CHAPTER XIII.
The Garden of the Lord "With what content and merriment, Their days are spent, whose minds are bent To follow the useful plow." That spring I decided if school didn't stop pretty soon, I'd run away again, and I didn't in the least care what they did to me.

A country road was all right and it was good enough, if it had been heaped up, leveled and plenty of gravel put on; and of course our road would be fine, because father was one of the commissioners, and as long as he filled that office, every road in the county would be just as fine as the law would allow him to make it.

I have even heard him tell mother that he "stretched it a leetle mite," when he was forced to by people who couldn't seem to be made to understand what was required to upbuild a nation.

He said our language was founded on the alphabet, and to master it you had to begin with "a".

And he said the nation was like that; it was based on townships, and when a township was clean, had good roads, bridges, schoolhouses, and churches, a county was in fine shape, and when each county was in order, the state was right, and when the state was prosperous, the nation could rejoice in its strength.
He said Atlas in the geography book, carrying the world on his back, was only a symbol, but it was a good one.