And you see after living so many years in the city the worst experience on the farm is a sort of joy!

In most men as I come to know them—­I mean men who dare to look themselves in the eye—­I find a deep desire for more naturalness, more directness.  How weary we all grow of this fabric of deception which is called modern life.  How passionately we desire to escape but cannot see the way!  How our hearts beat with sympathy when we find a man who has turned his back upon it all and who says “I will live it no longer.”  How we flounder in possessions as in a dark and suffocating bog, wasting our energies not upon life but upon things.  Instead of employing our houses, our cities, our gold, our clothing, we let these inanimate things possess and employ us—­to what utter weariness.  “Blessed be nothing,” sighs a dear old lady of my knowledge.

Of all ways of escape I know, the best, though it is far from perfection, is the farm.  There a man may yield himself most nearly to the quiet and orderly processes of nature.  He may attain most nearly to that equilibrium between the material and spiritual, with time for the exactions of the first, and leisure for the growth of the second, which is the ideal of life.

In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered the disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them intellectually or socially.  Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life:  neighbourhood feuds were common.  Country life was marked with the rigidity of a hard provincialism.  All this, however, is rapidly changing.  The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane at noon), the farmer’s telephone, the spreading country trolleys, more schools and churches, and cheaper railroad rates, have all helped to bring the farmer’s life well within the stimulating currents of world thought without robbing it of its ancient advantages.  And those advantages are incalculable:  Time first for thought and reflection (narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom of action—­which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who has his feet firmly planted upon his own land.

A city hammers and polishes its denizens into a defined model:  it worships standardisation; but the country encourages differentiation, it loves new types.  Thus it is that so many great and original men have lived their youth upon the land.  It would be impossible to imagine Abraham Lincoln brought up in a street of tenements.  Family life on the farm is highly educative; there is more discipline for a boy in the continuous care of a cow or a horse than in many a term of school.  Industry, patience, perseverance are qualities inherent in the very atmosphere of country life.  The so-called manual training of city schools is only a poor makeshift for developing in the city boy those habits which the country boy acquires naturally in his daily life.  An honest, hard-working country training is the best inheritance a father can leave his son.