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 tions are tremendous. Every week or so Jerry and Judith went through the tobacco plants with an old tin can in one hand and a stick in the other and knocked these offending vermin into the cans. When the rounds were completed they took the cans home and burned their contents in the cookstove.

It was not enough to cultivate the tobacco with the plow. It had to be hoed, too. To make its best growth each plant required individual attention. They chopped the ground about the plants with great hoes made especially for heavy work. The hard clay, baked flinty by the hot sunshine, resisted the hoes with all its might. It always seemed to Judith that her row would never come to an end. And when, after slow and toilsome progress, she at last reached the end, there were innumerable more rows waiting to be done. She was forced to admit that Jerry was her superior in the tobacco field. He could hoe three rows while she was doing one; and at evening, though tired, he was by no means at the end of his strength. It was very hot in the southward sloping field. The sun beat down mercilessly and the plants exhaled a heavy, sickening odor. She could feel the sweat standing out on her face, and rolling down her legs. It tickled and irritated her skin, and now and then she stopped to scratch viciously. Sometimes the acrid streams poured into her eyes and for the moment blinded her. When a breeze sprang up and swept across the tobacco field, its touch on her wet body made her feel almost cold. After it had died away the heavy quiet fell like a great, stifling blanket over the earth and it seemed twice as hot as before. Still she and Jerry plodded on with the patient persistence of those born and reared to a life of toil.

Not much visiting went on between Hat and Judith that summer; for the tobacco field claimed them both.

But Judith was young and buoyant. Tobacco did not have to be hoed every day; and these seasons of hard and continuous toil gave to the less strenuous days something of the feeling of holidays. In spite of the tobacco crop, life remained full of pleasures for Judith. She liked to work in her garden and see the beans and peas and cabbages making sturdy