You can imagine that it didn't take long for Andrew to become
spoiled at this rate! The next year he suddenly disappeared,
leaving only a note on the kitchen table, and tramped all over
the state for six weeks collecting material for a new book.
I had all I could do to keep him from going to New York to
talk to editors and people of that sort. Envelopes of
newspaper cuttings used to come to him, and he would pore over
them when he ought to have been ploughing corn. Luckily the
mail man comes along about the middle of the morning when
Andrew is out in the fields, so I used to look over the
letters before he saw them. After the second book ("Happiness
and Hayseed" it was called) was printed, letters from
publishers got so thick that I used to put them all in the
stove before Andrew saw them--except those from the Decameron
Jones people, which sometimes held checks. Literary folk used
to turn up now and then to interview Andrew, but generally I
managed to head them off.
But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and
more of a literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would
hang over the pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset
instead of mending the weather vane on the barn which took a
slew so that the north wind came from the southwest.
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