Aren't you sorry for the home-maker who, after years and years of joyful fussing and tinkering, works up to the point by-and-by where he pushes his hat to the back of his head, takes a long, anxious look all around, then calls his Laura into conference, finds that even she can't think of a single thing she wants added or rearranged, and at last is constrained to murmur, in deep awe: "Well, there, by hokey, she's finished!"? Nothing more to be done - not another brush stroke, not another thrust of the spade, not another lick of the hammer. Finished!

In the White River Valley

Come to think of it, I've never known a home-maker to get into that fix - not a real home-maker. Have you? But we've seen homes here and there, haven't we, that appeared dangerously snug and shipshape - a subtle menace that the dread thing might happen, sometime, to somebody? If it should ever come about, wouldn't that be a solemn moment? Solemn as death. Little, old Alexander let out a moan that has echoed for centuries, because he thought the raw material for conquest had petered out. But his were only the limitations of ignorance; nothing to compare with the blighted state of mind of the man who knows to a dead certainty that the home he's dreamed of, prayed for, slaved over, put his very heart and soul into, has been brought to full and flawless completion. Honestly, now, wouldn't that be fierce? There'd be nothing for a real homebuilder to do then but sell out and begin over.

My Laura and I have talked of that, often and often. We've been married twenty years; and from the first we've wanted a home. Our ideas have been almost uncannily harmonious. This home must be none of your ready-made affairs, conventional, undistinguished, lifeless, but a home of our own in the fullest and freest sense - one born of our mated genius, embodying ourselves.

Plans for this Ideal Home

It must be a place of sweet security for our children; a place of smiling delight for our friends; a place whose every wall, whose every line, whose every window and every nook and every generous space should be full of the elusive charm of individuality; a place that would slowly fill with kindly associations and gentle memories; a place that would endure, not for a day, but for generations, growing and gaining all the time in richness and grace; a place ---

The Home

Well, there; that'll do for a starter. Doesn't that sound fine? You can see what we were driving at. Dear, oh, dear, what a glorious time we had a-building it, in our younger days - conversationally! Reams of fair paper we've drawn over and put gravely away in our portfolio for future reference - now a sketch for an inglenook; again a bit of roof-line; again a suggestion for a casement, or an arch, or a porch. Gallons of oil we've burned, brooding over pictures and stories of others' performances, fondly agreeing how much braver and better our own would be when we got it. But, lest we should give one another needless pain, one point was always delicately slurred over in these eager plannings - the utter impossibility of fulfillment. We lived in a part of the country - Nebraska - where a few feet of pine board for a pantry shelf cost half a day's pay. We knew perfectly well that this big, generous idea of ours would cost a sight of money in the realization - fifteen or twenty thousand dollars for a good running start. We didn't have the price; and so we continued merely talking it over; getting piles of fun out of that, but having the gayety of it always toned down by a sigh.

And now this home is actually begun. Not a substitute, not a grudging compromise, but the real thing, just as we've seen it in our visions. We've had no windfall, either. Nobody has "come across" in a will, or otherwise. Nothing has happened out of the ordinary in our fortunes. It's just a case of Mahomet going to the mountain. That is to say, we've moved from high-priced Nebraska to a place where the materials for homemaking may be got without sapping one's life out in the process.

We're in Arkansas.

We've made a start, I say. We shall never finish. That's the beauty of it. If we live and work at it for a million years we shan't be in the least danger of the horrid melancholy of having our occupation gone. It's no trifling, baffling little town lot we're working with, but a fine, wide-spreading farm of one hundred and twenty acres, every acre crammed chockfull of possibilities. A lifetime might be spent on any one of a hundred nooks and beauty spots, doing things to it, fixing it up. We're rioting in the joy of knowing that we can never, never, never get to the end. There, as we see it, is the secret of happiness - the lure of continual achievement in something worth doing, and not the stodgy satisfaction of final accomplishment.

Arkansas? Yes, sir, Arkansas. On the White River Valley, right in the heart of the Ozark Mountain country. Oh, I know what you're thinking: "Arkansas! Why not Kamchatka, or Patagonia, or Afghanistan? If they had to go out of the world, why didn't they pick some place with the charm of real remoteness? But Arkansas!" That's the way we felt about it, too, when Arkansas first became one of the chances. That was because we didn't know a blessed thing about it - no more than you know yourself, right this minute. It's been the fashion, this long time, to poke fun at Arkansas, to think of it as one of the by-spots of earth, unregenerate, unreclaimed, and not worth reclaiming at that. All sorts of jokers and talemakers have taken a crack at it, making it out a comical place.

