This was very good from neighbor King--somethin' you wouldn't expect from such a sad or solemn-lookin' man, a man so quiet, so reserved, appearin' always as if he had some grief of his own, so that he could sympathize with others in misery. He must have been forty years old, for his dark brown hair was showin' gray around the temples, an' there were deep wrinkles around the corners of his mouth, an' lots of little ones around his deep, sunken brown eyes. It always seemed to me as if he'd been constructed for a minister or a lawyer, an' stopped half way as a farmer. He was no half-acre farmer, but a worker of hundreds of acres; an' my little homestead was only a potato patch alongside of his. The queerest thing about his place was that there wasn't a woman on it. All the work, cookin' an' everything was done by men. Well, girls was scarce in those days an' those parts, an' perhaps that was the reason. Maybe, again, he was afraid of women, an' didn't want 'em bossin' around his work. I didn't know an' didn't care. It was no concern of mine. I only knew he was mighty good to me in my affliction--the truest, steadiest, most unselfish friend a forlorn woman could have; an' every night I prayed for that same neighbor King, askin' the Lord to bless him for the goodness an' kindness he had shown to me. True enough, the grasshoppers didn't leave me much that year, just enough to keep soul and body together, with economy. The pesky things eat everything from pussly to leaves. I b'lieve they'd 'a' eaten the green out of the sky if they could 'a' got at it. Why, the earth looked as if the devil had gone over it with a brush of brown paint, missin' a spot here an' there that come up green after the critters had got away. There was only one thing they didn't eat, an' that was themselves--more's the pity!