But a chance remark that I overheard Abner Davis make one morning as I boarded the train changed my mental attitude in an instant. "He ain't no reg'lar farmer--oh, Jiminy, no!--ha, ha!--he's jest"--How he finally labelled me to his fellow-rustic I never heard, for the train slowed up at the platform, and his voice was drowned in the noise. I just had time to turn, before I stepped on board, to cast a withering glance backwards--a glance that was wasted, however, for Abner was poking the other man in the side with his thumb and they were both doubled over with merriment. Of course, he hadn't intended me to hear, and I was quite aware that I was not a farmer, either regular or irregular, but it was this fact that made the remark so galling. There are two things I cannot bear: one is what Marion calls the truth, for that always turns out to be something odious and objectionable; the other is ridicule. That morning my mind was filled with bitterness, for Abner Davis had managed to combine in one brief remark the essence of much that I disliked to hear. The rhythmic beat of the car-wheels clanked out the derisive refrain, "He ain't--no reg--'lar far--mer!" By the time I reached the city I had decided it was due to my self-respect to put things on a different basis. Certainly, I was not a farmer. I had neither a horse, nor a cow, nor a sheep--no, not even a guinea-pig! I had no agricultural implements, except,--oh, hateful thought!--a spade, a rake and a hoe. I was in this mood when Harold Jones unloaded Griggs upon me in the restaurant where I was taking lunch. I knew from the twinkle in Harold's eye when he introduced us that he meant mischief. "Griggs," he explained to me, "has got farm-on-the-brain. Carton," he explained to Griggs, "had such a severe attack that his mind is unhinged. He imagines--ha, ha!--that he's a farmer! Now you two sit down and exchange symptoms. I have to get back to the office." I treated Griggs with distant civility, not because he was thrust upon me, but because it usually takes me a year or more to get beyond formalities with an acquaintance. But Griggs was impervious to hauteur; he was unconstrained and hearty enough for two. I could see that Harold had spoken the truth in his case, for his farming mania was at its height, and he was overjoyed at finding a man who had done what he merely dreamed of doing. He was a produce commission merchant, he told me, and he was convinced that he could double his income and prolong his life by running a farm in connection with his business. It was a simple proposition, he stated, that a child could grasp. A farmer makes a profit by farming, a commission merchant by commissioning; therefore, if the merchant were also a farmer would he not absorb both profits?