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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

HAPPY HOLLOW FARM WILLIAM B. LIGHTON

LIFE TOOK ON NEW SAVORS

By

William R. Lighton

Author of ^'Letters oj an Old Farmer to His Son"

Illustrated

Copyright, 1914, 1915, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright, 1915, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Life Took on New Savors . . . Frontispiece

Field

PAGE

The Old Huntsville Road 22 ^

Here Our Life Began ^^

For the Christmas Fire '^'*

Good for Generations to Come . . - 88 Everything for the Table at Bare Cost of Production ^^^

Our First Crop ^^^

So We Bought a Set of Goats .... 146

Increase

There Was a New Glory upon Our Own Harvest

We Were Making Our Acres Do Their Utmost 238 This Was Our Dream Come True . . • 272

Suppose you had wanted some big thing with all your heart for all your life; and suppose you knew that your wife had always wanted just the same thing in just the same way. Suppose that in the fullness of time, when you were in the very prime of your years, with the joy of life at its strongest, this fond dream should become reality ; and suppose that after half a dozen years of actual experience you should find the reality better beyond compare than the dream ever dared be. Suppose all this, and how do you suppose you'd feel ?

Well, that's the story of Happy Hollow Farm.

Maybe I'd better say right at the beginning, and have it over with, that ours is different from the general run of back-to-the-land stories. There was no harsh or bitter fact in our lives that drove us to farming as a last hope. I hadn't lost my job in town. I wasn't facing a nervous breakdown after long years of faithful service of an inhuman employer. We hadn't been worn to desperation trying to make both ends meet. Nothing like that. The plain, unromantic facts were that no man could have desired a kinder, better tempered, more considerate boss than I had. I was my own boss. For a long time I'd been making a pretty fair-to-middling living for my family, writing stuff for the magazines. Income was growing better and better as the years passed. We were getting our full share of the enjoyment of books and music and the rest of life's refinements. We were seeing something of the world between whiles ; we were making friends worth having; we were steadily widening our circle and getting good out of every minute of it. Besides, we were getting ahead a little. As for the health part of it, there wasn't a doctor of our acquaintance whom I couldn't have worn to a wilted wreck in a day's cross-country hike or a long pull at the oars.

I'm telling you this so frankly, not by way of bragging, but just to let you know that it wasn't a sense of failure or weakness or impending evil that set our minds toward our farm. We were faring uncommonly well. If we fussed a little now and then, wishing for something we hadn't, the fussing wasn't serious. The long and short of it is that if carking care had sought a roost on our roof in those days she'd have been driven to startled flight by the sounds of jocund well-being that overflowed the place.

Yet with so much happiness we hadn't reached the supreme content, the sense of crowning completeness. It's not easy to make that feeling plain. To be happily satisfied with life's richness, and yet to be possessed by great desire — there's something of the idea. We had our vision, Laura and I, and it was always with us.

The vision was not of great possessions, nor of great fame and high place, nor of any other of the fair, false lures to disappointment. It was a vision of Home. So that you may understand the rest of what I'm to write, I must try to make you see that vision as we saw it.

Laura and I were married in 1890. From the first our ideals of home hadn't a hair's breadth of difference. You might say that our idea took form before we were born; for each of us came of a long line of home-makers. It was in our blood. We might differ about other things, but never about that. For both of us home was life's one great essential. It wasn't merely a pretty sentiment; it was a ruling passion.

We were agreed in this, too: We would never compromise our vision; we would never let life offer us something "just as good" and accept it as the real thing. We should know a counterfeit when we saw it. We might have to accept postponement and maybe ultimate defeat; but we'd go down with our colors nailed to the masthead. Talk about fixed ideas ! We certainly had one of 'em.

Before ever we set pencil to paper with the first scrawled sketch, we had the picture in our minds. Wide spaces — that was the essence of it. It wouldn't answer at all that we should have just any sort of roof over our heads and then let the spirit of contentment do the rest. It wouldn't do at all that we should just ''take a house," live in it till we were tired, and then swap it for another, on the chance of by and by finding something that would suit us well enough. We didn't have to do any blind groping toward our reality. We knew from the very beginning what it must be.

A beautiful setting, somewhere, with hills and woods and clear water and far vistas — that's what we must find. We had never seen that spot; but we had faith. It must exist. There our house would stand, nestled safe in the heart of soft delights.

