Every time I say "No" to the question "Goin' west harvestin'?" I am a little less brisk about reciting that triad of poems that I find is the best brief exposition of my gospel: (1) _The Proud Farmer_, (2) _The Illinois Village_ and (3) _The Building of Springfield_. If I do harvest it is likely to be just as it was at the Springfield water-works a year ago, when I broke my back in a week trying to wheel bricks. JUNE 12, 1912. On the banks of a stream west of the town of Warrensburg, Missouri. Perhaps the problem of a night's lodging has been solved. I seem to have found a substitute for the spare bedrooms and white sheets of Georgia and Pennsylvania. It appears that no livery stable will refuse a man a place to sleep. What happened at Otterville and Warrensburg I can make happen from here on, or so I am assured by a farm-hand. He told me that every tiniest village from here to western Kansas has at least two livery stables and there a man may sleep for the asking. He should try to get permission to mount to the hay-mow, for, unless the cot in the office is a mere stretch of canvas, it is likely to be (excuse me) verminiferous. The stable man asks if the mendicant has matches or tobacco. If he has he must give them up. Also he is told not to poke his head far out of the loft window, for, if the insurance man caught him, it would be all up with the insurance. These preliminaries quickly settled, the transient requests a buggy-robe to sleep in, lest he be overwhelmed with the loan of a horse-blanket. The objection to a horse-blanket is that it is a horse-blanket. And so, if I am to believe my friend with the red neck, my good times at Warrensburg and Otterville are likely to continue. Strange as it may seem, sleeping in a hayloft is Romance itself. The alfalfa is soft and fragrant and clean, the wind blows through the big loft door, the stars shine through the cottonwoods. If I wake in the night I hear the stable-boys bringing in the teams of men who have driven a long way and back again to get something;--to get drunk, or steal the kisses of somebody's wife or put over a political deal or get a chance to preach a sermon;--and I get scraps of detail from the stable-boys after the main actors of the drama have gone. It sounds as though all the remarks were being made in the loft instead of on the ground floor. The horses stamp and stamp and the grinding sound of their teeth is so close to me I cannot believe at first that the mangers and feed-boxes are way down below.