“I very much doubt,” replied Percy, “if there is any other occupation that is so uniformly successful as farming, in the truest sense.  It provides constant employment, a good living, and a comfortable home for nearly all who engage in it; and as a rule they have made no such preparation as is required for most other lines of work.

“But there is still another side to the farm life, Mother dear, or to any life for that matter.  Your own life has taught me that to work for the love of others is a motive which directs the noblest lives.  If agricultural missionaries are needed in India, they are also needed in parts of our own country where farm lands that were once productive are now greatly depleted and in some cases even abandoned for farming; and. if the older lands of the corn belt are already showing a decrease in productive power, we need the missionary even here.  If I can learn how to make land richer and richer and lead others to follow such a system, I should find much satisfaction in the effort.”

CHAPTER V

WORN OUT FARMS

“Well, you found some mighty poor land, I reckon,” was the greeting Percy received from Grandma West as he returned from his walk over Westover and some neighboring farms.

“I found some land that produces very poor crops,” he replied, “but I don’t know yet whether I should say that the land is poor.”

“Well, I know it’s about as poor as poor can be; but it was not always poor, I can tell you.  When I was a girl, if this farm did not produce five or six thousands bushels of wheat, we thought it a poor crop; but now, if we get five or six hundred bushels, we think we are doing pretty well.  My husband’s father paid sixty-eight dollars an acre for some of this land, and it was worth more than that a few years later and, mind you, in those days wheat was worth less and niggers a mighty sight more than they are nowadays; but, somehow, the land has just grown poor.  We don’t know how.  We have worked hard, and we have kept as much stock as we could, but we could never produce enough fertilizer on the farm to go very far on a thousand acres.

“Yes, Sir, we have just about a thousand acres here and we still own it,—­and with no mortgage on it, I’m mighty glad to say.  But, laws, the land is poor, and you can get all the land you want about here for ten dollars an acre.  There comes Charles, now.  He can tell you all about this country for more than twenty miles, I reckon.

“Wilkes!” A negro servant answered the call, and took the horse as Charles West stopped at the side gate.

“Wilkes was born here in slave times, nigh sixty years ago,” she continued.  “He is three years older than my son Charles.  He has remained with us ever since the war, except for a few months when he went away one time just to see for sure that he was free and could go.  But he came back mighty homesick and he’ll want to stay here till he dies, I reckon.