It was a testament to Jake's prowess that he ploughed an entire field in one day. He was a farmer, his Dad was a farmer and his Dad's Dad and so on. No one in the family remembered anyone not being a farmer except for one Insurance salesman and he was disowned by the family anyway.

The truly amazing thing was that Jake ploughed by hand - no machinery had yet been invented which would have allowed him to plough the field in the relative safety and comfort of an enclosed tractor.

Bob, on the other hand, was not capable of ploughing much more than a quarter of a field a day even though he had twice as many horses in his stable and they were well-bred and accustomed to the hard work of pulling a plough all day long, if they had to, whether it was raining or sunshine.

Bob and Jake were cousins, and so it turned out they had the same last name of Long, since Jake's Dad was the brother of Bob's Dad and, as was previously mentioned, both of them were farmers and were, indeed, formerly related to the Insurance salesman of which neither of them would speak.

They barely knew who this Insurance salesman was, anyway, since apparently both their Dads were related to the Insurance salesman's Dad by being in the same pool of grandchildren reared by the notorius Elphaeus Long who originally was a Pirate, but since he owned a farm and actually worked it most of the year, wasn't counted so much as a Pirate but as a Farmer and so remained in the family tree despite the fact that he was an evil and nasty person who took advantage of people and stole things from people of any race and creed whether he liked them or not.

It was a hot August day when Bob was resting under a tree and Jake had made his way through half the field when Monty, the Insurance lad, decided that he had had enough of not being in the family and figured maybe he could learn enough about Farming from Jake and/or Bob, that he made his way to the nexus or area where the farmland of Jake and Bob were adjacent to plead and beg for assistance in learning the tradecraft of the farmer, no matter how difficult or boring any of the tasks might be.

He decided to go in diguise, so that even if Jake and / or Bob had been told what he looked like, neither of them would be able to readily identify him because of the beard and moustache he was wearing and the clothes which he had dug out of his Grandfather's trunk which he figured would look homespun enough to resemble what most people in that general vicinity would normally wear when they were simply travelling about to meet their far-off neighbors to plan a party or to propose some trade or to get help raising a barn or any one of many other possibilities that farmers usually did.

He arrived just as Jake was sitting down with Bob to a picnic lunch.