On the White River

It's a land of incomparable beauty, of infinite charm, of limitless opportunities. We're spotlessly happy here; and the happiness is going to last. What more could a body ask? The marvel is that millions of others haven't found out this Eden. Here it's lain waiting, years and years, while the home-hunters have been ransacking the earth. But they've passed by on the other side.

Never mind how we happened to Arkansas. That doesn't matter. But one shining March morning we awoke in Fayetteville. Our first look out of the window at the hotel was curious, amused and, it must be confessed, rather superior. We didn't half expect to like it. But that first look, long drawn out, sobered us. Then we turned and looked at one another.

"Why, it's beautiful!" we whispered.

Before us lay a town of quiet, tree-grown streets, wandering easily over low-rolling hills. Across a little hollow rose the sedate walls of the State University buildings. Beyond, melting away into the fresh spring distances, spread the glories of the Ozarks, opalescent with a hundred thousand changeful lights and shades. The tonic crispness of a quarter-mile altitude set our blood tingling. The spell was on us before we left the window. You've heard of the old-fashioned folk who would be transported instantaneously into the state of mind they called "conviction." Well, that's the way it was with us. If there's any other spot to be compared with this for looks it's the Connecticut Valley.

After breakfast we sought the real-estate man who had coaxed us to the country. He was none of your sharps, but a gentleman born, kindly, shrewd, sympathetic. To him we laid bare our desires: "We want a farm absolutely in the rough, so that we shall pay for just the land value, and nothing for improvements made by somebody else, which we sha'n't like. We want to improve to suit ourselves. The place may be anything from forty acres to a quarter-section. but it must be beautiful - hills, and woods, and water, and a broad outlook. And not too expensive."

He smiled indulgently, as if he had heard folks talk like that before.

"There's a farm I've got that might suit you," he said, "if you really want a raw one. We'll drive out to it."

The Farm in the Rough

Just a mile from the public square we came to our home. We knew it for ours at the first glance, before we'd passed through the rickety wire gate. A tangle of blackberry briers met us at the line of the old rail-fence. A couple of dogwood trees, smothered in bloom, thrust their branches into the carriage. A mirthful little brook frolicked chuckling over gray stones. It was crystal clear. In Nebraska, every rill runs thick with black mud. We had set our hearts on a limpid brook. Under towering elms, sycamores and walnuts the ground was thick with violets and windflowers. In the deep heart of the hollow a spring came up at our feet, clear and cold.

The air of Araby was not more richly spiced than this. Laura pressed my arm.

"What a park this spot will make!" she whispered. She didn't say "would make," you notice; she said "will make." We were of one mind. It was all settled before we'd gone a hundred yards. The rest of our looking around was just a matter of form.

The more we looked the more we were confirmed. The farm was skirted by a horseshoe of oak-clothed hills, open to the south, giving perfect winter protection. A gentle slope descended to the river, three-quarters of a mile away, and beyond, stately, massive, magnificent, rose the crests of the Boston Range. Far and near, whether we took it in ten-mile sweeps or patch by patch, the prospect pleased.

Christmas in the Home of Our Dreams

There were no improvements. Years gone, in that more prosperous Southern day "before the war," this had been a well-cared-for homestead of the best type; but fire had swept away the buildings; neglect had followed the fire; and between them they'd made a pretty mess of it. When we found it, it was in the hands of a native tenant farmer who had his multitudinous family stabled in a shabby, weather-grayed cabin of axe-squared poles, mud-chinked. Three or four other crude shelters, thatched with poles or cornstalks, served for the lean mules, the cow and the hens; and one, most pretentious of the lot, a ruined old log house, held what remained of last year's corn and fodder. This tenant was cultivating about fifty acres, in three widely-separated fields. He had picked out just the easy spots. As for the rest of the once-cultivated land, it had become an impenetrable jungle of every manner of bush and brier that ever put forth leaf - wild plum, hawthorn, cedar, blackjack, mulberry - all laced tight as a drum with fox-grape and ground ivy, and matted underneath with the ubiquitous blackberry. At the back, rising above the lower levels, was forty acres of oak and hickory timber. That suited us, down to the ground. Do you remember the Christmas scene in Pickwick, with the heart of the picture a great, roaring log fire? So we had prefigured things. And in Nebraska - note the inevitable comparison - the man who sports an open wood fire big enough to be seen by the naked eye has been marked by the gods as a special favorite. That's why the hearth fire had been the living center of our scheme - no little parsimonious blaze of husbanded kindlingwood, but a pile of cord sticks, each bulky as a man could handle, massed in a blaze a dozen could gather round, with nobody crowded for elbow-room.

