“But isn’t he going to write, too, Sam?” I asked, a trifle uneasily.  “Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly good lawyer or bank clerk—­or farmer—­he wouldn’t have been half as much to the world as he is as a sadly dead poet.  Now, would he?”

“Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makes entry into the heavenly one, and we’ll see what he reports when the time comes.  Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field.”  Sam answered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as I went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean of future food and be perfectly happy.  “It’ll fill dinner-pails and give babies mother’s milk,” said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered out over his crop.  “The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five times last week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the Food Commission in Washington.  Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-old farmer, eh, Bettykin?” And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure I was falling before he caught me.

I didn’t answer—­I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hair into my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.

Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner’s report, and I sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front of Grandmother Nelson’s book.  Little did I know that simple action of pride in Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and to Tennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, or maybe—­

Daddy says that when a man owns a bottom field, a hillside, and a creek in the Harpeth Valley all he has to do is to go out and swing his hoe around his head a few times and he’ll have a living before he is ready to harvest it.  I don’t know about that, and I do know that since I came home in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more.  But his harvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sat around at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea of his farming by government books, with no experience.  They came to sit on the rail fences around his fields and to spit out of the other side of their mouths before the end of July, and I never went out to marvel, myself, that I didn’t step on that Commissioner of Agriculture, who couldn’t seem to keep away more than a few hours at a time.

As things grew and bloomed and burst and flowered and seeded, Sam went calmly on his way of work with the crops from dawn to dark, and Peter did likewise.  I never saw anything like his friendly pride in every successful test of Sam’s work.  And his own fat was getting packed on him at a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, clean pens that Sam maintained in the condition of a sanitary detention hospital.  Also Peter never mentioned the play, I never mentioned it, and Sam appeared to have completely forgotten it.