There was a Down-East housewife who, for years, was troubled with heart seizures. At the most inopportune times she would drop unconscious and after appearing for awhile to be at her last gasp would rally, and after an hour or so, seemingly would be as well as she ever had been. The frequency of these attacks naturally interfered with her husband’s labors and also was highly disturbing to his peace of mind. As he worked in his woodlot, or his hay meadow or about his barn he never knew when the hired girl would be coming at full speed breathlessly to tell him his wife had suffered another stroke and surely now was on the point of death. If his patience frayed under repeated alarms of this sort the worthy man gave no outward sign. Whenever the summons came—and it came very often—he would drop whatever he was doing and hasten to the house, invariably to find the sufferer on the way back to consciousness. One hot day he was hoeing his potato patch when word arrived by messenger that the invalid had just had an especially violent attack. He lumbered to the cottage. The form of his wife was stretched upon the kitchen floor where she had fallen. A glance told him that this time she had made a go of it. Beyond question, life was extinct. “Wall,” he said, “_this_ is more like it!” § 136 The Low-Down on the Saw-Milling Business An office-man for a Chicago lumber concern decided to get into the business on his own account. Sight unseen, he purchased a milling property in the White River bottoms of Arkansas at a figure which seemed to him highly attractive. He settled up his affairs in the city and caught a train for the South to take over the bargain. At a way-station on the edge of a swamp he left the cars. The man from whom he had purchased, a lean, whiskered individual, met him with a team and a buckboard, and together they started on the long drive back in the country. As they bumped along over the corduroy road the Northern man turned to his companion and said: “I’m hoping to make a good deal of money out of this new line and I’m trusting to you to put me onto the ropes. I know something about the selling end of the game but this is going to be my first experience in the actual getting out of the raw stock.” “Well, suh,” said the late proprietor, “I’ll give you my own experiences in the saw-mill business and then you kin draw yore own conclusions. This yere mill I sold you didn’t cost me nary cent to begin with. When my father-in-law died he left it to me all complete and clear of debt. “Labor ain’t cost me nothin’ because my two boys and me do all the work and we ain’t never had to hire no outside help. And the timber we’ve cut ain’t cost nothin’ neither ’cause, just between you and me, we been sort o’ stealin’ it off the land of a rich Yankee who owns a big stretch of the bottoms and ain’t got nobody watchin’ it.