Making a Real Beginning

And here I sit, right now, before one of those very fires, with the three kids sprawled out on the hearth-rug getting to-morrow's lessons, and with Laura snugly dozing in her corner. And think of this, you anxious householder: In the prairie country it cost us one hundred and fifty dollars to make a poor pretense of keeping warm through a long, harsh winter, and last winter it cost us eight dollars and fifty cents for the labor of cutting and bringing down ten cords from our woodlot. That forty acres will suffice us forever, wisely managed. Wood and water - these are the essentials to farm comfort. We found three brooks zigzagging across our farming land.

"Well, is this raw enough?", quizzed our conductor. He seemed to think the joke was on us.

"How much?" we asked, without levity.

He told us that we might have the farm for twenty dollars an acre-which, he laughed, was only about fifteen cents a piece for the possibilities. Then, growing sensible, he assured us that in soil character the farm was one of the best in the district, as we could see for ourselves when we got back to town and looked at the soil-survey maps. Eighty or ninety acres we would find cultivable - more than that, if we wished to put vineyard or orchard on the hill slopes. Where the fields were cleared the surface showed a deep, loose, sandy loam with a friable, deep-red clay subsoil. Loose stone was everywhere, from mere pebbles to young boulders that would make a hefty lift for a strong man. But that didn't dismay us. We had our own notions about what we'd do with that stone. We had come from a country where such stone was shipped in by rail for four hundred miles, and was worth no end of money when it got there. And we got ours just for the cost of moving it across half the width of the farm and getting it out of the way.

Here's Where We'll Build the Porch

"All right, we'll take it," we said. "Don't you dare show us anything else. This is ours."

A month later we moved to Arkansas, bag and baggage. That was in April of 1908. We went straight out to the farm, pitching camp on the spot that had first captivated us. Tents sheltered us. There was no other refuge.

We could not undertake much in that first season. The tenant, a lean-shanked, fox-faced Hill Billy, had already begun the year's crop work, and looked on us as rank intruders. He would not yield an inch of his cleared ground for our use, on any reasonable terms; only grudgingly did he grant us room enough for our camp. Until crops were gathered we would be constrained to give ourselves to planning and to working on some of the waste places. The year was lost to us in care of the fields.

Good fortune stayed with us, though. The site we had picked upon for the house and buildings lay outside the cultivated ground, in the heart of a thicket dense as a canebrake. Here, thrilling with eagerness, I set to work with brushhook and axe, clearing a space, with unaccustomed hands, while from their haunts in the hills the squatters gathered, perching about me in a ring, expectant as buzzards. It had been noised around the settlement that a rich stranger had strayed in, and already the Billies were snapping their beaks, whetting up their appetites for fresh meat.

That's been the one taste of wormwood in our cup down here; the fret of trying to break even with native hired labor. The stranger is reckoned legitimate picking. These fellows will work for one another for fifty rents a day, and take their pay in salt "side-meat"; but from the alien they demand thrice that pay, in cold cash, testing every coin with their snuff-stained teeth.

Well, there they loafed, half a dozen of 'em, whittling, spitting, showering impudent questions and making disparaging criticisms, waiting for me to play out. I was bound I wouldn't; I was going to finish that job myself, if it was the last act. Did you ever try to swing a brushhook in a six-foot-high mat of blackberry brambles? This mat had been undisturbed for a score of years, at least, till it had become as the great-grandfather of all the blackberry patches; dead canes of other ages inextricably woven among the living, tied all together with thirty-foot long strands of thorny ivy. At every stroke of the hook the spiked whips lashed back across my face and shoulders, clutching and tearing, hanging to my clothes, piling hip-deep about me. The Inquisition at its cruelest had no peskier torment. I was mad enough to cry, blistered, bleeding, racked with backache. But give up? Not in a hundred years! The first stroke on the making of the home was to be done by no other hand than mine. And by-and-by there was a half acre cleared.

