-Lio- admonition to him was phrased in this form: "A little slow there, Jimmy? Keep the hoe moving, lad! Keep it moving!" I helped on his farm during numerous seasons, and frequently did the rolling after the grain had been sown. Working for him was always a pleasure.

Peter McElroy had a jolly smile and a charming sense of humor. He, too, had the knack of making a youngster like myself feel quite "grown up," as we picked along the drills together. In every sense of the word, he was one of Nature's noblemen.

As the potato-digging season opened, the thermometer portended the arrival of Autum's final days. When we made our Shivering appearance in the field at seven in the morning -- sometimes a trifle earlier.-- the soil was brittle and crusty from the previous night's freeze. Efficient picking called for bare hands; gloves were quite impractical. Consequently, until the sun had gained a bit of height, our fingers were blue and numb.

Three horses hauled the digger -- a heavy two-wheeled piece of machinery with a curved horizontal share at the rear to uproot the drill. Above the share was a whirling rotor with long, flattened radial blades that hurled soil and potatoes a half-dozen or more feet to the right of the digger's — line of travel. The pickers worked in pairs; one, usually an adult, in the furrow left by the share; the other, a youngster, gathering the tubers . scattered by the rotor.

To be rated a "clean" picker demanded strict attention to business, with no distractions. At intervals, the owner of the field, who usually drove the digger, would pause to glance back over a freshly picked drill. When he spotted a couple of potatoes partly buried in the moist red loam, the boy or the girl responsible was informed of the oversight, with a suggestion that closer attention be exercised. In potato-digging, as in threshing, the matter of "skylarking" frequently came into the picture. The term was used

to describe various kinds of youthful deviltry; here, it applied