Thursday, half past one, and the basket has forty-one letters in it, which for the fourteenth of May is nothing. Fill this out as you go. I type my own carbons because the pool puts the lot number in the box for the shipping date and then I am hunting it for ten minutes.

A woman writes and says nothing came up. That is four letters, not one. One: the lot was dead, and that is ours. Two: the ground went cold and wet after she sowed and the seed sat and rotted, and that is May. Three: she put beet down an inch and a half because the packet said half an inch and she was being generous. Four: she planted it and then it rained an inch and twenty in one night and the row is now in the alley. From this desk in Shenandoah I cannot tell which. So we send the packet. Detroit Dark Red runs us eleven cents the packet and a customer who is sore at us costs a catalog mailing, and the fall book is at the printer already, so the arithmetic does itself.

Then I check the tin. Every lot we ship leaves a retained sample in a numbered tin on the rack, and if her seed was bad the tin will say so. Four hundred seeds on damp blotter, into the cabinet at seventy-five degrees, count the sprouts at day seven and again at day fourteen. Federal minimum on beet is sixty-five percent. Lot 4118 read eighty-one, which is good seed, and eighty-one percent good seed will still hand somebody with clay ground a thin row and a grudge. Both those things are true at once and neither one is an argument.

Wendell Prahl — Adjustments. Six years this July. Average turnaround four and a half days, which I will put in a box further down because it belongs in a box.