I have had, in recent years, many letters from friends asking about life in the country, but the longer I remain here, the more I know about it, the less able I am to answer them—­at least briefly.  It is as though one should come and ask:  “Is love worth trying?” or, “How about religion?” For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange, original adventure.  We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more probably, we do both.  It is packed and crowded with the zest of adventure, or it is dull and miserable.  We may, if we are skilled enough, make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for other work, whatever it may be.  There is many a man whose strength is renewed like that of the wrestler of Irassa, every time his feet touch the earth.

Of all places in the world where life can be lived to its fullest and freest, where it can be met in its greatest variety and beauty, I am convinced that there is none to equal the open country, or the country town.  For all country people in these days may have the city—­some city or town not too far away:  but there are millions of men and women in America who have no country and no sense of the country.  What do they not lose out of life!

I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its worst.  At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an income pitifully small.  Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and loneliness.  But where is there not drudgery when men are poor—­where life is at its worst?  I have never seen drudgery in the country comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops.  And in recent years both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the gasoline engine.  I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one day as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week.  While there is, indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only good, honest, wholesome hard work—­the kind of work that makes for fiber in a man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise provides.

There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who come face to face with nature itself.  You have set out your upper acres to peach trees:  and the deer come down from the hills at night and strip the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the snow, girdle and kill them.  The season brings too much rain and the potatoes rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm when no out is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens’ eggs prove infertile, and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been growing all summer.  A constant warfare with insects and blights and fungi—­a real, bitter warfare, which can cease neither summer nor winter!