Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/217

Rh brother once, a rolling stone who wasted the family substance and went off to Europe once a year to buy marble lions and tombstones and paint little pictures on pieces of canvas. He had been a poor sort, this brother, and it couldn't have been much loss when he died of Roman fever somewhere in Italy, for he had always preferred daubing a picture of a field to driving a plow up and down its landsides. And you can't farm in a country like Canada with a camel's-hair brush! Not by a long shot! The two old crows still tried to run that farm, for they would endure no man about the place, but they couldn't even pay the interest on the mortgage, and year by year things were only getting worse. They'd be foreclosing on 'em any time now.

It would make great tobacco land, the upper half of the farm, once it was worked right. They could get five or six hundred a year out of it, easy, growing Burley on shares, but the two elderly Keswick women had religious scruples about surrendering land for the cultivation of the filthy weed.