John Grahame stood in a pile of wheat up to his knees. He had exhausted every resource. The walls of the granary bulged until the nails were popping. His stock could not get into the barn because the doors were blocked with wheat, and now Jane had been driven from the house, and wheat was flowing from the windows in amber streams. In desperation he strove to extricate himself from the rapidly growing pile. It had reached his waist and was still climbing. He tried to shout, and threw a last frantic look around in search of help. Apparently he was doomed to die under a deluge of prosperity, for there was no one in sight. And then he saw something which brought to him a wave of consolation. From the rollway of his root cellar he saw feet protruding, feet that waved and threshed around in the wheat to no avail. He recognized them, pair by pair, as the feet of his creditors buried headfirst in their own collections. One pair he recognized as belonging to his grocery and dry goods merchant, and he felt a tinge of sorrow; another belonged to his banker, the man who had made him mortgage everything on the place, excepting only his wife and dog; this time his gaze was coldly critical. The third pair belonged to the hardware man who had sold Jane that incubator that wouldn’t incubate and the separator that wouldn’t separate, the man who had made him mortgage his milch cows to buy a binder; and again his gaze was unsympathetic. Lastly he spied a fourth pair, which belonged to a real-estate dealer, a man who had sold him one hundred and sixty acres of gumbo, and he positively gloated over the man’s predicament. But his joy was short-lived. The wheat had reached his chin. He put forth all the strength he had in him, in a last frantic effort. It was futile. Another rush of golden grain buried him ten feet beneath its suffocating bulk, and he could breathe no more. There were shooting stars and crimson fires and all the rest of that horrid crew, even to the ringing of bells, but the bells sounded muffled and far away, because the alarm clock was covered with a pillow. John Grahame sat up in bed. It was five o’clock. The transition from nightmare to actuality did not bring the relief he had a right to expect. The room was cold, and a wind that spoke eloquently of further discomforts out of doors moaned along the eaves. A carefully shaded night lamp in another room cast an all-too-feeble ray through the open door, and by its ineffective light, Grahame sat on the edge of the bed and began to dress.