thought about having a new one. There were only seven now, another baby wouldn't make much difference and it wouldn't be long--just a couple years- before Henry Herman, Clara Frieda and Ford Helferstout would be in school and she would be alone all day long. Einar had been looking at Tillie Sorgerson with big moon eyes every time they went to church and they were going to have to start keeping an eye on the two of them or he might be a grampa before he got to be a papa again. I'm getting old, Herman thought. Here I am worried about Einar doing exactly what I did when I was younger. "Well, life goes on," he thought, "and that's how it does it." "Better start keeping an eye on the girls, too," he thought. "Won't be long and they'll be looking to start running around nights with the neighborhood boys."

Damn rain, he started to say, and then stopped himself. "Never cuss the rain when you're a farmer." That's what his dad always said. Good advice. "Come on you kids, pile in, it's going to be a long ways home in this mud." Even as big as the new sedan was, it was still tight for the nine of them with all the groceries and packages.

The Ford man had talked to him about how much better the sedans were and how you were inside and warm and dry and out of the weather but he never talked about how much that sedan body weighed. The poor little Ford could hardly pull itself on the level ground in the mud on the high gear. He was worried about what it was going to be like going down through Norwegian coulee and then the mile back up through the big draw on the low pedal all the way. Once you dropped down the South hill and crossed the swale at the bottom there was never a spot where you weren't pulling up a grade. Sometimes it was less of a grade but it was always a grade. This new Ford would hardly pull it on the high gear when the road was dry, let alone in the mud. "I'll be glad if it will pull it on low pedal in this mud tonight, going to be a late one," he thought. Good thing Einar and Torvald and the girls are here to push, we might not be able to make it up out of Norwegian coulee or up the Jorgenson hill without them. The T was loaded about as heavy already as a T could get, what with he and Freida and Einar and Torvald and Rosalie & Mabel and the triplets. If those girls kept growing like they had the last year or two they were going to be bigger than Freida, Mabel was already as big as a horse and only 12 and Rosalie wasn't far behind her. Well, they all liked to eat and Freida liked to cook and bake, so the girls came by it pretty honestly. Freida had been tall and slim when he married her, but these girls were going to top 200 by the time they were out of eighth grade if they kept it up.

No wonder the Ford was having trouble pulling the load. They'd bought half of everything in town, too, had two boxes tied on the fenders and two fifty pound bags of chick starter strapped to the spare tire carrier on the back. Frieda had ordered some Buff Orpington baby chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa and that was part of the reason they'd gone to town even though it was raining. She wanted to see if they had come in to the depot. If they came in on Saturday the depot sent a postcard to tell you your chicks were in but then they sat in the depot until Monday because the mail didn't come until Monday in the afternoon. Then you didn't go get the chicks until Monday afternoon late and it was later by the time you got them home so they were three or four days old by the time you got them warm and fed and watered and she thought it hurt them too bad to be that old before they got feed and water. Herman knew she was right and he hated to lose any chicks, too, so they went to town to check. Thank goodness the chicks hadn't been there, but she was happy they'd gone to check at the depot. It seemed to him like the older the girls got the more things they needed from town. Freida and the girls and