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never in fact discerned a pattern. She didn't know what to make of
    herself, truly. She might have said that for ten years (and who could remember before
    that?) she had repeatedly pressed on, doing and thinking what she judged to be right and
    natural at the time, only to be told afterward that she had done just the wrong thing. It
    was as if she were plowing a furrow, intent upon the ground in front of her, only to stop
    and look around and discover that she was in the wrong field, and, indeed, the wrong
    country entirely. No, it would never have occurred to her to smooth her grandfather's
    brow.

    When the parade was over, Lavinia and Mr. Bell helped Papa to his feet, and then
    out of the newspaper office and around the building, where they got into the wagon, Papa
    first, Beatrice and Lavinia after him. Margaret and Elizabeth were assisted into the back,
    and then Beatrice drove the pair of mules to the Fete. Mr. Bell followed on his own
    mount, a fine bay Missouri Trotter with a white blaze and a white front foot.

    At the Fete, events returned to their customary state. The band played, the
    comestibles were served (including two of Lavinia's blackberry pies and almost a peck of
    John Gentry's cherries) and declared the best ever. The sun went down. No one would
    have known when they drove home that night (an hour in the moonlight, with Elizabeth
    sleeping against Margaret's shoulder, and Lavinia and John Gentry discussing something
    quietly in the front seat of the wagon, while John Gentry drove the team and Beatrice
    hummed in the evening air) that anything untoward had happened--Papa seemed hale and
    cheerful. Margaret's idle thought, as the moonlit road unwound between the fields, was
    that she had forgotten to find a copy of the paper, and so she knew it would be some time
    before she learned what it was that Mr. Early had done to modify the nature of creation
    itself.

    THIS day, like the day her father shot himself, was the beginning of a new age-Mr. Bell became a regular visitor to Gentry Farm. He would appear in the morning, after
    breakfast, and drink coffee with them at the table, and then he would follow John Gentry
    into the fields, where he would be introduced to the mysteries of hemp, tobacco, corn,
    and mules. He even explored the hemp fields, which were down in the bottomlands,
    damp and dirty, teeming with snakes, the girls thought. John Gentry had a long, low
    building near the hemp fields, where, using a system of pulleys and hooks and mules and
    men with the hemp wrapped around their waists, he manufactured and tarred lengths of
    rope. But after he had explored the hemp fields, seen the workmen cut the plants off at
    the ground and then lay them in shallow clay ponds full of dank water, Mr. Bell
    suggested another plan for the hemp business. John Gentry, he said, should plant the seed
    differently--not so close together, but more in rows, so that the plants could mature and
    flower. The ultimate product of this sort of plantation was not rope but a medicinal
    cornucopia effective in the treatment of every ill. Robert Bell's favorite St. Louis
    practitioner, Dr. Caswell, made both powders and pills for the whole city. Robert Bell
    took the medicine--Madison County Cure-All, Dr. Caswell called it. It was even good for
    the cholera. Robert said, "Thank the Lord you stuck with the hemp." And John Gentry
    said, "You've got to make a mess of mule and cattle manure, and chicken litter, and till it
    in faithfully every fall. That's what you have to do, and if you have some fish meal, well,
    then, that's even better." They talked about it over and over, Robert Bell nodding, as if
    farming were in his blood.

    Robert liked to look at the horses and the mules, and to go out with Beatrice in the
    gig. His Missouri Trotter was a sensible mare whom he sometimes rode and sometimes
    drove. He told John Gentry that he did not pretend to be a horseman but he knew some
    horsemen, and he knew that, among these horsemen,