“I have only one problem now. In twelve years my cows and hogs have paid for themselves, paid for my farm, built my barn and house. The one problem is not money any longer, but it is my boys and girls. They are just now at the point where the home can no longer hold them, and they will, I fear, sink into the mire of this godless community.” “What do you mean, ‘mire’?” I inquired. “Well, it is hard to put into words,” he continued. “Perhaps this will give you some idea: since I have been here, now twelve years, not a wedding has taken place anywhere hereabouts that has not been forced. And this is not the worst of it.” “Why don’t you start a Sunday-school?” I urged. “Too late!” he sighed. “My children are almost beyond me. I was, I fear, too busy with my cows and pigs, and the children just grew up before I knew it.” “What will you do?” I could not refrain from asking, more to myself than to him, in my own perplexity, as I tried to share in the problem. “The only thing I can do,” said he, as if the conversation had strengthened a previous resolution half-heartedly entertained, “is to yield to my wife’s judgment; sell the farm, go to some safe community where there is a church, Sunday-school, and a high school. We people here in this community made our great mistake in starting out wrong. We made a religion of our pure-bred hogs and cattle, and let our boys and girls go to the dogs.” This tale of children, who turned out to have been unwittingly sidetracked by cows and hogs, recalled my own experience in breaking some new land in the Skims at a period in my life when the doctor had said: “What you need is to get close to the land. Crawl around on the soil a year or two and you will learn over again how to sleep.” Well, with my old horse The Cid and a mail-order one-horse plow, I went through the motions of plowing that pine cut-over from which the pines had been skimmed off like cream from a milk-pan. Surveying the scratched and torn field, somewhat bruised and bleeding, I will declare it was, I said to myself: “It doesn’t look really plowed; but it will be all right when I get it dragged.” Then The Cid did his very best at dragging. Dutifully--with an inner chuckle, I am sure, at my green expectations, for he was a seasoned old Skims horse himself--he plodded along and over the field. At last I stood sweating and weary, looking it over, and was obliged to own up: “It doesn’t look dragged; but it will be all right when I get it cultivated.” I went through the form of marking and planting, and though I couldn’t see the rows very well, I quieted my discontent by saying to myself, “It will be all right when I get it hoed.” But when the corn came up, it was accompanied by such a community of weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, that I couldn’t cultivate because I couldn’t see the corn. After I had in much perplexity stared at the cultivator and then at the field, I looked that piece of work square in the face and averred: