She drew out the letter, and from a life habit of making sure, pressed the envelope to see that it contained nothing more.  She noted a slip of crumpled paper and drew it out.  Upon it was written in a penciled scrawl: 

"Her grandma has not consented."

She read the letter, stood for a moment as in meditation, then replaced the slip and letter in the envelope, and laid it on Percy’s desk.  The letter was plainly a man’s handwriting.  The envelope was addressed in a bold hand that was clearly not Mr. West’s writing.

CHAPTER XXXIV

PLANNING FOR LIFE

HEART-OF-EGYPT, ILLINOIS, June 16, 1904.

Mr. Charles West,

Blue Mound, Va.

MY DEAR SIR:—­I have delayed writing to you in regard to the plans for Poorland Farm, until I could feel that we are able at least to make an outline of tentative nature.  The labor problem of a farm of three hundred and twenty acres is of course very different from that on forty acres, and we are not yet fully decided regarding our crop rotation and the disposition of the crops produced (or hoped for).  I realize that to rebuild in my life what another has torn down during his life is a task the end of which can hardly be even dimly foreshadowed.  Some friends are already beginning to ask me what results I am getting, and they apparently feel that we must succeed or fail with a trial of a full season.  I have said to them that I have no objection whatever to discussing our plans at any time, so far as we are yet able to make plans, but that I shall not be ready to discuss results with anyone until we begin to secure crop yields in the third rotation.  This means that I am not expecting the benefits of a six-year rotation of crops before the rotation has been actually practiced.  You will understand of course that, if all your land had been cropped with little or no change, for all its history, you would require six or eight years’ time before you would be able to grow a crop of corn on land that had been pastured for six or eight years; but some people seem to take it for granted that one can adopt a six-year rotation and enjoy the full benefits of it the first season.

I remember that you were surprised that I could buy a level upland farm even in this part of Illinois for $18 an acre; but you will probably be more surprised to learn that this farm had not paid the previous owners two per cent. interest on $18 an acre as an average of the last five years.  In fact, sixty acres of it had grown no crops for the last five years.  It was largely managed by tenants on the basis of share rent, and because of this I have been able to secure the records of several years.

I at least had some satisfaction in purchasing this farm, for the real estate men were left without a single “talking point.”  I insisted that I wanted the poorest prairie farm in “Egypt,” and whenever they began to tell me that the soil on a certain farm was really above the average, or that the land had been well cared for until recently, or that it had been fertilized a good deal, etc., I at once informed them that any advantage of that sort completely disqualified any farm for me; and that they need not talk to me about any farms except those that represented the poorest and most abused in Southern Illinois.