"Well, from the start he's makin' it don't look like the judge 'd have very long to wait for his money," said Sol. "Twenty acres of apple trees all in a orchard together, and twenty acres of strawberries set out betwixt and between the rows!" He looked over the hillside and little apron of valley where Joe's young orchard spread. Each tiny tree was a plume of leaves; the rows stretched out to the hilltop, and over. "I can figger out how twenty acres of apples can be picked and took care of," reflected Sol, as if going over with himself something which he had given thought to before, "but I'll be durned if I can figger out how any man's goin' to pick and take care of twenty acres of strawberries!" "Joe knows," said his mother. "Well, I hope he does," sighed Sol, the sigh being breathed to give expression of what remained unspoken. No matter what his hopes, his doubts were unshaken. No man had ever taken care of twenty acres of strawberries--nor the twentieth part of one acre, for that matter--in that community. No man could do it, according to the bone-deep belief of Sol and his kind. "Joe says that's only a little dab of a start," said she. "Cree-mo-nee!" said Sol, his mouth standing open like a mussel shell in the sun. "When'll they be ripe?" "Next spring." "Which?" queried Sol, perking his head in puzzled and impertinent way, very much as the rooster had done a little while before him. "Next spring, I said," she repeated, nodding over her bonnet, into which she was slipping the splints. "No crop this year?" "No; Joe says it weakens the plants to bear the first year they're set. It takes the strength away from the roots, he says. He goes through the field and snips off every bloom he sees when he's hoein' among 'em, and I help him between times. We don't git all of 'em, by a mighty sight, though." Sol shook his head with wise depreciation. "Throwin' away money," said he. "Did you ever raise any strawberries?" she inquired, putting down the bonnet, bringing Sol up with a sharp look. "Reckon I raised as many as Joe ever did, and them mainly with a spoon," said Sol. The joke was not entirely new; it could not have been original with Sol by at least three hundred years. But it did very well as an excuse for Sol to laugh. He was always looking for excuses to laugh, that was the one virtue in him. Without his big laugh he would have been an empty sack without a bottom. "Joe got them rows mighty purty and straight," said Sol, squinting along the apple trees. "Yes, he set 'em out accordin' to geog'aphy," said she. "Which?" said Sol. "Ge-og'a-phy, I said. Didn't you never hear tell of that before neither, Sol Greening?" "Oh," said Sol, lightly, as if that made it all as plain to him as his own cracked thumbs. "How much does Joe reckon he'll git off of that patch of berries when it begins to bear?"