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yond all reason, and thus that its holder could not possibly live as a person of rank and pay the year's unavoidable expenses unless he had resources of his own to draw upon.

Meanwhile no misgivings could keep me from building a new barn, nor from cultivating the land into larger fields, in the hope that in time I might reckon upon a more abundant yield and thereby perceive the possibility of maintaining myself at this pleasant place; but this activity, however strenuous, remained weak against an Almighty Power that, during two successive years, through night frosts around midsummer, denied me the harvesting of the rye seed-crop, and thus extinguished the spark of hope for better days that still seemed to remain.

Now lawsuits, journeys, surveying proceedings and the taxation of the land, building and rebuilding, and finally crop failures—these successive drainers of money—had so emptied my small store that I had begun a new course of indebtedness; and how was I to extricate myself from it through the land's yield, when even in good years it did not yet produce the heavy tax imposed upon it?

If this situation already appeared troubl-