"You are more than kind," Hiram told her. "But I understand that I may be able to go to housekeeping on my own account in one of the sheds--where the former tenant of the farm ran his incubators and brooders." "That Jim Brandenburg! He made me a lot of trouble. But he did have ideas about hens. I suppose that shed could be made comfortable for you if Mr. Bronson wants you right on the place." "I will try 'baching it,' Miss Pringle," Hiram said with firmness. "Well, just as you say. But I want you to come over to-day to dinner. You ain't prepared to go right to housekeeping, I'm sure." "Thank you; I will certainly come," Hiram assured her. "Do so," Miss Pringle said warmly, as she turned away. "Abigail will blow the horn when it's ready." He thanked her again. The terrible Miss Pringle did not prove to be so very formidable after all. It was evident that Battick had gained just as wrong an idea about his neighbors as the neighbors had about him. "I will keep on the blind side of both parties," Hiram Strong told himself. "It is well to have friends in both camps. One thing I surely want--that is, to keep on good terms with everybody about Sunnyside. I don't want to have any such difficulty here as I had with the Dickersons at first, back there at Scoville," he added, remembering very poignantly a neighborhood feud that had hampered him when he first went to work on the Atterson Eighty. When Miss Pringle had gone back to her neat little cottage across the road, Hiram began examining the buildings left standing on the Sunnyside premises. Nothing of importance but the dwelling itself had been destroyed by the fire. The barn had a basement with swinging stanchions for ten cows and stalls for several horses. The mows were filled with a good quality of hay, and some oats in the straw--a feed that Hiram did not much approve of. For a horse or mule has to be very hungry indeed to eat oat-straw, and fed in this way a large proportion of the grain is wasted and trampled underfoot with the roughage. "It looks to me," Hiram decided, after coming out of the barn, "that somebody tried to run a small dairy here without a silo. There are stacks of corn fodder, half of it winter-spoiled, and not a beast on the place to eat it up. It would pay Mr. Bronson to buy some young stock right now and turn it into the paddock back of the barn, and feed up all this roughage. "Even if there is little pasture on the farm, it would pay to do this, and if the stock is not fattened by May, hire pasture for them on neighboring farms. I hate to see fodder go to waste, for it is the most expensive feed a farmer can raise." Many an older farmer would have called in question the young fellow's statement. But Hiram was thinking no longer as a "one-horse farmer." He had got out of that class now. Here at Sunnyside, if he made a profit at all, it must be through much bigger agricultural activities than he had ever been able to compass before.