It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promise of state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce the expenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schools and I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the town at the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation. Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriation committee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going to cost $9,000 for roads that year. This would be rather amusing if it weren't, as Stella points out, so terribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do not employ a road superintendent, and don't know how to build them right, still employing the ancient American method of scraping back the gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil, furthermore, is now so saturated with oil that it makes a pudding whenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the money evaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the great grafting institution till I moved to a New England small town. There I learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I've told how selectman Morrissy scraped my lawn--admitting I was party to the crime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel to the town at 50 cents a load, from a gravel bed the town already owned, and, as selectman, O. K'd his own bill! I have seen how our "honest farmers" rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soon as Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the time it isn't needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teams on the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home at night an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spent before July, so there is nothing to repair roads with in the autumn. Of course some roads do have to be repaired in the autumn, so the selectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was so much the poorer, and couldn't afford an extra $500 to educate its children properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but we still lack the $500.