as if she were a lady," it sounds like good sense.