They ran to the
barn and then back again, re-entering, he by the front and she by the back porch.
"--Gather up the things an' get into that old barn."
The old barn leaked like a sieve, but they managed to find a dry space on which to spread their anything but dry bedding.
The people then assembled in this barn were no other than a company of Egyptians, or, as they are vulgarly called, gypsies, and they were now celebrating the wedding of one of their society.
Greater plenty, likewise, was nowhere to be seen than what flourished in this barn. Here was indeed no nicety nor elegance, nor did the keen appetite of the guests require any.
What would you say if I was to prove to you that it would build a fine chicken-house, one for the herd boar, a concrete tank down in the pasture that'd save the cows enough trips to the barn to make 'em give a heap sight more milk, a cooling house for it and a good tool room?" Rose's eyes opened wide.
The running water and bath in the house were given up for piping to the barn, and stanchions--then novelties in southeastern Kansas.
However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and reclined on a heap of pull-tails--the refuse after the straight straw had been drawn--thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work.
The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no longer.
He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the
barn to feed the greys.
He had a long sleep in the barn and then a big breakfast of coffee and bread and oatmeal and stewed cherries, for which the man charged him only fifteen cents, perhaps having been influenced by his arguments.
When it rained he would find a deserted building, if he could, and if not, he would wait until after dark and then, with his stick ready, begin a stealthy approach upon a barn. Generally he could get in before the dog got scent of him, and then he would hide in the hay and be safe until morning; if not, and the dog attacked him, he would rise up and make a retreat in battle order.
They hang up the rats' tails in a row or the
barn door, to show how many they have caught--dozens and dozens of them.
The same man who will pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other excuse than that it is cheap.
In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running so high that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the general theme of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a result of this Telephone Crusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the great cities as they are to their own barns.
