This book is one of the unexpected products of my farm.  It is this way with the farmer.  After the work of planting and cultivating, after the rain has fallen in his fields, after the sun has warmed them, after the new green leaves have broken the earth—­one day he stands looking out with a certain new joy across his acres (the wind bends and half turns the long blades of the corn) and there springs up within him a song of the fields.  No matter how little poetic, how little articulate he is, the song rises irrepressibly in his heart, and he turns aside from his task with a new glow of fulfillment and contentment.  At harvest time in our country I hear, or I imagine I hear, a sort of chorus rising over all the hills, and I meet no man who is not, deep down within him, a singer!  So song follows work:  so art grows out of life!

And the friends I have made!  They have come to me naturally, as the corn grows in my fields or the wind blows in my trees.  Some strange potency abides within the soil of this earth!  When two men stoop (there must be stooping) and touch it together, a magnetic current is set up between them:  a flow of common understanding and confidence.  I would call the attention of all great Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians to this phenomenon:  it will repay investigation.  It is at once the rarest and the commonest thing I know.  It shows that down deep within us, where we really live, we are all a good deal alike.  We have much the same instincts, hopes, joys, sorrows.  If only it were not for the outward things that we commonly look upon as important (which are in reality not at all important) we might come together without fear, vanity, envy, or prejudice and be friends.  And what a world it would be!  If civilisation means anything at all it means the increasing ability of men to look through material possessions, through clothing, through differences of speech and colour of skin, and to see the genuine man that abides within each of us.  It means an escape from symbols!

I tell this merely to show what surprising and unexpected things have grown out of my farm.  All along I have had more than I bargained for.  From now on I shall marvel at nothing!  When I ordered my own life I failed; now that I work from day to day, doing that which I can do best and which most delights me, I am rewarded in ways that I could not have imagined.  Why, it would not surprise me if heaven were at the end of all this!

Now, I am not so foolish as to imagine that a farm is a perfect place.  In these Adventures I have emphasised perhaps too forcibly the joyful and pleasant features of my life.  In what I have written I have naturally chosen only those things which were most interesting and charming.  My life has not been without discouragement and loss and loneliness (loneliness most of all).  I have enjoyed the hard work; the little troubles have troubled me more than the big ones.  I detest unharnessing a muddy horse in the rain!  I don’t like chickens in the barn.  And somehow Harriet uses an inordinate amount of kindling wood.  But once in the habit, unpleasant things have a way of fading quickly and quietly from the memory.