"I wouldn't. I just wondered----. I want to build a house like a Swiss chalet, low and brown with a little corner tower for a sunroom, and a stone foundation just piling up naturally out of the ground, and a stone chimney with a fireplace as wide as a cave, where a person could dream the wildest kind of dreams and then live them. You can hear the creek roaring over the hill; there's enough water power there to run a factory, and the house could be made pretty snug, I think; but sometimes I'm afraid I've just let myself be carried away with a vision--east is east, and the country will never make a good imitation of the town. You have lived in the city, and you know the country pretty well. Do you think this could be made a place where--well, where anyone not used to country life would be happy?"

"I think it could." She was looking away and the tone did not sound at all impulsive. Desperately he tried again.

"Do you think a man would be a downright piker to ask a girl who has always had everything she wanted to come to a place like this?"

"No." The answer was very frank, and the girl bolted directly into a rapid, and not very comprehensive review of plans she had seen developed in less promising places. For some reason she seemed confused.

CHAPTER X.

From the day when he took the farmers of his county to see how another man had harnessed the creek which ran wild through his pastures, setting it to work to cut the wood, and grind the grain and to run every hand machine from the fanning-mill to the grindstone, the Agricultural Representative began to see visions.

"Did you ever see anything like it?" one man exclaimed when they were going over the details afterwards. "There wasn't a darned crank on the place. The thing must do more than one man's work, and the most soul-aggravatin' part of the work at that. Now at our place there's just the boy and me to do everything, and we're prowlin' around the barn with a lantern till nine o'clock most nights. We get a man for a month or two sometimes, but the wife isn't strong and it makes more work for her. Besides, as wages go now it doesn't pay. I know Jim gets discouraged sometimes. He has a fair schooling and the wages he could get in town must look pretty good compared with what we turn in in actual cash from the farm; a boy doesn't see what capital's being laid away in the place every year. If he's half alive he knows he's living the best part of his life now; and he isn't going to waste it all laying up something for a time when he can't enjoy it.

"I've tried to keep Jim at home by giving him a calf or a colt once in a while, like my father used to do, but if a boy has to feed calves and curry colts long after the hour when every other working man has hung up his overalls, he gets sick of them. I never saw a boy sick of tinkerin' around a gasoline engine or a motor, though. If Jim goes his mother and I might as well go too, and we're so used to the old place now that I guess we'd never get over being homesick if we left it. I wish you'd come up and measure the flow of our creek."

Another evening one of the young men who had taken the junior farmers' course in the winter came into the agricultural office looking rather embarra.s.sed.

"It's about the water-power," he began.

"Oh, yes," Billy encouraged. He wasn't thinking of much except water power these days and was glad of an opportunity to unload his enthusiasm. Besides, the boy had just commenced farming on a place of his own, and the agricultural adviser knew that young blood moves more quickly in adopting reforms. "I should think you'd have a pretty good force from that hill of yours," he said. "What did you think of doing?"

"Well, you see," the boy stammered, "it's like this. I ain't just sure what's the best way. I want to get married and I don't know what to do."

The Representative stared. He had had varied requests for advice since he came to stand for the Department of Agriculture in the community, but this was something new. Under his quizzical grin the boy reddened painfully. He had never seen the Representative's steady brown eyes hold such a glint of amus.e.m.e.nt, and he was afraid he was going to laugh.

"I'm sorry," Billy said without looking particularly sympathetic, "but I don't know much about it myself. It would just be a case of the blind leading the blind."

"Oh!" The boy began to grasp things; then he roared. "I guess you'll learn," he admitted dryly. "Leastways you don't strike the neighborhood up around 'The Heights' as one that wasn't interested."

Billy felt his own face warming up. "The Heights" was the section surrounding the Evison estate, and in his evening spins over the country roads he had often met his client jogging quietly along in a rubber-tired buggy, his feet stretched out comfortably on the dashboard and his interest evidently very much absorbed in a white-robed presence beside him. Billy felt that they had a singularly common interest, and he shook hands with him across the table.

"Go ahead," he said. "What has the water-power to do with your case?"

"If you'd been down at our club meetings oftener this summer you'd have known I was keeping company with the school-teacher."

There was an unmistakable pride in the confession. The school-teacher evidently held a rather superior place in the social life of the neighborhood, and again Billy felt the nearness of a kindred interest. At the same time he interpreted something of reproach in the words "if you'd been down to our club meetings oftener...."

