Page 442

THE SUBJUGATION OF JOB-A STORY: BY
FRANK H. SWEET
HEN Job Marshall took up his hundred and sixty
acres, he commenced work with a grub hoe and ax,
and when later he obtained a team, he was obliged to
cut a road through a mile or two of forest before he
could get his produce to market. With his ax and a
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room cabin and put up his own chimney; and with the grub hoe he
broke an acre or two of ground for his first planting. Other things
came little by little, through the building up of the country and his
own industry.
   But though in time the two-room cabin was turned into a stable,
and a plain, inexpensive frame building erected in its place, and a few
other improvements made, the farm, as a whole, remained the same.
Rail fences still zigzagged around inconvenient lots that had been
enclosed as cleared, fruit trees bore in scattered and irregular isolation,
as they had been set when stumps and roots occupied too much of the
ground for line planting, and the rough road which had been cut
through the forest for the first hauling of produce still did duty as
outlet for the farm.
   Beyond the zigzag fences, however, the world had changed. Tall
spires of smoke rose from the chimneys of a manufacturing town less
than two miles away, and between that and the farm were the steel
rails of a trunk line which banded the East and West; the public
roads were all good now, with many of them macadamized, and in-
stead of a doubtful, low-priced market, there was a good demand for
everything almost at the very gate of the farm.
   Modern improvements he did not countenance, however.      In
the first place, they were too expensive, and in the second, they mini-
mized the severe labor which he believed was necessary to successful
farming. So his boys were made to work as he had worked, with
crude, old-fashioned tools that demanded sheer muscle for every dollar
they helped to earn. He followed the old custom of demanding their
time until they were of age; but on that day, one after another, the
first four boys left the farm to become clerks or railroad men. Hiram,
the fifth boy, however, was a farmer by nature, and a home boy in spite
of the adverse training. Like the other boys he was imbued with mod-
ern ideas, though quieter and less ostentatious in expressing them.
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