"Jump right in, Jim; the water's fine for you just now. I'm not wised up yet to this new game of yours, but I've got a bet on you. Go to it and win." "It's my day to break the bank," asserted J. Rufus. "Your bet's safe. Go soak your watch and play me across the board." The telephone bell rang and Blackie answered it. "Come right over," he told the man at the other end of the wire. "Mr. Wallingford has arrived." He hung up the receiver and conducted Wallingford downstairs into a well-lighted room that jutted out in an "L" from the house, with a separate outside entrance toward the rear. "Observe the center of a modern agriculturist's web," he declaimed. "Sit at your desk, farmer, for your working superintendent is about to call on you." J. Rufus looked around him with vast appreciation. "I thought I had my own ideas about looking the part," he observed, "but you have me skinned four ways from the Jack." In the center of the room was a large, flat-top desk, and upon it was an extension 'phone from the country line. On the other side was the desk 'phone and call board of a private line which connected the house, the barn, the granary and a dozen fields throughout the farm. On one side was a roll-top desk, and this was Mr. Daw's. Opposite was another roll-top desk, for the "working superintendent." "At least one real farmer will have to be on the job," Blackie explained, "and I nabbed Hamlet Tinkle, the prize of the neighborhood. He is a graduate of an agricultural college and all the farmers think he's a joke; but I have him doped out as being able to coax more fodder from unwilling mud than any soil tickler in these parts. He helped me select the farm library." With a grin at his own completeness of detail, Mr. Daw indicated the sectional bookcases, where stood, in neat rows, the Government reports on everything agricultural, and treatises on every farm subject under the sun from the pip to the boll weevil. Filing cases there were, and card indexes, and every luxury that has been devised for modern office work. With an amused air the up-to-date farmer was leafing through one after the other of the conglomeration of strange books, when Hamlet Tinkle was ushered in by the ever-grinning Nellie. He was a tall, big-boned fellow, who had divided his time at the agricultural college between playing center rush and studying the chemical capabilities of various soils. Just now, though the weather was bracing, he wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with the front turned up, and a flannel shirt with no coat or vest; and he had walked two miles, from the place at which he had telephoned, in twenty-two minutes. "Mr. Tinkle--Mr. Wallingford," said Mr. Daw. "Mr. Wallingford, this is the gentleman whom I recommend as your working superintendent." Both Mr. Wallingford and Mr. Tinkle accepted this title with perfect gravity.