The preceding summer I had made about $200 out of my produce, which in my first naïve enthusiasm pleased me greatly. But it was surely a poor return on my investment, reckoned merely in dollars and cents, and the second season showed a different result. Having two cows and a small family, I managed to dispose of my surplus milk and cream to a farmer who ran a milk route. This brought me in $73 a year. As I further saved at least $100 by not having to buy milk, and $60 by Peter's efforts at the churn, and could reckon a further profit from manure and calves, my cows were worth between $300 and $400 a year to me. Now that we had hens and chickens, we could reckon on another $100 saved in egg and poultry bills. To this total I was able to add at the end of the summer more than $500 received from the sale of fruit and vegetables, not only to the market but to the hotels. I was the only person in Bentford who had cultivated raspberries for sale, for instance, and the fact that I could deliver them absolutely fresh to the hotels was appreciated in so delicate a fruit. Stella and Peter were the pickers. I also supplied the inns with peas, cauliflowers, and tomatoes. Thus the farm was actually paying me in cash or saving at least $1,000 a year--indeed, much more, since we had no fruit nor vegetable bills the year through, Mrs. Pillig being an artist in preserving what would not keep in the cellar. But we will call it $1,000, and let the rest go as interest on the investment represented by seeds and implements. To offset this, I paid Mike $600 a year, and employed his son Joe at $1.75 a day, for twenty weeks. This left me a profit of about $200 on my first full season at Twin Fires, which paid my taxes and bought my coal. Out of my salary, then, came no rent, no bills for butter, eggs, milk, poultry, nor vegetables. I had to pay Mrs. Pillig her $20 a month therefrom, I had to pay the upkeep of the place, and grocery and meat bills (the latter being comparatively small in summer). But with the great item of rent eliminated, and my farm help paying for itself, it was astonishing to me to contemplate what a beautiful, comfortable home we were able to afford on an income which in New York would coop us in an Upper West Side apartment. We had thirty acres of beautiful land, we had a brook, a pine grove, an orchard, a not too formal garden, a lovely house in which we were slowly assembling mahogany furniture which fitted it. We had summer society as sophisticated as we cared to mix with, and winter society to which we could give gladly of our own stores of knowledge or enthusiasm and find joy in the giving. We had health as never before, and air and sunshine and a world of beauty all about us to the far blue wall of hills.