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Chamberlain's instinct for doing his share of work caused him to roll up his trousers and wade in, shoulder to shoulder with Hand, even while he was lecturing on the feebleness of man's wits. "Good horse running loose into barb-wire fences had to be caught, but it didn't need a squadron of men and a forty-acre lot to do it in.
As things are always excepting Ulster and the North generally farming could scarcely be more shameful in its neglect than it is domestic life could scarcely be more squalid, more savage, more filthy. Even rich farmers live like pigs and with their pigs, and the stone house is no better kept than the mud cabin the forty-acre field no better tilled than the miserable little potato patch.
Philip would not have kept him at all, but as he had taken him into the family circle when a cub he did not like to be cruel and turn him out along in a heartless world. Twice Bruin managed to untie the clothes line and started for the forty-acre. He crawled along very slowly, and when he saw Philip coming after him, he stopped, looked behind him, and said, "Hoo," showing his disgust.
He has been known to neglect his regular business to assist an embarrassed young man over a rail fence, or entertain a party of picnickers from the city. He has a natural antipathy for red flags, and will cross a forty-acre field to make a mop rag of one and rub its bearer's nose in the mud an example that might be advantageously followed by the Chicago authorities.
Then he dropped on the ill-smelling ground and went to sleep to dream that he had been turned into a forty-acre field of clover, while a dozen brass bands played a waltz and multitudes of people looked on and cheered. In the morning more salt hay was thrown to him and water was brought in a dirty pail. Then, without a stroke of brush or curry-comb he was led out.
On Poorland Farm there are seven forty-acre fields which are at least as nearly level as they ought to be to permit good surface drainage, and there is no need that a single hill of corn should be omitted on any one of these seven fields; and I am confident that with an adequate supply of raw phosphate rock and magnesian limestone and a liberal use of legume crops this land can be made to pay interest on $300 an acre.
I was left to "lie out," and No. 2 raised only twelve acres of cowpeas. No. 3 was plowed during the summer and seeded to timothy in the early fall. No. 4 was in corn and Nos. 5 and 6 were left in meadow, two patches of nine and sixteen acres previously in cowpeas and corn having been seeded to timothy in order, as Percy said, to "square out" the forty-acre fields.
Sometimes on hot days he took out his bed, and after shaking it, he laid it down on the grass; his blankets he hung on the fence for many reasons which he wanted to get rid of. The water in the forty-acre to the south was all dried up. An old black snake with a streak of orange along his ribs grew thirsty.
Watering must be accomplished by some artificial piping system or from spring-fed brooks. The more length of flowing streams on a piece of land, provided the adjacent ground is dry, the more value the property has for poultry. Two spring-fed brooks crossing a forty-acre tract so as to give a half mile of running water, or a full mile of houses, would water five thousand hens without labor.
Except for a small forty-acre tract, the Gillis land was dry farmed. The forty was irrigated from a spring developed on the premises. It was in alfalfa. Other meadows raised timothy mixed with alsike. Even in unfavorable years, the ranch yielded more than a hundred and fifty tons of hay. Besides hay, a lot of oats and barley was produced.
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