They would sit about the doorway after sundown to rest and often a neighbor, come on an errand, would linger with them there. Sallie would have fastened the last of the chickens and turkeys into their small coops and she would sit in the grass, growing quiet now as she approached the necessity of sleep. On Saturday evenings the talk beside the door lasted until long after nightfall. Sometimes Theodosia would sit with them in the twilight, or again she would go to the upper gallery, her place, and play for them on her instrument if they desired this, or she would call down replies to them when she was questioned. Often Caleb Burns came, stopping but a little while if it were an evening before a busy day, or lingering an hour or more at the end of the week. Then he and Lucian West talked of their farming and recounted their experiments or offered proofs of this thing and that, or Burns fell into monologue while all sat still to hear him. Midi would be asked to confirm a date, or place rightly some distant sequence of incidents. She dated all happenings by the birth of some child, either her own or some other woman’s offspring. Her chronology was final and beyond dispute, her datings written with the indelibles, pain and new life. The men used history and memory and were often refuted, their method wanting. Sitting on the small gallery above, their voices would come to Theodosia, but half attended, as the refrains from some flowing song into which she had gone and in which she lived. Caleb talked of the age when man followed after the herds as they roamed, to prey on their flesh, of the deep relation between man and these beasts, or another voice would give some reply. Man following after the herds.... Or, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn....” The Shorthorn, called formerly Durham, or Teeswater, or Holderness.... Used to be called the Patton stock in America, but new breeds imported of late.... This winter I fed corn silage with oat and clover hay and ground corn for a grain ration, mixed with bran and cottonseed meal, in proportions 200, 200, and 75.... Percentage of shrinkage in corn.... Mineral mixture for hogs.... Wood ashes and common salt. Ten parts of wood ashes to one part of salt.... Worms in hogs.... Internal parasites in sheep.... Grub-in-head, lung-worm, tape-worm, nodular disease, stomach-worms.... Drenchings.... Three-ounce doses of one per cent copper sulphate solution given three days in succession.... Drench your sheep twice a year.... Young lambs before and at weanen time.