Which detail from the passage best supports the idea that Farmer
It was long past dusk of an August evening. Farmer Weitbreck stood leaning on the big gate of his barnyard, looking first up and
then down the road; his face wore an expression of deep perplexity. Never before had the farmers been so put to it for farm service, for
harvesttime had come, and instead of the stream of laborers seeking employment that usually at this season set in as regularly as
river freshets in spring, it was this year almost impossible to hire anyone.
The explanation of this nobody knew or could divine, but the fact was indisputable, and the farmers were in dismay-nobody more
so that Farmer Weitbreack, who had miles of grain, all yellow and nodding, ready for the sickle and nobody but himself and his son
John to swing scythes.
"Never I am caught this way anoder year," thought he, as he gazed wearily up and down the dark, silent road.
Gustavus Weitbreck had lived so long on his farm that he thought in English instead of German, but his phraseology was the only
thing about about him that had changed. In habits of life, he was the same he had been forty years ago, when he farmed a little plot of
land in the fatherland-slow, methodical, saving, upright, obstinate. All these traits "Old Weitbreck," as he was called all through the
country, possessed to a degree much out of the ordinary, and it was a combination of two of them-the obstinacy and the savingness
-which had brought him into his present predicament.
In June, he had had a good laborer-one of the best in the country. By his help, the haying had been done in two thirds the usual
time; but when John Weitbreck, like a sensible fellow, said, "Now, we should better keep Alf on till harvest; these is plenty of odds-
and-ends work about the farm he can help at," his father had cried out
"It is that you tink I must be made out of money! I vill not keep dis man on so big wages to do vat you call odd-and-end vork. We do
odd-and-end vork ourself."
