PEG MORRISON emulating (through the long summer months) the shining examples reported in the agricultural papers, found himself half-owner of a prodigious yield of onions in the early autumn. Day after day he had toiled amid the long lines of odorous shoots; weeding, when weeding was a back-breaking task under pitiless summer suns, and early and late stirring the baked soil—for the onion specialists laid great stress on intensive cultivation. Viewing the great heaps of shining bulbs, red, yellow, and silver-hued, spread out in the various barns to dry, Mr. Morrison felt inclined to break forth into singing, moved by something of the same exultant spirit which has prompted successful agriculturists from the days of the first harvests, reaped from the bosom of the virgin earth. “Let everlastin’ thanks be thine, Fer sech a bright displa-a-y [he chanted] Es makes a world o’ darkness shine With beams o’ heavenly da-a-y!” Martha Cottle, her maiden countenance coyly shaded by a ruffled pink sun-bonnet, and bearing the egg-basket ostentatiously in one hand, paused on the threshold of the barn. “Why, Mis-ter Morrison,” she exclaimed, “what a wonderful harvest of onions! I never saw anything like it.” “This ain’t all of ’em, either,” quoth Peg, pausing long enough in his labors to wipe the beaded perspiration from his forehead. “The only thing that gits me is what to do with ’em, now ’t I’ve got ’em. The’ ain’t a quarter of ’em out the ground yit.” “You should have thought of that before,” Miss Cottle said wisely. “If you keep them too long they’ll rot or freeze out here.” “They sure will,” agreed Peg, with some anxiety. “I’ve got to do somethin’ with ’em quick. I’ll bet,” he added, “that I’ve got nigh onto three thousand bushels—two, anyhow. The’d ’a’ b’en more, only part of ’em didn’t come up, an’ some was spoiled b’ the dry weather. I didn’t put in more’n half I intended to, neither. I d’clar I don’t see how that thar John Closner of Hidalgo, Texas, made out to plant an’ cultivate thirty-two acres of onions; an’ what in creation he done with twenty-eight thousan’ eight hunderd bushels when he got ’em raised beats me. The’s an awful lot o’ onions in a hunderd bushels, seems t’ me.” Miss Cottle reflected, her eyes on Mr. Morrison’s heated countenance. “I don’t suppose,” she said, “that you’d care to take any advice from _me;_ but I know what _I’d_ do, if I’d raised all those onions.” “I ain’t proud,” Mr. Morrison confessed handsomely. “I’d take advice f’om a Leghorn hen, ef it p’intedly hit the nail on the head. Fire away, ma’am. Ef you’ve got any good idees, it’s reelly wrong t’ keep ’em to yourself, they’re kind o’ scurse these days.” He looked whimsically at the lady, whose earnest attention appeared to be divided pretty evenly between the shining heaps of vegetables and himself. “I don’t believe I shall ever smell onions again without thinking of you, Peleg,” Miss Cottle observed sentimentally.