Henry showed Hiram the “branch”, a little stream flowing into the river, which marked the westerly boundary of the farm for some ways, and they set off up the steep bank of this stream. This back end of the farm--quite forty acres, or half of the whole tract--had been entirely neglected by the last owner of the property for a great many years. It was some distance from the house, for the farm was a long and narrow strip of land from the highway to the river, and Uncle Jeptha had had quite all he could do to till the uplands and the fields adjacent to his home. They came upon these open fields--many of them filthy with dead weeds and littered with sprouting bushes--from the rear. Hiram saw that the fences were in bad repair and that the back of the premises gave every indication of neglect and shiftlessness. Perhaps not exactly the latter; Uncle Jeptha had been an old man and unable to do much active work for some years. But he had cropped certain of his fields “on shares” with the usual results--impoverished soil, illy-tilled crops, and the land left in a slovenly condition which several years of careful tillage would hardly overcome. Now, although Hiram's father had been of the tenant class, he had farmed other men's land as he would his own. Owners of outlying farms had been glad to get Mr. Strong to till their fields. He had known how to work, he knew the reasons for every bit of labor he performed, and he had not kept his son in ignorance of them. As they worked together the father had explained to the son what he did, and why he did it, The results of their work spoke for themselves, and Hiram had a retentive memory. Mr. Strong, too, had been a great, reader--especially in the winter when the farmer naturally has more time in-doors. Yet he was a “twelve months farmer”; he knew that the winter, despite the broken nature of the work, was quite as valuable to the successful farmer as the other seasons of the year. The elder Strong knew that men with more money, and more time for experimenting than he had, were writing and publishing all the time helps for the wise farmer. He subscribed for several papers, and read and digested them carefully. Hiram, even during his two years in the city, had continued his subscription (although it was hard to find the money sometimes) to two or three of those publications that his father had most approved. And the boy had read them faithfully. He was as up-to-date in farming lore now, if not in actual practise, as he had been when he left the country to try his fortune in Crawberry. Beyond the place where the branch turned back upon itself and hid its source in the thicker timber, Hiram saw that the fields were open on both sides of this westerly line of the farm. “Who's our neighbor over yonder, Henry?” he asked. “Dickerson--Sam Dickerson,” said Henry. “And he's got a boy, Pete, no older than us. Say, Hiram, you'll have trouble with Pete Dickerson.”