CHAPTER VIII  BELSHAZZAR'S RECORD POINT

The Harvester set the neglected cabin in order; then he carefully and deftly packed all his dried herbs, barks, and roots.  Next came carrying the couch grass, wild alum, and soapwort into the store- room.  Then followed July herbs.  He first went to his beds of foxglove, because the tender leaves of the second year should be stripped from them at flowering time, and that usually began two weeks earlier; but his bed lay in a shaded, damp location and the tall bloom stalks were only in half flower, their pale lavender making an exquisite picture.  It paid to collect those leaves, so the Harvester hastily stripped the amount he wanted.

Yarrow was beginning to bloom and he gathered as much as he required, taking the whole plant.  That only brought a few cents a pound, but it was used entire, so the weight made it worth while.

Catnip tops and leaves were also ready.  As it grew in the open in dry soil and the beds had been weeded that spring, he could gather great arm loads of it with a sickle, but he had to watch the swarming bees.  He left the male fern and mullein until the last for different reasons.

On the damp, cool, rocky hillside, beneath deep shade of big forest trees, grew the ferns, their long, graceful fronds waving softly.  Tree toads sang on the cool rocks beneath them, chewinks nested under gnarled roots among them, rose-breasted grosbeaks sang in grape-vines clambering over the thickets, and Singing Water ran close beside.  So the Harvester left digging these roots until nearly the last, because he so disliked to disturb the bed.  He could not have done it if he had not been forced.  All of the demand for his fern never could be supplied.  Of his products none was more important to the Harvester because this formed the basis of one of the oldest and most reliable remedies for little children.  The fern had to be gathered with especial care, deteriorated quickly, and no staple was more subject to adulteration.

So he kept his bed intact, lifted the roots at the proper time, carefully cleaned without washing, rapidly dried in currents of hot air, and shipped them in bottles to the trade.  He charged and received fifteen cents a pound, where careless and indifferent workers got ten.

On the banks of Singing Water, at the head of the fern bed, the Harvester stood under a gray beech tree and looked down the swaying length of delicate green.  He was lean and rapidly bronzing, for he seldom remembered a head covering because he loved the sweep of the wind in his hair.

``I hate to touch you,'' he said.  ``How I wish she could see you before I begin.  If she did, probably she would say it was a sin, and then I never could muster courage to do it at all.  I'd give a small farm to know if those violets revived for her.  I was crazy to ask Doc if they were wilted, but I hated to.  If they were from the ones I gathered that morning they should have been all right.''

A tree toad dared him to come on; a chipmunk grew saucy as the Harvester bent to an unloved task.  If he stripped the bed as closely as he dared and not injure it, he could not fill half his orders; so, deftly and with swift, skilful fingers and an earnest face, he worked.  Belshazzar came down the hill on a rush, nose to earth and began hunting among the plants.  He never could understand why his loved master was so careless as to go to work before he had pronounced it safe.  When the fern bed was finished, the Harvester took time to make a trip to town, but