And such a house! For eighteen years it grew in our minds, taking form slowly, slowly. A wide-spreading roof of beautiful lines ; and beneath the roof wide, generous spaces. There must be nothing cramped. Our idea expressed itself in spaciousness, not in luxury. We must have lots of room. The living center of the whole thing would be a great, massive fireplace of stone, wide, deep-throated, fit to hold a roaring winter fire of huge logs of oak and hickory. Do you remember that Christmas scene in Pickwick Papers^ with the jovial old Wardle and his friends gathered about the blaze? In our first years together Laura and I read that story. After that, do you fancy you could have induced us to plan for steam radiators or a furnace in the basement? Right from that minute that fireplace was ours.

Around this our thoughts grouped themselves, opening out, broadening, room by room, space upon space, with nothing grudged and no mean subterfuges. We were to build, not for ourselves alone, but for generations. We dreamed of a home that, not in our lifetime alone, but through the generations to come after us, would slowly, slowly grow richer and richer in all life's sweetnesses and gentle memories. We would build an abiding place for the spirit that endures.

Most likely you can understand, without more telling, what we were driving at. Most of us, at one time or another, have nursed that fond notion. Laura and I clung to it as the first-born inspiration of our life together. Bit by bit we watched it grow. For years upon years we kept a portfolio of pictures and sketches and scraps; and now and then, when our life seemed to be halting a little, as if to catch its breath, we'd get these out and look them through and talk them over. That helped, no end.

There was one thing we always carefully avoided in our talks — the perfectly plain impossibility of actually doing this thing we were dreaming about, as matters stood with us. We lived at Omaha in those days. To make the barest beginning on that home of ours up there would have taken a small fortune. We had no fortune, and there was no chance of our ever getting one. Laura knew that as well as I did. I don't know why that didn't make us disgruntled or melancholy; but it didn't. Eighteen years is a long time to wait for the thing you want, as we wanted that home.

It was worth waiting for. Fulfillment of great desire is always worth waiting for. We have found fulfillment of our desire.

As I'm putting these words on paper, it's midnight. Excepting the lamp on my desk, lights are out in the house. Laura and the children went to bed an hour ago. It's early May, but the nights are still cool here. I built up a fire at sunset; a fire of oak and hickory logs banked against a big blackjack backlog. After supper we sat around the hearth, and I held little Peggy on my lap and read to her out of the Jungle Books until she grew drowsy. After that, Laura and I sat together for an hour or so, not talking much, but looking into the red flare and flicker of the flames, thinking. By and by she told me good-night, and I came over to my own room to write for a little while.

The fire still burns, softly. From where I sit I can see it glowing in the deep stone fireplace down the length of the big living room, and watch the ruddy, warm shadows on the walls and the high arched ceiling. It's very beautiful. There's a brilliant full moon in mid-heaven. The living-room floor is checkered with golden light falling through the small square panes of the long doors and windows. Looking out, I can see the long, soft, moonlit slope of the land toward the river, a half mile away; and beyond, the full rise of the spring-clothed, mist-crowned Ozark hills. It's very beautiful. One of my windows stands open, and on the slow air the odor of sweetbrier comes in. There's the smell of moist earth, too, and now and then a whiff of the pungent tang of wood smoke from some big brush fires that were set this afternoon. If I listen, I can hear the low chuckle of a brook a little way from the house.

This is fulfillment. This is the home of our dreams come true, just as we saw it through those eighteen years of waiting.

How did it come about? Well, that's the story, of course.

Maybe there's no better way to put it than just to say that our idea wouldn't wait any longer to be born. Ideas are a good bit like other living things ; when the birthtime comes, you can't put it off just because you think you're not ready. That's the way it seemed to work with us.

It was in the early spring of 1908. Laura was away from home on a visit. While she was gone, one night I got out paper and pencil and set to work. Until that time we hadn't even tried to make a finished plan; we had only sketches and scraps, here a little and there a little, on vagrant sheets. I began putting them together. Before I went to sleep that night I had sent to Laura my completed drafts.

They came back to me with only two words of comment: "Simply perfect!" That gave me plenty to think about until Laura got home.

"Well," I said then, "if that house is all right, let's go find a place to put it, so we can be getting started on it."

Laura laughed. I'd known that she would. She had always said that she was the "practical" one. She isn't a bit more practical than I am, if you get right down to it; but never mind that now. The point is that she laughed. No doubt it did sound funny.

"All right!" I said. "But we're going to build that house, just the way it lies there, before the end of this year. We're going to spend next Christmas in that very identical house."

