He found one man whose cribs were full of a small-cobbed corn of a yellow dent variety, but with many red kernels interspersed among the yellow on most ears. It might not have been what the judges at a corn show would have called true to type, nor was it a handsome corn. But it was as hard as a rock, well rooted on the cob, and, furthermore, it ground into the finest kind of meal. "How do you select your seed for this, Mr. Brown?" Hiram asked the farmer. "I just throw aside what look to me like good ears as the boys bring the corn up from the fields and I count the baskets. I don't try to select ears in the field as I hear they do on the agricultural college farm. That's all flapdoodle," said the old fellow, with evident confidence in his own opinion. "When I'm ready to get my seed, Mr. Strong, just before planting time, I go over the ears I've saved, and what the rats have left me--" "So you are a friend of the rats, too?" "What d'you mean--a friend of the rats? I feel about as friendly to them as I do to potato bugs or polecats. Not any!" "But you feed them--and, what's worse, on your seed corn." "Like to see you keep rats out of anything that you have to keep corn in," said Daniel Brown energetically. "Not any!" "We'll take that up at some future time," Hiram said seriously. "I don't believe in letting rats or mice have the run of my seed corn. I think too much of it. Besides, they often nibble the germ of the corn and that particular grain never comes up." "Well, I count on the planter dropping enough in the hill to overcome that." "And then you have to go tediously over the field and pull up the superfluous sprouts, don't you?" "Who don't?" "I hate to," confessed Hiram. "Lots of things about farming, young man, that we hate to do. And you'll find it out as you get older." "I don't doubt it. I'm learning things--both good and bad--every day. Don't you test your corn, Mr. Brown?" "What d'you mean? In the silly little boxes they tell about at the agriculturoolarulal college?" chuckled the old hard-shell farmer. "Not any! And I raise the very best corn in this section." "Don't you believe in scientific farming?" "Science is all right for city folks that need it when they come out on to the land and mess around, raising crops," declared the old man in good natured disgust. "But experience counts for more than book-learning, and don't you forget it." "But just think what you might do, Mr. Brown, with all your experience and just a little science." "Rats!" chuckled the old man. "That is much to the point," Hiram said gravely. "'Rats.' A little science properly applied would free your cribs of rats. I am going to send you a Government pamphlet on that matter." "I usually roll them into pipe-spills, young man," replied Brown. "I ain't never cultivated a taste for fiction."