Nine Hamiltons and no water

The nine Hamilton children are counted off. George is handsome and "sinless"; Will is stolid and conservative, formed early by the valley's distrust of his foreign, book-reading father, and blessed with an accidental talent for money that will end in a Ford agency and a Marmon. Tom is his father over again but bolder and hungrier, a boy of "giant joy" and huge sorrow who once cut the membrane under little Mollie's tongue with a pocketknife and then ran away and was sick. Joe is the idle darling, so useless at farm work that he is sent to college. The girls are Una, Lizzie, Dessie, Olive — the narrator's mother — and pretty Mollie. Samuel meanwhile drains the family's earnings into patents and a lost lawsuit, learning "that without money you cannot fight money". Liza rules by Bible and iron morals, and takes her port wine strictly as medicine.

A family census done as portraits, sorting the children by how much of Samuel each got. The chapter explains why the ranch yields people instead of money: the same restless invention that makes Samuel loved is what the patents drain away, and the dry wells mean there is nothing to inherit but temperament.