Unfortunately the club met on Tuesday evenings and Miss Evison seemed to be free more often on Tuesday than on other nights of the week.

Frequently when he was about ready to leave the office the 'phone would ring and the familiar flute-like voice would pipe, "I was afraid you might have gone. I meant to call all afternoon and had almost forgotten." Then the tone would drop almost to a whisper, "I'm afraid I've been very stingy of my time lately, but we'd have the whole evening to ourselves if you'd care to come to-night."

Once he had been obliged to tell her that this was the night when his Junior Farmers held their meeting and that he had almost promised to be there.

"I'm so sorry," she replied, with touching plaintiveness. "We're having a little euchre. Some friends from town have just dropped in.

They're very informal, and I know you'd enjoy it. You couldn't leave your precious young farmers for just one night?"

"I've done that so many nights. Perhaps I could leave the meeting early and call on the way home?"

She was unmistakably hurt.

"Oh, no; don't trouble," she answered quickly. "I wouldn't _think_ of having you do such a thing. It doesn't matter. I just thought perhaps you'd _like_ to come."

Another time he had asked her to come with him. It was an evening when girls attended.

"You know," she said, "it's very sweet of you to offer to take me right into your Holy-of-Holies to hear how they feed their calves and the like, but it would be casting your pearls before a very ungrateful little pig. I wouldn't enjoy it a bit. And I think, too, if you'll take an experienced person's advice, that you're getting too much of it yourself. Do you know that you've talked to me an hour now, about waterwheels?"

"I'm sorry."

"I like to hear about them, and what you're doing and everything, but don't you think if you work all day at that sort of thing, it's enough without running to meetings at night? It doesn't leave you any time for social interests at all. I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble in getting into the Country Club, and the people there are so different. Most of the members are men and women of wide social experience."

Billy knew something of their social experience, but he didn't tell her. Neither did he make any effort to gain admittance to the club, but he did spend more evenings attending theatres and motoring excursions than was good for his Junior Farmers' Society. He felt that he deserved the unconscious reproof, "If you'd been at our meetings oftener," from this young man whose aspirations were, after all, so like his own. Evidently, however, his friend's efforts had accomplished something, while his case was as uncertain as ever.

"You're going to marry the teacher, then?" he asked.

"Yes." There was no doubt about that. "She isn't afraid to go on a farm because she doesn't know anything about it. She'd always lived in town before she came here, but she's crazy about the country, and no gush about it either. She takes the kids to the woods and has them making gardens at the school, and all that. When I bought the farm every old wiseacre in the settlement came and said: 'You're making a mistake. That girl's never done farm work and wouldn't stand it for a year.' I could have wrung their necks. I didn't want to marry any girl to have her help to support the place. I thought I could make things so she wouldn't have to work any harder to take care of a home out here than she would in town. There was no person I could ask about it until you brought that girl out to the farm excursion. I didn't know what she'd think, but I didn't suppose I'd ever see her again, anyway, so I asked her if she thought a fellow had any right to take a girl who didn't know anything about farming out to a place like mine, and if she thought a farm house could be made just as comfortable and handy as a place in town. She's some girl that. She never smiled, and she didn't seem surprised--she was a sight more considerate than some other people I know. She said that a girl worth having wouldn't be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man, but that the work on an average farm with no conveniences at all was too hard for any woman. Then she showed how an ordinary house could be made a regular doves' nest for the price of an automobile."

Billy was thinking of his own inquiry on the way to the station. It struck him with a certain grim amus.e.m.e.nt that she would be rather impressed with the prevailing sentiment. And she had said: "A girl worth having wouldn't be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man." She hadn't told him that.

When he came out of his reverie the boy was still talking.

"So I thought if you'd come and measure the flow of the creek," he was saying, "I'd know what to do. If there isn't enough water power, I'll get a gasoline engine big enough to pump water for a bathroom and do the power work around the house, anyway."

A few other inquiries for power systems came in, but their motives were more purely economic. The labor problem was becoming more baffling every year; hired men were expensive, and they wouldn't stay. The water power, once installed, would cost nothing; it would work all day and all year until the bed of the stream was worn level.

Billy knew that once started the fever was bound to spread, and he had visions.

When his car climbed the hills at sunrise, as it often did now that the work was pressing, with school fairs and marketing a.s.sociations busy disposing of the year's harvests, he frequently saw a round-shouldered, blue-overalled boy, half awake, plodding out to the barn. He remembered well the sleepy stupidness, the torturing ache of the body weakened by the fever of growth, and stiffened by long hours of a man's work. Some day, he believed, every farm in the district would have mechanical power doing the heartbreaking drudgery which was making boys shiver at the thought of farming all their lives.

