relating this story.

Perkins was what some people call, not a farmer, but an "agriculturist,"—that is, he was a back-to-the-land man. He had been born and raised on a farm. He knew that you must harness a horse on the left side, milk a cow on the right, that wagon nuts tighten the way the wheel rims, and that a fresh egg will not float.

He had a farm that would grow enough clover to fill the average dairy if he fed it lime; he had a boy coming to school age; and both he and his wife wanted to get back to the country. They had their little savings, and they wanted, first of all, to take a vacation, getting acquainted with their farm. They hadn't taken a vacation in fifteen years.

He moved in, late in the summer, and started out to get acquainted with his neighbors, as well as his land. This was in the New England hills. Water courses cut through everywhere. In regard to its bountiful water supply, the neighborhood had much in common with all the states east of the Mississippi, along the Atlantic seaboard, in the lake region of the central west, and in the Pacific States. With this difference; the water courses in his neighborhood had once been of economic importance.

A mountain river flowed down his valley. Up and down the valley one met ramshackle mills, fallen into decay. Many years ago before railroads came, before it was easy to haul coal from place to place to make steam, these little mills were centers of thriving industries, which depended on the power of falling water to make turned articles, spin cotton, and so forth. Then the railroads came, and it was easy to haul coal to make steam. And the same railroads that hauled the coal to make steam, were there to haul away the articles manufactured by steam power. So in time the little manufacturing plants on the river back in the hills quit business and moved to railroad stations. Then New England, from being a manufacturing community made up of many small isolated water plants, came to be a community made up of huge arteries and laterals of smoke stacks that fringed the railroads. Where the railroad happened to follow a river course—as the Connecticut River—the water-power plants remained; but the little plants back in the hills were wiped off the map—because steam power with railroads at the front door proved cheaper than water-power with railroads ten miles away.

One night Perkins came in late from a long drive with his next-door neighbor. He had learned the first rule of courtesy in the country, which is to unhitch his own side of the horse and help back the buggy into the shed. They stumbled around in the barn putting up the horse, and getting down hay and grain for it, by the light of an oil lantern, which was set on the floor in a place convenient to be kicked over. He went inside and took supper by the light of a smoky smelly oil lamp, that filled the room full of dark corners; and when supper was over, the farmwife groped about in the cellar putting things away by the light of a candle.

The next day his neighbor was grinding cider at his ramshackle water mill—one of the operations for which a week must be set aside every fall. Perkins sat on a log and listened to the crunch-crunch of the apples in the chute, and the drip of the frothy yellow liquid that fell into waiting buckets.

"How much power have you got here?" he asked.

"Thirty or forty horsepower, I guess."

"What do you do with it, besides grinding cider to pickle your neighbors' digestion with?"

"Nothing much. I've got a planer and a moulding machine in there, to work up jags of lumber occasionally. That's all. This mill was a chair-factory in my grandfather's day, back in 1830."

"Do you use it thirty days in a year?"

"No; not half that."

"What are you going to do with it this winter?"

"Nothing; I keep the gate open and the wheel turning, so it won't freeze, but nothing else. I am going to take the family to Texas to visit my wife's folks for three months. We've worked hard enough to take a vacation."

"Will you rent me the mill while you are gone?"

"Go ahead; you can have it for nothing, if you will watch the ice."

"All right; let me know when you come back and I'll drive to town and bring you home."

Three months went by, and one day in February the city man, in response to a letter, hitched up and drove to town to bring his neighbor back home. It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they started out, and it was six—dark—when they turned the bend in the road to the farm house. They helped the wife and children out, with their baggage, and as Perkins opened the door of the house, he reached up on the wall and turned something that clicked sharply.

Instantly light sprang from everywhere. In the barn-yard a street lamp with an 18-inch reflector illuminated all under it for a space of 100 feet with bright white rays of light. Another street lamp hung over the watering trough. The barn doors and windows burst forth in light. There was not a dark corner to be found anywhere. In the house it was the same. Perkins led the amazed procession from room to room of the house they had shut up for the winter. On the wall in the hall outside of every room was a button which he pushed, and the room became as light as day before they entered. The cellar door, in opening, automatically lighted a lamp illuminating that cavern as it had never been lighted before since the day a house was built over it.

Needless to say, the farmer and his family were reduced to a state of speechlessness.

"How the deuce did you do it?" finally articulated the farmer.

"I put your idle water wheel to work," said Perkins; and then, satisfied with this exhibition, he put them back in the sleigh and drove to his home, where his wife had supper waiting.

While the men were putting up the team in the electric lighted barn, the farmwife went into the kitchen. Her hostess was cooking supper on an electric stove. It looked like a city gas range and it cooked all their meals, and did the baking besides. A hot-water tank stood against the wall, not connected to anything hot, apparently. But it was scalding hot, by virtue of a little electric water heater the size of a quart tin can, connected at the bottom. Twenty-four hours a day the water wheel pumped electricity into that "can," so that hot water was to be had at any hour simply by turning a faucet. In the laundry there was an electric pump that kept the tank in the attic filled automatically. When the level of water in this tank fell to a certain point, a float operated a switch that started the pump; and when the water level reached a certain height, the same float stopped the pump. A small motor, the size of a medium Hubbard squash operated a washing machine and wringer on wash days. This same motor was a man-of-all-work for this house, for, when called on, it turned the separator, ground and polished knives and silverware, spun the sewing machine, and worked the vacuum cleaner.

Over the dining room table hung the same hanging shade of old days, but the oil lamp itself was gone. In its place was a 100-watt tungsten lamp whose rays made the white table cloth fairly glisten. The wires carrying electricity to this lamp were threaded through the chains reaching to the ceiling, and one had to look twice to see where the current came from. In the sitting room, a cluster of electric bulbs glowed from a fancy wicker work basket that hung from the ceiling. The housewife had made use of what she had throughout the house. Old-fashioned