"Why, old man!" Laura chided. She thought I was fooling. We had never got into the way of joking about that home of ours; we'd as soon have jested about an ailing child. By and by, when I kept on nagging, she knew she'd have to deal with me.

"Why, how are we possibly going to do it?" she asked. That's the sort of question that some people call "practical."

"I don't know," I said; "but we're going to start right off now and find out. We can't do it here ; that's true enough. It isn't a town-lot proposition. A suburban acre or two won't do. We must have lots of land. That home is going to need a big farm to go with it. It's going to be an old-fashioned homestead sort of thing. I guess we're agreed on that. Well, then, the thing to do is to go and hunt up our farm."

That brought on more conversation. Laura didn't want to hurt ; but she had to say it sooner or later. "Have you forgotten that it takes money to buy a farm?" she asked. "You know how much money we have."

I knew, well enough. By shaking out and cashing in all our resources we could have in hand in real money something less than four thousand dollars. I'll admit that that made me feel a bit uneasy. If it had been forty thousand I'd have felt better. Even forty thousand in Omaha wouldn't have let us "get by" with what we meant to do.

"No matter," I said. "Just listen to this, now : We want that place, wherever it is. It's ridiculous to suppose that it doesn't exist somewhere, when we've wanted it so long and so faithfully. We've never really tried to find it. That's what we're going to do now."

"But if we had a big farm, what should we do with it?" Laura persisted. "We're not farmers." It beats all how very practical a practical person can be if she puts her mind to it.

I'm bound to own that Laura was right, on the face of things. Neither of us was even distantly related to a farmer, except by marriage. That part of it didn't strike me as hopeless, though. We were used to keeping a cow and a few hens ; our town-lot garden had always been the envy of the neighbors ; for the last five years I'd been tending an acre of small fruits with uncommon success. We had the knack of making things grow and thrive. As the Frenchman says, we had "the smell for the soil." Besides, for years upon years we had been tireless readers of the literature of modern farming; we knew a lot of the theory of it. No, that part didn't appear hopeless, not ,by a long shot.

"Anyway," I said, "we can learn. That's not worrying me now. The point is to find the farm. We'll start so soon as you want to pack your suitcase."

Do you believe that the great gods ever give us mortals a "hunch"? Maybe we might as well believe it. If we don't, then we have to believe in luck, which isn't a speck more scientific.

Something or other, by whatever name you call it, led us straight to our dream-farm. I bought railway tickets to Fayetteville, Arkansas. There wasn't any reason in it; ordinary human intelligence had nothing whatever to do with it. We didn't know a blessed thing about Arkansas ; indeed, we shared a very common prejudice against her. You know how folks have always felt about Arkansas — that she's nothing but a dead spot on a live map. If we had tried to reason it out, we shouldn't have come to Fayetteville. But we didn't reason. A few daj^s before I'd happened to get hold of a "farms-for-sale" list sent out by a Fayetteville real estate man. We'd read thousands of such circulars. There was nothing seductive about this one; it was indifferently written and badly printed, as if with an eye single to cheapness. I'll never tell you why; but on that list I'd checked a farm. There was nothing alluring in the description: "120 acres 2^^ mi. from town, part cleared, no improvements, $2400. Part Cash." The rest of the circular let us know that Fayetteville was in the heart of the Ozark mountain country, and that here was the seat of the state university. That's all we had to go by.

It was the middle of a March night when we got to Fayetteville and went to bed. We waked in the morning in a blaze of crystal and golden glory. I didn't know quite what to make of it. Did you ever have your senses literally stunned by a flood of delights? It needed a little time to understand that this was the sunrise breaking in upon us. We stood together by the window, looking out. Before us lay a picture that just stubbornly won't be put into words. There were tree-arched roads and the white houses of the town. Beyond we could see the somber-toned buildings of the university. Below us, through a winding hollow, ran a shining river; and then again beyond, rolling miles on miles into the mist-softened distance, spread the billowy hills of the Boston Range, flushed with spring. Over all, mellowing it, suffusing it, melting it into liquid beauty, was that wonderful flooding light. "The light that never was on sea or land" — do you remember that? That's what it made me think of.

We walked the streets for an hour after breakfast, not saying much, but looking, looking. Wherever we looked, through every open space, there lay our hills, misty blue and misty green and misty gold — wonderful, wonderful ! We loved them. I think we both felt, right from that first hour, that we had come to the end of our rainbow.

