Note 41 — Chapter Twenty-four
Reading edition
... looking back, I can see now, how early this idea was boring itself into Davey’s brain. In her monograph about him, the late Eda Eberhardt, Centralia’s librarian, relates how she was obliged to deprive him of reading-room privileges one week because of his habit of poring over maps and pencil-marking the deserts, mountains, and prairies.
He once related to me, word for word, the doctrine of Malthusianism, as it had been passed on to him by Henry, drawing his own critical deductions, and evidently thinking about the relativity of population and land.
He could never bear to see idle land. Even the stony little nooks and corners surrounding the Igrotte house gave up odds and ends of the most heterogeneous yield. Mushrooms under the back porch. A potato-patch he had somehow scratched into being, on a rocky little ledge of land behind the barns. Even out of the powdery, dry front yard he had eked beets and carrots.
Much of my own later success with crop-rotation I owe to his helpful co-operation in those days when his significant back-to-the-farm policies must just have been taking shape in his mind.