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her. Her ideas are usually pretty good, and when I’ve gone against them I’ve been sorry. When you think about it, Mom is generally right.
    So we went to Hidden Valley, Mom and Donnie (that’s my younger brother) and I. It was worse than I had thought it was going to be. The place was still queer enough to scare you purple, but besides that there was something new, a kind of heavy depression in the air.
    It was terrible. At first it made you feel like you’d like to put your hea d up and howl the way a dog does; then you felt too worn out and miserable and unhappy to have energy left for howling.
    It got worse with every hour we stayed there. By the time we’d been in Hidden Valley for two days, Mom and I were looking at each othe r and wondering which of us would be the first to suggest going back to the city. I kept thinking about how sensible Uncle Albert had been to blow himself up with the dynamite. Even Donnie and his kitten felt the depression; they sat huddled up together i n a corner and looked miserable.
    Finally Mom said, in a kind of desperate way, “Eddie, why don’t you see what you can get on your radio set? It might cheer you up.” Mom doesn’t give up easily.
    I thought it was a silly idea. I’ve been a ham operator ever since I was fifteen, and it’s a lot of fun. I enjoy it more than anything. But when you’re feeling as bad as I was then, you don’t want to talk to anyone. You just want to sit and wonder about d y ing and things like that.
    My stuff had been dumped down all in a corner of the little beaver-boarded living room. I hadn’t felt chipper enough to do anything about getting it set up, though Uncle Albert had put in a private power system and there was ele ctricity in the house. After Mom asked me for the second time, though, I got up and hobbled over to my equipment. And here a funny thing happened. I’d hardly started hunting around for a table to put my stuff on when my depression began to lift.
    It was wonderful. It was like being lost in the middle of a dark, choking fog and then having the fog blow away and the bright sun shine out.
    The others were affected the same way. Donnie got a piece of string and began playing with the kitten, and the k itten sat back “and batted at the string with its paws the way cats do when they’re playful. Mom stood watching me for a while, smiling, and then she went out in the kitchen and began to get supper. I could smell the bacon frying and hear her whistling “On ward Christian Soldiers.” Mom whistles that way when she’s feeling good.
    We didn’t go back to feeling depressed again, either. The funny things about Hidden Valley stopped bothering us, and we all enjoyed ourselves. We had fresh eggs, and milk so rich yo u could hardly drink it, and lettuce and peas and tomatoes and everything. It was a dry year, but we had plenty of water for irrigation. We lived off the fat of the land; you’d have to have a hundred dollars a week to live like that in the city.
    Donnie liked school (he walked about a mile to the school bus) better than he had in the city because the kids were more friendly, and Mom got a big bang out of taking care of the cow and the chickens. I was outside all day long, working in the garden, and I got a fine tan and put on some weight. Mom said I never looked so well. She went into town in the jalopy twice a month to get me books from the county library, and I had all kinds of interesting things to read.
    The only thing that bothered me —and it didn’t really bother me, at that —was that I couldn’t contact any other hams with my station. I never got a single signal from anyone. I don’t know what the trouble was, really —what it looked like was that radio waves couldn’t get into or out of the valley. I did everything I could to soup up my equipment. I had Mom get me a dozen books from the county library, and I stayed up half the night studying them. I tore my equipment down and built it up again eight or