For sharp contrasts give me the dull country.  The unexpected is the usual in small and in great things alike as they happen on a farm, and I make no apology to the reader for entering them in my narrative.  I only ask him, if he be a city man, to take my word for the truth as to the general facts.  To some elaboration and embellishment I plead guilty, but the groundwork is truth, and the facts stated are as real as the foundations of my buildings or the cows in my stalls.  If the fortunate reader be a country man, he will need no assurance from me, for his eyes have seen and his ears have heard the strange and startling episodes with which the quiet country-side is filled.  I do not dare record all the adventures which clustered around us at Four Oaks.  People who know only the monotonous life of cities would not believe the half if told, and I do not wish to invite discredit upon my story of the making of the factory farm.

The incidents I have given of the strike at Gordon’s mine are substantially correct, and I would love to follow them to their sequel,—­the cooeperative mine; but as that is a story by itself, I cannot do it now.  I promise myself, however, the pleasure of writing a history of this innovation in coal-mining at an early date.  It is worth the world’s knowing that a copartnership can exist between three hundred equal partners without serious friction, and that community in business interests on a large scale can be successfully managed without any effort to control personal liberty, either domestic, social, or religious.  Indeed, I believe the success of this experiment is due largely to the absence of any attempt to superintend the private interests of its members,—­the only bond being a common financial one, and the one requisite to membership, ability to save a portion of the wages earned.

But to go back to farm matters.  In August the ground was stirred for the second time around the young trees.  To do this, the mulch was turned back and the surface for a space of three feet all around the tree was loosened by hoe or mattock, and the mulch was then returned.  The trees were vigorous, and their leaves had the polish of health, in spite of the dry July and August.  The mulching must receive the credit for much of this thrift, for it protected the soil from the rays of the sun and invited the deep moisture to rise toward the surface.  Few people realize the amount of water that enters into the daily consumption of a tree.  It is said that the four acres of leaf surface of a large elm will transpire or yield to evaporation eight tons of water in a day, and that it takes more than five hundred tons of water to produce one ton of hay, wheat, oats, or other crop.  This seems enormous; but an inch of rain on an acre of ground means more than a hundred tons of water, and precipitation in our part of the country is about thirty-six inches per annum, so that we can count on over thirty-six hundred tons of water per acre to supply this tremendous evaporation of plant life.