Six years he had worked cultivating these beds, and hunting through the woods on the river banks, government land, the great Limberlost Swamp, and neglected corners of earth for barks and roots.

He occasionally made long trips across the country for rapidly diminishing plants he found in the woodland of men who did not care to bother with a few specimens, and many big beds of profitable herbs, extinct for miles around, now flourished on the banks of Loon Lake, in the marsh, and through the forest rising above.

To what extent and value his venture had grown, no one save the Harvester knew.

When his neighbours twitted him with being too lazy to plow and sow, of "mooning" over books, and derisively sneered when they spoke of him as the Harvester of the Woods or the Medicine Man, David Langston smiled and went his way.
How lonely he had been since the death of his mother he never realized until that morning when a new idea really had taken possession of him.
From the store-house he heaped packages of seeds, dried leaves, barks, and roots into the wagon.

But he kept a generous supply of each, for he prided himself on being able to fill all orders that reached him.