"Well," I said, after a while, "we might as well go and have a look at the farm." There was only one farm in our minds. Think what you will, say what you like about it, the thing was already settled. We hunted up our real estate man, told him what we wanted, and showed him our checked copy of his list. "We want a place quite in the rough," I explained; "one that we may improve for ourselves. You understand."

He took a good look at us, to make sure that he understood. No doubt he had us sized up about right, as a couple of crazy enthusiasts. He didn't try to argue us out of our notion. "Yes," he said, "I guess maybe that place might suit you, if you really want one in the rough." Without more talk we drove out of town.

It was an old, old road we traveled; the Huntsville Road, it's called. Settlement of this Ozark country began a full century ago, in a day when rude trails were the only traveled ways. The Huntsville Road survived from the old times. It showed its age. Gray, tottering stone walls and gray, rotting rail fences meandered on either side, grown over with wild blackberries and thorny smilax and sassafras bushes. Here and there a huge elm bent over, its buds just breaking into frothy green. The rare farms along the road wore a shaggy, unkempt look. The road itself was rough — oh, yes, quite rough! Up hill and down it wandered, rain-rutted, twisting back and forth in quest of a smooth place it seemed never to find. We bumped quite a lot as we rode ; if the driver tried to dodge a stone in the wheel-tracks, he was sure to drop into a **chughole."

"They'll be working these roads when spring opens up a little more," our real estate man said. He needn't have bothered to say anything about it. We weren't really minding the bumps ; for ahead of us, with a fresh revelation at each new turn of the way, opened the White River Valley, rimmed with the hills. We gazed and gazed, and couldn't get enough of gazing.

By and by, turning off through a narrow, stony lane, we came to a rude wire gate in a crumbling rail fence. Just inside the gate the carriage halted.

"This is the place," our real estater said ; and then, like a wise man, he sat waiting. I think he had his doubts. We found out afterward that this farm of ours had been for years a standing joke to the real estate folk of Fayetteville. Nobody wanted it — its owner least of all. That's how it happened to be waiting for us. We had no doubts. That farm was ours!

What we saw was a rough, untidy expanse, a half mile across, stretching from point to point of a deep crescent of low wooded hills that opened toward the south. Here and there, at broken intervals, lay a tiny irregular patch of ground under plow; and in between these were deep, tangled thiclvets of wild growtjis, dense as a jungle. In the depths of this wilderness, somewhere near us, we could hear a brook making sport in a stony bed. Along the banks towered giant sycamores and feathery-limbed elms and stately walnuts. Countless plumed heads of dogwood bloom were thrust out of the greenery, and we caught the odor of hawthorn and honey locust.

"Come!" Laura said; and we got out of the carriage and walked down into the heart of the wild hollow, pushing the tangle aside that we might get close to the water's edge. The brook ran clear and free and cold. A little way up the bank we found a deep flowing spring, walled in in some old day, and brimming full. The ground was smothered in a very riot of spring bloom. Away up in the very tip-top of a sycamore, straight over our heads, a mocking-bird began singing, fit to split his little throat. I looked at Laura, and Laura looked at me; a smile passed between us — and it was all over!

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "That's no way to buy a farm." Well, don't I know it? But this wasn't a farm. It had been a farm once, long ago, and it would be a farm again by and by; but just then it was simply acres and acres of raw, untamed beauty, inviting us.

We walked around a little. The place lay in the form of an L — eighty acres across the south front, with forty acres of woodland on a hill at the back. There were three brooks wandering through the land. We stood at the edge of the woods and let our eyes follow their courses. Wherever we looked. Possibility was written large.

"There's wood enough right here," I said, "to run our big fireplace for a thousand years !"

The agent's circular had spoken solemn truth in saying that the place had no improvements. Nobody would have thought of giving that name to the weather-beaten old log house standing on the hill-slope, sheltering the tenant farmer and his family. The walls were mudchinked, the doors hung awry, the broken windows were patched with paper and stuffed with faded rags. The house-yard was an ugly litter of refuse of unnumbered years of shiftless living. Near by was a tumble-down stable of thatched poles. Down below, by the big spring, stood a log-walled granary — without any grain in it. No, there weren't any improvements.

The tenant, a lean, listless man of the hills, came up and joined us presently.

"You-uns thinkin' of buyin' thish-yere farm?" he wanted to know. "It ain't worth nothin'. It's a turrible sorry farm. You-all could starve plumb to death on thish-yere

farm."

