After some time he walked with her through three hundred acres of potatoes that lay in the valley before the house, and he had for the first time in his life, the opportunity to study potato raising on a large scale.

"From your conversation it seems that you raise potatoes on the same ground every year. I am curious to know how this is done, for even on the blackest soil in the country I live, this is regarded as quite impossible with any success."

"Well, it is generally so; but we have found that to plow the land after the potatoes have been dug, and then seed the same in turnips is practical. When the turnips, with their wealth of green leaves are at their best, then, we plow them under and the freezing does the rest."

"A wonderful mulch!"

"It is very simple when one looks into it." They were walking through the fields, and without her knowing it, he studied her. The kind of girl and the kind of family his race needed, he could see. In his observation of the clan to which he had been born, practicability was the greatest need. Indeed he was sometimes surprised that his race could be so impracticable. Further west in this State, his uncles, who, like all Negroes previous to the emancipation, had been born slaves, had gone West in the latter seventies and early eighties, and settled on land. With time this land had mounted to great values and the holders had been made well-to-do thereby. A case of evolution, on all sides. Over all the Central West, this had been so. At the price land now brought it would have been impossible for any to own land. There happened, then as had recently, a series of dry years—seemingly about every twenty years. To pull through such a siege, the old settlers usually did much better than the new. To begin with, they were financially better able; but on the other hand, they did not, as a rule, take the chances new settlers were inclined to take. Because two or three years were seasonable, and crops were good, they did not become overly enthusiastic and plunge deeply into debt as he had done. He could see his error now, and the chances new settlers were inclined to take. Because moreover, he had been so much alone—his wedded life had been so brief, and even during it, he was confused so much with disadvantages, that he had never attempted to subsidize his farming with stock raising. Perhaps this had been his most serious mistake; to have had a hundred head of cattle during such a period as had just passed, would have been to have gone through it without disaster.