Guess which building came first. It was the henhouse. Thoroughbred poultry was to be one of the features of the farm - we had brought the parent flock of fifty Buff Orpingtons with us from Nebraska - and their quarters were to be substantial and roomy. The first house was ten by forty feet, well put up, airy, screened, weathertight, and divided into three rooms. When it was finished we moved into it, making a temporary shelter for the hens under the massed branches of a wild-plum thicket.

That chicken-house gave us our first real' understanding of the cost of doing things down here. A building just like it in the old home had set us back one hundred and thirty dollars. This one cost a shade over fifty dollars, with the lumber bought at a retail yard.

How the natives fussed and buzzed! That house bothered them no end. "You-all kain't be so plumb rich as we-all been told," they said. We didn't try to relieve their puzzlement a little bit, but went serenely on. The henhouse was comfortable enough until other plans were ripened.

The house itself - the big house - had been carefully worked out on paper; but we did not want to be precipitate. It was to be a huge, sprawling bungalow of logs and rough field stone; but we had to discover just how we were to gather and prepare these materials in the best form, at the least possible cost. Care on these points, as we found later, meant a saving of at least one-half in our outlay. Also, we had to find a builder blessed with understanding. That promised to be troublesome.

How the Farm Was Stocked

There were in architecture, so far as we knew, no precedents for some of our ideas; so our builder must be a man with the rare gift of imagination. There was no hint of any such quality in any of the artisans we had talked to at first. But we did not borrow fear. It turns us cold now to think back upon our blithe peace of mind of that day, when the whole plan was up in the air; but that's a way we've got into in the course of our twenty years of adventuring together in life. It's worked pretty well, and it came out beautifully in this case. Forecast of failure would merely have used up steam power that was needed for other things. We would be satisfied if we had the house under roof by cold weather.

The Milk House

Our next move was to start a dairy herd. There wasn't a rod of cattle-tight fence on the place; so we had to begin at the beginning. In one of the old, abandoned fields the wild grasses were knee-high; and this plat we inclosed with wire. A gentleman of color helped me. We made a sorry job of it; for I had never before hacked out an oak fence post, and my dusky mate's particular genius was for going sound asleep standing up. That's no way to build a fence. That fence has since been taken down and replaced, but it served for a time; and when it was strung we turned into the pasture a herd of ten milch cows. These cows were grades, Jersey and Durham, with good milking records and tested at our University Experiment Station for their butter-making qualities. Along with them we bought a cream separator, and right there our work as farmers was begun.

Now, let's stop a bit and get this thing straight. You aren't to understand that we were interested merely in making a home and in doing artistic stunts with our land. We meant to develop a thoroughgoing, all-around farm, one that should justify itself by profits. It was to be made as beautiful as possible, but it must, also, make our living.

We were not farmers, Laura and I, in the hard, practical sense. You might say that we were just amateurs. Neither of us had ever had anything to do with the larger problems of farm management. But in Nebraska we had lived for five or six years on a two-acre suburban patch with our cows, our chickens, our orchard, our small fruits and our garden, studying these subjects zealously, doing the work ourselves and making it pay, every stroke of it. You can see that we were not exactly a couple of misguided novices. We had learned the knack of getting results from the soil with our own hands, and for a dozen years we had been tireless readers of scientific farm literature. We had taken to this from choice because we liked it, even when the probability of having a farm of our own seemed hopelessly remote. We knew a lot of things about farming, though we had never practiced them on any scale larger than our two acres.

Now, you take this from us, straight: To make a farm pay is just a business proposition which may be undertaken by any average family, in our case with more certainty of success than goes with almost any other business in the catalogue. Once, when farming was played by luck and not by knowledge, that was not true. Then it was a world of chance for the farmer. But that time has gone by. To make fun of the "book-farmer" is getting to be rather stale sport. To make a farm pay today is a question of exact book-knowledge and plenty of it, coupled with a clear plan of your own, which is to be carried out with average horse-sense and sound business judgment. Not to mince matters, we had acquired those abilities; and we've gone at our work unafraid, sure of the outcome.

