Doubtless they would if I had given my permission, but when I wasn’t hoeing I was spraying with Paris Green. More than this I went around with a tin can and knocked off into this all those bugs which did succeed in reaching maturity. A couple of sprayings a season was the most anyone around here ever did. So long as the bugs were kept down enough not actually to kill the plants most people hereabout were satisfied. I don’t believe an even hundred of the pests succeeded in getting a square meal off my potatoes. Now in all this I insist, and it’s evident on the face of it, that such attention didn’t imply on my part any scientific knowledge of farming. I did what I was told to do and did it thoroughly. I did what it seems to me I should have known enough to do even if I hadn’t been told. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too; you can’t let bugs eat your potatoes and have your potatoes, too. It was queer sort of reasoning that until now had convinced my neighbors that this was possible. They had almost fatalistic theories about farming. They seemed to think that the most any man could do was to plant his seed and then trust to Providence for what might result. This pious faith in the bounty of the Almighty was fundamentally of course merely an unconscious excuse for their own laziness, but it seems to me it really must have been at the root of their shiftlessness--an inheritance perhaps. Hadley was a fine example of it. I gave up early in the season trying to inspire him even with the help of the prizes. He did plant a few hills of corn but he refused to hoe them more than once. Now what I did myself, a large part of my neighbors were also doing in a more or less earnest way. The young men I found were doing more than the old men. The latter had taken advice in the matter of fertilizers and seeds but it came hard to them to give the later attention to their crops that I did. However, it was possible to see a general and notable improvement even in this. The semi-monthly meetings did much to spur them on and the noticeable results which followed their efforts also did something more. Some of them remained skeptical, but both Holt and myself insisted that they must keep at it until the end of the season. We never missed a chance to dangle before their eyes the prize money. Holt did one clever thing that had a very good effect. He secured one hundred crisp new dollar bills and kept them displayed in the window of Moulton’s grocery store with a sign over them which read: “ONLY ONE OF THE TEN PRIZES.” The display of so much money caught the eye of everyone who passed. More than that about everyone in town who was competing went down and had a look at it every so often. It acted like a tonic to many a man who was getting disheartened by the amount of labor involved in the new system.