Occasionally a woman coming from the barn with her milk-pails and a fretful little toddler or two tagging along after her would startle him with a crowd of memories which he had been trying hard to forget.

Whatever changes might come now, he would always have to remember that until he was old enough to do it himself, nothing had been done to make things easier for his mother. In the evenings when he drove home late and saw families still struggling with belated ch.o.r.es, he had a dream of a time when every farm would have regular hours, when the family would gather in the evenings not too tired to enjoy each other, when the mothers of the farms, famed in all history for giving the world its st.u.r.diest, brainiest children, would have time to give their best to all their children, to put their best work on the black sheep, or misfits, or handicapped, or delicate ones, for whom there is little special provision in the country outside their own homes.

A speaker at a political meeting in the town hall had recently expressed something of the same ideas. "There is a movement for better things among the farmers' wives," he said. "The idea is finding recognition among them that all the prizes of progress are no longer to be allowed to go to the man-life on the farm while the woman-life is left to vegetate. The woman on the farm must bear the oncoming hosts of strong men, or they will not be borne. And unless the farm women can live under conditions which make for happiness, health and pride our whole nation will be weakened by ill-health, unhappiness, and unrest of the mothers and wives."

A few of the more adventurous women had accompanied their husbands to hear the speaker, but they gave little sign of their approval or disapproval of his sentiments. A week or two later Mrs. Burns called at the agricultural office to see if the Representative would have time, with all the community water-power demands, to help do something for the children. Billy hoped he would have time.

Recollections of certain experiences of his own childhood on the Swamp Farm had left his sympathies quick for any youngster suffering possibly some of the same tribulations. Yet he knew the homes in the neighborhood pretty well, and he knew that child-labor could not be called an evil of the section, except in the backward crevices of the hills, and in the best counties of the province there are "way-back"

places where a lot of evils go unmolested. Even on one of the leading farms near the town, where the children of the family were perhaps over cared for, there was a "Home-boy," stolid, stunted, stupid-looking, who couldn't talk plain, and who went around with his mouth open and a painful, bitter look about his eyes. Billy had misgivings as to how things were going with him. He felt ready to support any movement which Mrs. Burns might have in mind.

"You remember hearing that political speaker say that the woman on the farm gave the world its st.u.r.diest children?" she began. "Well, after what I had seen in hospital work, and what I've seen right around home, I wondered. Last week we had a doctor talk to us at the Women's Inst.i.tute, and he showed us that the tradition that children brought up in the country are healthier than children brought up in the city is all a lie. He showed us that while the death rate in the cities has been going down steadily for the last ten years, in the country it maintains a pretty straight line. The beginning of most of it starts with the children. In the country we don't go to doctors or dentists or oculists until the case gets desperate; it's a good deal of trouble to go, and often the cost has to be considered. Most people have never been taught that "little" things like enlarged tonsils or bad teeth can become very serious.

"I was in a house the other day when one of the girls came home from school crying with a toothache. She had been suffering for weeks, but they said it was only a first tooth; it would soon come out itself.

She had never gone to a dentist in her life, and her front teeth were so crooked as to be a disfigurement. If something isn't done soon she will have to go through her whole life disfigured. It isn't fair.

"One of our neighbor's boys had always been considered stupid. The teachers didn't know what was wrong with him; he just didn't grasp things. He also made a great deal of amus.e.m.e.nt for the school by his awkwardness; he couldn't walk across the room without b.u.mping into things. They have just by accident discovered that he's nearly blind.

The oculist can do a good deal for him even yet, but he can never bring his sight back perfectly, and his school years have been wasted. That could have been prevented.

"In a garden in our little village at home, a young woman with a twisted back works all day with the flowers--they are the closest friends she has. I've noticed that she is always there in the morning and afternoon when the school children go past. They pick the flowers through the fence and go on unrebuked, and I've seen her stand watching them up the road, especially the little five-year-olds, with tears in her eyes and a look almost rebellious. She won't ever have any children, you see. And it's all because no one noticed the curvature when it was just beginning and could have been straightened. She was sent to school to sit in the same old painful seat day after day so she might 'pa.s.s the entrance.'

"Just one other case. On the farm next ours, a girl with brown eyes like a Madonna's, and the proverbial crown of red-gold hair, is suffering everything from the consciousness of a cruel disfigurement.