Which brings us back to that bunch of dairy cows. We had made up our minds to this as one of the fundamentals of farm economy. Not that we had any notion of growing rich from the sale of butter and cream; but the cows were to be a part of the farm machinery, as indispensable as the plows or the harrows. We meant to make this a stock farm as distinguished from a grain farm. That is to say, everything in the way of field crops produced on the place was to be fed to animals of our own-cows, mares, swine, sheep and poultry. To sell one's grain or hay crop bodily is nowadays reckoned slovenly management. To follow that practice is to be content with less than half profits. There's another and a better profit in making these crops into meat and cream and eggs and wool. Besides which there's the fertility to be restored to the land in manures; and on top of that the increase in the herds and flocks. That was our program - not as evolved by ourselves, but as borrowed from the best practices of the most successful modern farming.

The Dairy Herd

We fared the fact that our land had been badly mishandled, as land invariably is by the tenant farmer. The tenant's problem, if he thinks out a problem at all, is to get all he can from the soil by persistent, exhaustive cropping and to put as little as possible back again. His is destructive, not constructive, farming. We were to reverse this process, and our dairy herd was the cornerstone of our building. We bought the best we could afford - good healthy animals of good average qualities. They cost. us thirty-five dollars a head. In Nebraska they would have cost twice as much. With them we got from the University herd a pedigreed Jersey bull-calf of a famous milk strain; so that, in the future development of our herd, we should be getting calves of improved qualities. Our pastures now hold half a dozen calves which in another year will be added to the milk producers, materially raising the standard of the whole lot. Of course, following this practice exclusively, we shall have only a grade or "utility" herd at the best; but we shall be building from a first-rate foundation, and, as our means permit, we shall replace the first cows with pure-bred jerseys. Perhaps we shall not thus greatly increase our cream yield, but surplus animals to be disposed of will then bring good or even fancy prices as breeding stock instead of the current market price of butcher's meat. Our University station, following the custom of every similar institution in the West, seeking to improve conditions on the farms near by, let us have this choice animal at a merely, nominal price - only twenty-five dollars. He is a master of his kind. Today, not yet two years old, he is worth twenty times what he cost us.

As a matter of fact, the sale of cream from our cows has added nothing to our treasury. What we have sold from the product of the herd has just about met cost. But that doesn't tell all the story.

It has become almost an axiom of the dairy farm, selling nothing but cream, that the profits consist in intelligent use of the by-products - skim-milk and manure - the milk to be fed to growing animals and the manure to be returned to the land. So we have found it.

Inseparable from the creamery farm is the swine herd. If this can be supplemented by the poultry flock so much the better, but there must be pigs; else waste, that blight of any business enterprise, creeps in. Day in and day out, all through the year, we have a heavy yield of separator milk - milk stripped of its fats, but retaining a high feeding value when given to growing stock. Nor does this value consist only in the elements shown by analysis. Intelligently fed with grains it gives the "balanced ration" - that crowning factor in modern animal industry - materially raising the flesh-making efficiency of every kernel eaten and giving sturdy health and vigor. A thrifty cockerel while he is still singing soprano, does mighty well if, on all he will eat of grain alone, he adds to his weight two and one-half ounces a week; but with skim-milk substituted for a part of this ration, at lessened cost, his gain jumps nearly a hundred per cent and his quality for the table gets to be something you'll think of between meals.

High Living in This Home

Did you ever eat a skim-milk chicken? Let me tell you how we fix 'em on a Sunday afternoon, when some friends have dropped over the hill from town and we want to bait them to come again. We just build up a crackling fire in one of the deep fireplaces, hang a plump brace of these birds before the blaze on wires, keep them turning for an hour in slow and stately measure, with a pan below to catch the drippings, till the yellow bodies show an oily, golden crispness shining through a haze of rich steam and begin to drop apart with tenderness, and the watching company kind of loses interest in the conversation. And over on the table Dorothy has set out a basket of brown rolls and a print of sweet butter and a glass of plum jelly, and the plates are piping hot - and nobody can wait another minute. Since the hatches came off last spring we've had five hundred pounds of young Orpington on our table - a quarter of a ton, no less, made out of clean wheat and corn and sweet milk.

