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 and made a kitchen garden near the house in which she raised beets, cabbages, beans, tomatoes, and other vegetables to take away the curse of bareness from their table.

The first big job of the season came in May. This was the tobacco setting. Late in February Jerry had made the tobacco bed. It was nine feet by sixty feet and it lay in a sheltered hollow sloping gently to the south. To kill the weed seeds Jerry had burnt the bed by covering it with old fence rails and setting them on fire. Then he had raked the ashes into the ground and made the earth as fine and smooth as sand. Into this he had sowed the small, almost microscopic seed, had tramped it well into the ground and spread over the whole a tightly stretched covering of cheesecloth to protect the young plants from wind and frost. According to the custom of tenant farmers' wives in the tobacco country, Judith had planted on the edges seed of tomatoes, peppers, and cabbages to make plants for the home garden.

It was a dry spring that year, and Jerry had had to work hard to keep the plants alive. Again and again, after his day's work was done, he had trudged to and fro between the nearest spring and the tobacco bed carrying big buckets of water to the thirsty young plants. Jerry found to his dismay that it took a great many buckets of water to wet a nine by sixty bed. At last in late April there came several days of gently falling warm rain and the plants took on new life. By the middle of May they were lush and lusty and ready to be set when the right weather conditions arrived.

The big rain came the last week in May, bringing the much desired "season." Little showers had fallen from time to time, but they were not enough to wet the ground deeply. Jerry was beginning to grow uneasy and had been scanning the weather signs with an anxious eye for many days. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, as he drove his horses up from the field where he had been cultivating corn, the sun sank behind an opaque wall of sickly yellow cloud. Looking about Jerry saw the sky overcast in every direction with a uniform pale gray. Birds flew low under the heavy gray canopy. The