I’ve got my seed in, glory be! The deed is done; the mad scramble is over. And Mother Earth, as tired as a child of being mauled, lies sleeping in the sun.

If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we’ve been doing a heap of mouth-worship on Alabama Ranch this last few weeks. But the final acre has been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked and plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the heavy rains of Thursday night there’s just the faintest tinge of green, here and there, along my billiard-table of a granary-to-be.

But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, last night, I trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off most of the handle, and fastened it upside down in a hole I’d bored at one end of the lower door-step.

All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though I were what they call out here a Soil Robber, or a Land Miner, a get-rich-quick squatter who doesn’t bother about mixed farming or the rotation of crops, with no true love for the land which he impoverishes and leaves behind him when he’s made his pile. I want to make my pile, it’s true, but we’ll soon have other things to think about. There’s my home garden to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked after, and a run to be built for my chickens. The latter, for all their neglect, have been laying like mad and I’ve three full crates of eggs in the cellar, all dipped in water-glass and ready for barter at Buckhorn. If the output keeps up I’ll store away five or six crates of the treated eggs for Christmas-season sale, for in midwinter they easily bring eighty cents a dozen.

And speaking of barter reminds me that both Dinkie and the Twins are growing out of their duds, and heaven knows when I’ll find time to make more for them. They’ll probably have to promenade around like Ikkie’s ancestors. I’ve even run out of safety-pins. And since the enduring necessity for the safety-pin is evidenced by the fact that it’s even found on the baby-mummies of ancient Egypt, and must be a good four thousand years old, I’ve had Whinnie supply me with some home-made ones, manufactured out of hair-pins.... My little Dinkie, I notice, is going to love animals. He seems especially fond of horses, and is fearless when beside them, or on them, or even under them—for he walked calmly in under the belly of Jail-Bird, who could have brained him with one pound of his wicked big hoof. But the beast seemed to know that it was a friend in that forbidden quarter, and never so much as moved until Dinkie had been rescued. It won’t be long now before Dinkie has a pinto of his own and will go bobbing off across the prairie-floor, I suppose, like a monkey on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better than coming with his mother while she gathers her “clutch” of eggs. He can scramble into a manger—where my unruly hens persist in making an occasional nest—like a marmoset. The delight on his face at the discovery of even two or three “cackle-berries,” as Whinnie calls them, is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share in that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives me the feeling that I’m partaking of the bounty of Nature, that I’m getting something for next-to-nothing. It’s the same impulse, really, which drives city women to the bargain-counter and the auction-room, the sublimated passion to adorn the home teepee-pole with the fruits of their cunning!