Here's Where We'll Roast the Chickens

And the pigs! You ought to see them! They're Laura's. As soon as a fit pasture had been made, last spring, she drove a thrifty trade for a fine young Duroc-Jersey brood sow and her litter. Now there are eighteen head in the herd. One has been eaten; a second, weighing in at three hundred pounds, is scheduled for holiday time; and there's a bunch of eight six-weeks youngsters that, judged by native standards, ought to be four months old at least-sleek, rollicky, friendly little beasts, rolling in plumpness, and clean as parlor pets. Give a pig half a chance, and he's the cleanest beast on the farm-tidy as a cat. Ours have been brought up life Reginalds and Reginas, on food clean enough for the house table, with acres of green pasture and oceans of skim-milk.

Credit another point to the dairy cows. Next spring we'll have a hundred head of young pigs a-growing, in broad, fresh-made pastures. We've found out that pigs pay, if you put into their management as much brain-power as goes into a good, swift game of whist. Farming, on the whole, is a good deal like whist; and brains are trumps. We're leaning strongly on this pig branch of our industry. There's certainly money in them, here in the South where it costs a sight less, according to the records, to make a pound of well-bred pork than it does where we hail from.

We're handling our pigs as we're handling our dairy herd - grading up in our increase all the time; starting with good, sound brood stock, and putting into the male side the best we can get. That pays, too. An Arkansas hog of native blood does rather uncommonly well if, ranging in the woods and rustling his own living, he can show one hundred and fifty pounds at three or four years. Our three-hundred-pounder on the waiting list is eight months old. There's the difference. The pig of the modern farm has been produced by wise, selective breeding, giving an animal that can make a pound of meat in the least possible time and at the lowest possible cost. Not all of this result, though, rests in the better stock. The pig couldn't do it alone, on his own hook, without well-judged feeding. The balanced ration is the ultimate measure of profit; and in this pretty drama skim-milk 1-.as a leading part. Yes, you really must give the dairy cows another credit mark.

And there's the fertilizer, not only from the cow-barn but also from the poultry houses and in the pig pastures - tons and tons that have gone to the land for its enrichment. There's no room for argument about the value of that. If we were growing grain and hay for sale, as most of our neighbors are doing, we'd be losing all that, letting it go into the other fellow's pocket. Not for us!

The Way of the Book-Farmer

Somehow, as this is set down on paper, it appears expensive - as if we must have a good, round lot of money invested. That's not the fact. Reckoning it up, the investment seems ludicrously small. The first cost of cattle and pigs and chickens wasn't over four hundred and twenty-five dollars. They've paid this back, and the cost of their keep besides, in milk, eggs and meat; and we still have the original stock and all its increase for our profit. That's pretty good, isn't it? The double profit of growth and increase, with another profit in by-products-that's the combination that gives a farm like ours a strong edge over the old-style grain farm.

What we've done shows what we mean to do. We're more than satisfied with the account as it stands. We're going right ahead on this beginning. Excepting about fifteen acres reserved for orchard and garden, the farm, as fast as we can get it cleaned up, is being made into meadow and pasture, planted to those clovers and grasses that scientific demonstration has marked as best for this region. We shall increase our herds and flocks to the largest number that can be pastured on the place, buying the grain feeds, selling nothing that can be fed at home - selling almost nothing at all but finished products. Only a few acres are being given to market crops - an acre to choice strawberries; an acre to asparagus; two or three acres to potatoes and onions, and ten acres to orchard trees - everything from apples to apricots, from sweet cherries to Spanish chestnuts; nothing that has not been proved successful here, and nothing but the best of its kind. We got the fruits all planted last spring.

The Living Room

"Book-farming?" Yes, sir, it's book-farming. That's the best thing that can be said of it. That's why we know it's bound to succeed, as its succeeding now. For mark this: The new farming - call it book-farming, if the name pleases you has done nothing more notable than to establish the fact beyond dispute, that in this industry there's no such thing as blind chance; that fixed conditions give certain and calculable results. It's not counted a marvel, is it, that the manner of making and the cost of a yard of cloth or a ton of steel rails can be determined beforehand? Well, then, why give the merry hoot to the man who, by the same methods and with no less exact knowledge of his working conditions, pretends to say what it will cost him to produce a pound of pork? It's just the raw novelty of the proposition, most likely, that makes it appear so rich in humor; but it can be done. It's being done now, right along. We're doing it. We know, to a dead certainty, that on every bushel of grain we're feeding to our poultry and our pigs, in this program, we're more than doubling our money. Can you beat that? And we're going to keep it up, just that way.

