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potatoes and our vegetable garden, we have done much better. It use
to be nothing but cotton; now we raise our own food. As I told you,
we don't spend our mighty little on flour and sugar. We don't sell
our vegetables. We can them to use in the winter. We still have about
three hundred quarts to last us 'til our spring garden comes in. We
have a lot of jelly and preserves and marmalade. Our peach and pear
trees and crab-apple trees are doing well, and we have the blackberry
and huckleberry bushes, more than we can use. We make blackberry and
elderberry wine too, but make more scuppemong wine than any other
kind. We don't waste nothing; save all of our leaves even. Leaf mould
is one of the best fertilizers.

"Our stock don't take near as much feed in the winter. We just
turn them a-loose and they just graze from early morning 'til late in
the afternoon. Now, from March on we have to put them up and feed
them on corn and cotton-seed meal. Of course we have some pasture.
Our cotton seed we exchange for cottonseed meal. It don't cost us
nothing. And we raise a lot of com. Another thing we have is our
pecan trees. We make some money off of them, but the price hasn't
been good the last few years, and the crop has been poor; not enough
rain. We ain't had near enough rain. But here we go, liable as not
it will rain. Ain't farmers terrible? I am one and I know. Can't
please them; even God Almighty can't; they're always grumbling."

Miss Dora re-entered the conversation with comments about some
of their other troubles. she said. "We have had a time with niggers stealing,
she said. They just can't help it; it's born in them. But we can't
stay here and watch things all the time. If you turn your back, they'll
grab up a chicken, steal your eggs and sell them to the rolling store.

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