In the evening twilight I passed through the Roman Catholic community of St. James and walked on a few miles in the cool of the evening. Not every farm-house that I saw wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one, which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave evidence of infirm fortune. The garden-gate was off its hinges and was decrepit besides. With some difficulty I repropped it against the tottering posts when I entered. In a much littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged farmer, who with his hired man had just finished the evening milking. Without a word he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly through a strainer into a milk-can on the other side of the fence, as he listened to an account of myself. What I wanted was a place to sleep and a breakfast in the morning. In return I offered to do whatever amount of work he thought was fair. When the bucket was empty he gave me a deliberate look, then simply asked me to follow him to the house. Throwing himself at full length on the sloping cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the doorstep near by as a seat for me, and began to question me about the crops in the country about Algona. I was fortunate enough to divert him soon to his own concerns, and, for an hour or more, I listened, while he told me of a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years, he had worked hard, he said, and had seen the gradual settlement and growth of the region immediately about him; yet, with slightly varying fortunes, he was little better off than when he took up the farm as a pioneer. There was a mystery in it all that baffled him. Low prices were the ostensible cause of his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for his crops than they cost him; but back of low prices was something else, an incalculable power which took vague form in his mind as a conspiracy of the rich, who seemed to him not to work and yet to have unmeasured wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live at the cost of almost unceasing toil. By five o’clock in the morning we were at the chores, and were hungry enough when the summons came to breakfast at a little after six. There is, in certain forms of it, a cheerlessness in farm-life the gloom of which would be difficult to heighten. The call to breakfast came from the kitchen, which was a shed-like annex to the small, decaying, wooden farm-house. The farmer, the hired man, and I washed ourselves at the kitchen-door, then passed from the clear sunlight into a room whose smoke-blackened walls were hung round with kitchen utensils. The air was hot and dense with the fumes and smoke of cooking. A slovenly woman stood over the stove, turning potatoes that were frying in a pan, while, at the same time, she scolded two ragged children, who sat at the table devouring the food with their eyes.