He also supplied the town
with ice. In his orchards beneath the trees stood more than a hundred
beehives and every year he shipped honey to Cleveland. The farmer himself
was a man who appeared to do nothing, but his shrewd mind was always at
work. In the summer throughout the long sleepy afternoons, he drove about
over the county buying sheep and cattle, stopping to trade horses with some
farmer, dickering for new pieces of land, everlastingly busy. He had one
passion. He loved fast trotting horses, but would not humor himself by
owning one. "It's a game that only gets you into trouble and debt," he said
to his friend John Clark, the banker. "Let other men own the horses and go
broke racing them. I'll go to the races. Every fall I can go to Cleveland
to the grand circuit. If I go crazy about a horse I can bet ten dollars
he'll win. If he doesn't I'm out ten dollars. If I owned him I would maybe
be out hundreds for the expense of training and all that." The farmer was
a tall man with a white beard, broad shoulders, and rather small slender
white hands. He chewed tobacco, but in spite of the habit kept both himself
and his white beard scrupulously clean. His wife had died while he was yet
in the full vigor of life, but he had no eye for women. His mind, he once
told one of his friends, was too much occupied with his own affairs and
with thoughts of the fine horses he had seen to concern itself with any
such nonsense.
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