The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring, and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I cannot understand. However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists. During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before. By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies. The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time, called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on. It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they hitched up and drove off to town. On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and piled them in the backs of their buggies.