Oh, yes. I started to tell you about this house of ours. All the time, as we looked over our plans, we kept looking at one another askance, each wondering if the other would really care so very much if the scheme must be simplified to meet the state of the bank account. We wanted the house, just as it stood on paper, with not a detail yielded to crass necessity; but it seemed impossible that we could do it on our capital. Tentative inquiry at the local lumber yards confirmed this doubt. Our plans called for a house with 2,232 square feet of floor space - eight rooms, not to speak of generous porches and a roomy green-house. In Nebraska you can't do those things unless you're a "plute." We knew we were miles and miles out of that class; and so we were both secretly prepared to hedge and compromise.

But here the house stands, uncompromised - not finished by a jugful, but laid out on. the lines we'd fixed, and to be completed in due time. Provision has been made for everything. We can read our title clear to the very end.

It's this way: Arkansas is a timber country. First of all her resources stand her forests of oak and pine. So we were close to the source of our raw material.

Along in the middle of the summer I made a pilgrimage to the heart of the saw-mill country, one hundred and fifty miles south of home, and established relations. One of the little mills was hired to cut the stock we would need; and in September I started three carloads of lumber to Fayetteville. One big car held the logs fog the house walls. These were pine timbers squared by the saw to a uniform size of six by eight inches. In the other cars was the rest of the lumber for the house; also for a cottage for hired help, for a huge barn, for a detached laundry house, for some additional poultry houses - everything we should need. Door and windows of oak and cypress, made after designs of our own, were built for us at Fayetteville. These and the shingles were the only items of woodwork bought, outside the car. brought from the mills. You see what we have done - paid just a moderate sawmill charge, and cut out the middleman and his profits. Far be it from us to slam the middleman. He's a mighty useful fellow, when you need him; but we couldn't figure it out that we needed him so desperately in this operation.

What the House Cost

All ,this sounds a bit complicated and difficult maybe, but we found it in fact as simple as two and two. We got just what we wanted, in material of the very best, and at a cost that absolutely dispelled our first misgivings. The three cars of lumber, loaded at the mill, cost us $588.71. The freight to Fayetteville was $235.35. And there you are. We have built generously and well in every particular, with big, 'substantial housing for every living thing on the place. Nothing is cramped. In Nebraska, a diminutive four-room cottage, just big enough to turn around in, had cost us a lot more. than we paid for the materials for this enterprise. We have had no exceptional advantages; there's nothing to be credited to luck. Anybody who wants to can duplicate our performance for the same money.

Meanwhile, we had found. our builder. I'll not deny that there was some downright luck in that. The gods were surely good to us in sending us, out of the native darkness, a man who understood. Mind you, we had no architect's plans - nothing to work by but our own rough pencil sketches, supplemented by word of mouth. The work of that man and his crew was a dream. If there was a lick amiss, or a penny wasted, we never knew it. On October twenty-fourth the first shovelful of earth was turned for the laying of the foundations, and teams were set to hauling stone picked up around the farm, for piers and walls and chimneys. On December nineteenth the thing was done house, barn, tenant house, and all the rest, ready for use. We kept Christmas beneath the roof we had seen in our visions.

Finished? No, no! It's just as I tell you There are pages and pages of things that wait - enough to last through a happy lifetime. When the pine building is well settled in place there's oak paneling to be built and oak floors to be laid; and the porches are still to come; and walks outside, and flower-beds, and a pond for water plants; and there's a gasoline engine to be set up for pumping our water and running a dynamo for our house-lighting; and - oh, no end of such-like things! But we're living now in these wide spares, before our heaped winter fires of heart-of-oak - room enough for our own perfect content, and room to spare for every friend who will come to us. Our dream is coming true.

And the cost? You will maybe want a final word about that. Well, the house as it stands today, strong as a castle and good for generations, has cost us a little less than $1,500. Can you beat that? Why, in Nebraska, we couldn't have got away from the wire for that money; and here we're coming down the homestretch.