Hiram in the Middle West

For an hour before the accommodation train stopped at Pringleton the rain had etched zigzag lines upon the windowpane beside Hiram Strong's seat; so to find the platform aglitte...

He seemed a very suspicious man. His blue eyes searched the open countenance of the boy from the East, and his expression, with bristling moustache and all, was fierce indeed.

The thought had been impressed upon Hiram Strong's mind from the very first that there was something altogether wrong with Yancey Battick. His wild eyes and excited manner now c...

As so often happens after a hard storm, the weather cleared at daybreak and a patch of cold blue wintry sky met Hiram Strong's inquisitive gaze through the window as he rolled o...

The woman so excitedly approaching Sunnyside was a buxom person with every sign of an assertive and determined character. This first speech addressed to Hiram made him feel that...

The motor-car that came swiftly along the ridge road to the gate of Sunnyside Farm was a big, seven-passenger touring car. Behind the wheel sat a big man in a fur coat. To tell...

By evening of his first day on Sunnyside Farm Hiram Strong was comfortably established in the incubator shed and prepared to keep house after a fashion. Mr. Bronson supplied him...

Lettie Bronson did not come to Sunnyside again that spring, but her father, of course, came frequently during the first weeks of Hiram's incumbency as superintendent of the hill...

This was the fifth day since Hiram had started his test boxes, and he was so much interested in this matter on his arrival at Sunnyside that he did not think again of Mr. Battic...

Hiram Strong was not likely to forget the experiences of that night. He did not feel that he was braver than anyone else in remaining with the delirious man and doing what he co...

The first truck to arrive that day at Sunnyside instead of bringing lumber, bricks, or other building material, brought ten yearling steers that Mr. Bronson had picked up from h...

"Do you want him? I understand you are about ready to put a gang of ditchers to work in that wheat field. But you haven't told me what kind of underdraining you are going to do...

"I should say not! You did just right. You read him aright. His prime failings are drink and laziness. Just warn him off the premises if he bothers you. He's been in trouble and...

It was about this time that Hiram received his first letter since leaving Scoville from Sister. He was glad to hear personally from her, and about her wonderful fortune as well;...

"What are you doing there?" demanded Battick, with his gun cocked and the muzzle on a level with Hiram Strong's breast. "Have I got to give you a lesson, too?"

"I do love a dance, Mr. Strong, don't you?" she began with her head on one side and a languishing look. "We have had very few of them around this neighborhood this winter. The f...

The hard scrubby looking red and yellow corn that Hiram had got from Mr. Brown and tested so carefully, had planted a goodly patch of the Sunnyside cornland. Mr. Bronson looked...

There had been two powerful lamps lifted from automobiles and placed so that they would light the veranda. Therefore the front of the partially built house and the yard were wel...

Hiram had not lost sight of the fact that Yancey Battick's wheat had promised to be better than any of that planted on Sunnyside, to say the least; and although since his rather...

The whine of the wind rose to a demoniac shriek. Hiram turned to shout to his companions and a sudden gust seemed to take his breath so completely that he could not utter a sound.

Before Hiram Strong and Orrin Post reached the strip of woodland that divided the open field of Sunnyside from the old Pringle place they heard somebody shouting. After the pass...

Not until morning was the full result of the tornado revealed on and about Sunnyside. Most of the buildings being comparatively new, Hiram found that few had suffered. The sheds...

Hiram Strong was learning something about corn growing that he had not found out before. That is, after all, one of the greatest charms of the science of agriculture: There is a...

The rain dripped from the porch roof and a curtain of drizzle fell between the house and the gate where the gray horses stood. The bewhiskered individual had a rubber blanket ov...

Hiram knew that Lettie Bronson, after all, had her way with her father and that before the summer was over she had made him take her to one of the lake shore resorts where she m...

In spite of the disappointment Hiram Strong experienced regarding the party at the Bronson house in Plympton, the winter did not pass without some entertainment--and of a kind w...

She jumped over the wheel and ran to greet the young farmer. A year previous Hiram would certainly have met Sister with a hug and a kiss! But this tall, pretty, almost grown-up...

There was an uncertainty in the atmosphere of Sunnyside Farm and an expectancy of trouble in all their minds. What would happen next? Would the enemy strike again, having been t...

Hiram and Sister (who had as yet not discovered her first name) often discussed her personal mystery. The lawyer who had finally searched her out at the Atterson farm, having tr...

The wheat threshing was past. The plows were going again, and following the raking and smoothing of the fields Hiram Strong put in either ensilage corn and peas, or a mixture of...

Hiram Strong had grown taller corn with bigger ears on it in the East than any of the now ripening crop on Sunnyside Farm. But in bulk of shelled corn he knew he had never equal...

By this time the great corn crop was in the cribs and Sunnyside Farm was down to a winter basis. The crop had averaged sixty-five bushels of shelled corn to the acre, and only o...

It was by no means a strange story; except that he was forced to live in a public institution, the management of which chanced to be in rather hard, unsympathetic hands.