"Very well," replied Percy. "If you must go to get the thread and
will permit me to be the coachman, I shall be satisfied, for you
will be home early."

"Then we will take the colts and buckboard, and I shall be home in
less than twenty minutes after your train leaves the station."

"I think I have missed several days of your beautiful 'Indian
Summer,' because of my trip to the North," Percy remarked to Mr.
West as they sat on the broad veranda waiting for the hour of two
thirty when the colts were to be ready for the drive.

"I wish you might have been with us while Professor Barstow was
here," replied Mr. West, "not only because of the mild autumn
weather we have had, but also because Professor Barstow has some
ideas about questions of soil fertility that are very different from
those you hold. He says a young man from Washington gave a lecture
at his college down in North Carolina, in which he informed them
that the cause of infertility of soils is a poisonous substance
excreted by the plant itself, and that this can be overcome by
changing from one crop to another because the excrete of one plant,
while poisonous to that plant, will not be poisonous to other plants
of a different kind. Thus, by rotation of crops, good crops could be
grown indefinitely on the same land without the addition of plant
food. He said that the soil water alone dissolved plenty of plant
food from all soils for the production of good crops, and that the
supply of plant food will be permanently maintained, because the
plant food contained in the subsoil far below where the roots go is
being brought to the surface by the rise of the capillary moisture,
and that there is in fact a steady tendency toward an accumulation