“I want to see how you manage your farm,” I said. “I shall be honored,” he said with the sincere but exaggerated politeness of his race. “But it is not much, just a few acres.” It was not until midnight that the last of our guests left, for Pelletti, who had brought along his fiddle, furnished music for a dance. It would have done your heart good to watch those people dance--especially the girls. The fiddle seemed to become part of them. Before we knew it Ruth and I were on the floor and Dick had seized Lucia, Dardoni’s oldest daughter, and followed at our heels. It was right after this that I began to plan the development of my farm. It was of course much too late in the season for me to attempt to plant anything. However, there were many other things about the place that needed attention. I hired Hadley by the month to help me and started in at once clearing up generally. I had him repair the walls and fences, cut bushes, trim the trees, and do the chores around the house. I bought a cow for the sake of having our own milk for the kiddies, and so he also had her to look after. I paid him forty dollars a month and it was all he was worth. Dick and I used to do as much every Saturday afternoon as he did through the week. I made one other investment this season; I bought a second-hand automobile. This made me independent of trains and allowed me many an odd hour at home which otherwise I would have lost. I could make the run from my office to the house in thirty-five minutes, but the thing cost me first and last a good deal of money. It didn’t take me a month to learn that anyone who figures on saving car fare with one of them makes a mistake. However, I figured that we would save enough in other ways to make up for this added expense. Here again I soon learned I was mistaken, and that brought me face to face with a new revelation which knocked sky high some of my preconceived notions. We found when we came to settle our first month’s store bill that it was costing as much and in some cases more for our food stuffs than it had cost in the city. When Ruth came to me with the bills and I looked them over I was astonished to find that the prices even for eggs and butter were those current in town; that such staples as sugar and flour and lard were if anything a little higher and that for vegetables we were actually paying more than we did at the city market when Ruth was doing her own marketing. “Well,” I said, “what do you make out of this?” “I don’t understand about the butter and eggs,” she said, “but of course I don’t have the chance here that I used to have to get cut prices on the other things.” “I know,” I said, “but these men don’t have to pay high rents or an expensive staff of clerks. They don’t even advertise. It looks to me as though our friend Moulton was taking advantage of us. Probably he thinks we’re city folks and don’t care what we pay.”