Underwear was a luxury and almost unknown. Men wore their coarse homespun against their skin. The burrs in the virgin wool scratched like pins and needles. Stud put another horse-shoe into the charcoal and worked the bellows. He tossed a handful of hickory nuts through the open window into the pig pen where the big sows cracked them between their teeth and swallowed them with noisy gusto. Stud noticed that the sick sow was back on her feet again and as greedy as any of her fantastically enormous sisters. Better hogs than we raised in the old days, he thought. That's one place we've improved. Men get meaner and weaker and filthier, while hogs and cattle get to be better animals every year. That's on account of the way we breed the beasts. No romance. No guessing what's under a bustle. Just hard-headed facts and scientific breeding. Do the human race some good to have a first rate breeder put in charge for a few generations. "Whang, whang," went the hammer on the anvil as sparks flew out like Fourth-of-July. "Hissss" went the second shoe in the tub of scummy water. The smithy was filled with the delectable odor of hot metal and scorching hooves and dung, age old dust and the first breath of crab-apple blossoms now bursting on the scraggly black trees beside the smithy window. Man got meaner and smaller while the animals got greater and finer, thought Stud again, and that was why a man could give his best years to raising Jersey bulls like Napoleon, or Percheron stallions like Teddy Roosevelt ... could care for his cattle almost more than his family. There was a decency about animals not to be found in men. This he had known ever since as a young man--a spoiled but good-looking young fellow who dominated his daddy and bought the big farm for a song--he had found that one can't trust bankers, share farmers, renters, or hired men, but one can trust horses, cows, and pigs.... "Give 'em your best and they'll give you their best," thought Stud. And no stock in the Rock River valley had better care or better feed than the Brailsford stock. Stud thinks now, seeing Peter dash down the road like mad on his new red motorcycle, that a buggy was good enough for him at that age. No, he didn't get his first buggy until he was eighteen. It had red wheels and a fringed whip-socket, and his father had given him a spanking bay gelding to go with it. What a figure he cut courting Sarah to the tune of "I'm the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo".... Black curls, a little mustache turned up at the ends, derby hat, pants tight over strong rippling thighs, smart checked coat. A dashing young giant, muscled like a bull. And Sarah in her long flaring gown, curls down the back of her neck, rows and rows of buttons, puff sleeves and a waist so small he could reach around it with his two hands. "Ah, Sarah, you were beautiful then," Stud says aloud. He slaps the mare sharply across her gleaming flank. "Get going, you lazy piece of horse flesh." 2