Even the real-estater showed signs of emotion when we told him we were ready to talk turkey. The price was twenty dollars an acre ; we might pay one-fourth down and have any time we liked for paying the rest. We didn't try to dicker. If we had but known it we might have shaved several hundred dollars from that price by holding out and whip-sawing a while. We found that out afterward. If the agent had but known it, he might have doubled the price on us and we shouldn't have turned a hair. So maybe we're even. We certainly wanted that place — and we certainly got it. The trade was closed that afternoon.

"Well, we've bought something," I said to Laura when we were back at the hotel, slicking up a little for supper. To tell the truth, I was just the least trifle dismayed, now that it was all over and the tension relaxed and I could think deliberately of what we had done. I think Laura had something of that feeling, too.

"Yes, old man," she said. It seemed to me that her tone lacked gayety ; but maybe I was wrong about that.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I went on.

"Perfectly beautiful !" she said. There was the ring of enthusiasm this time. "But did you hear what that tenant said? He said we could starve to death on that farm."

"Oh, well!" I joked. "We could starve to death anywhere, if we wanted to."

There was a silence. The silence drew out and out. When I stole a glance at her she was standing at the window, looking away across the hills, touching her lips with a finger-tip — a little trick she has when she*s thoughtful. She has never told me what she was thinking about, all to herself, in that minute. I've wondered. When she turned from the window presently she was quite herself, smiling, game for anything.

"Could you see where the house is to stand?" I asked.

"Yes!" she flashed. "On that little knoll at the edge of the oats field, by that big wild cherry tree."

"That's the place!" I said. We stood together then and watched the sunset color fading; watched till there was nothing to see but the dull flush of the afterglow. "Come!" I said then. "We must get supper and be ready for the train home."

"Home!" Laura said. "Why, this is Home!"

I've told you some rather intimate things; for I've wanted you to know the state of mind we were in when we began our life of farming. We weren't driven to it, you see ; we didn't go at it in fear and trembling, as a last hard resort. We went at it with fine, strong zest, as to our life's crowning adventure. I think that promised pretty well for happiness.

II

Our farm was bought m March of 1908. Six weeks later, in early May, we had cut loose from our old life and had come to Arkansas to begin the new.

Nothing would satisfy us but to go at once to the farm. Thinking back, I have to laugh at our impetuous temper. There wasn't a building on the place fit to live in ; besides, the tenant's kase covered that year, to the end of the cropping season. We had no rights at all upon the land, save by sufferance, until the new year's crop would be gathered. There was some satisfaction, though, in thinking that this tenant was our tenant now. We had acquired him with the farm. He was farming "on shares," and was to give one half of whatever he harvested, by way of rental. We discovered after a time that this share of the crop had almost enabled the former owner to keep the taxes paid.

No matter about that. We had a tenant;

and he would be in possession of the farm, under a perfectly good contract, for the next seven or eight months. We had to negotiate with him for the privilege of coming upon the land to live in the meantime.

We discovered at once that we weren't going to be riotously fond of this tenant. He was very fussy, very jealous of those rights of his. He grudged the permission he gave us to pitch camp in the thicket down between the empty granary and the big spring. That was the only available spot, and we took it. It really suited us first-rate.

We got into town in the early morning of that May day. By noon we had secured a big tent and had bought camp tools and suppHes — laundry soap, and rope, and salt, and matches, and an ax, and some canned tomatoes, and a bottle of witch-hazel, and coffee, and oilcloth, and flour, and a couple of water buckets, and baking powder — a wagon-load of truck. Right after dinner we went out with this stuff. By the middle of the afternoon we had the tent set up and our beds laid out for night. I brought wood and water then, and at sunset we had our supper, holding our plates in our laps, sitting on the ground around an open campfire.

There were six of us: Laura, and my mother, and Dorothy, our daughter of fifteen, and Louis, who was twelve, and little Peggy, not yet three, and I, coming forty-two in the summer. Oh, yes, and there was Lee. I wish you might have known Lee. I don't know how old he was ; but he was a pronounced brunette with a trick of showing the whites of his eyes and his shining white teeth when anything tickled him. Something was always tickling him. We'd found him in Kansas and had brought him with us to Arkansas. Truly, he was a jolly soul. He's doing a life sentence in the Kansas penitentiary now, poor chap. I'll tell you more about Lee as we go along. It turned out that he was just no good at all for work; but while he lasted he was the Br'er Bones of our enterprise.