asked Ben eagerly.

Jo was rather shamefaced. “Well, I shouldn’t have done it. But the way the man said it made me mad, so I hauled off and gave him a punch in the jaw. He looked so funny, the way he sprawled with raspberries all over him! He was a good-sized feller, and he got up on his feet and came after me ugly, but he saw Pete coming on the run and I can tell you he legged it for his car with all the kids streaming after him. He knew just as well as I did that he was stealing.”

“Well,” said Ben slowly, “if any one stole my beans I’d punch him in the jaw, too. After a farmer has planted seeds on his own land the crop is his exactly as much as the vegetables in my mother’s kitchen are hers after she has brought them home from the market.”

“There ought to be policemen to watch city people,” said Ann. “They ought to be made afraid to steal, if they are not the kind of persons who would be ashamed to take what isn’t theirs.”

“There don’t seem to be many of that last kind,” said Jo.

“It makes me feel rather queer,” said Ann. “I don’t like to think that you have learned to have such a bad opinion of people who live in the city.”

“Tell us some more about farming, Jo,” begged50 Ben. “What happens to beans after they have sprouted and begun to be plants?” He looked fondly at his row with their yellow-green stems.

50

“Oh, we’ll have plenty of work from now on,” began Jo. “We’ll have to hunt for cutworms right away. See—here is one now.” He uncovered a small gray worm about an inch long and crushed it with his hoe.

“Let’s see!” said Ben excitedly, and he and Ann began to examine their own allotments.

“They work at night and dig in under the soil when the sun comes out,” Jo explained. “They bite the young plant off just where it goes into the ground. Whenever you find a plant lying on the ground you know that a cutworm has eaten it off and he is hiding under the dirt a few inches away. You’ll have to dig each one up and kill it before he does any more damage. He would come back again and again and finally eat off the whole row.”

“I’ve found one!” Ben cried. “I hate them! Why do they have to come?” he asked as he stamped on it.

“I guess they have to eat like the rest of us,” answered Jo. “But if we didn’t watch there would be 

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