And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a tool.  A cornfield, a plow, a woodpile, an oak tree, will cure no man unless he have it in himself to be cured.  The truth is that no life, and least of all a farmer’s life, is simple—­unless it is simple.  I know a man and his wife who came out here to the country with the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith, simple.  They were unable to keep the chickens out of their summer kitchen.  They discovered microbes in the well, and mosquitoes in the cistern, and wasps in the garret.  Owing to the resemblance of the seeds, their radishes turned out to be turnips!  The last I heard of them they were living snugly in a flat in Sixteenth Street—­all their troubles solved by a dumb-waiter.

The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a man is in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place of all places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where he can grow.  The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it often destroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces, the desire for the higher life which animates every good man.

While on the subject of simplicity it may be well to observe that simplicity does not necessarily, as some of those who escape from the city seem to think, consist in doing without things, but rather in the proper use of things.  One cannot return, unless with affectation, to the crudities of a former existence.  We do not believe in Diogenes and his tub.  Do you not think the good Lord has given us the telephone (that we may better reach that elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the highest of human ideals) and the railroad (that we may widen our human knowledge and sympathy)—­and even the motor-car? (though, indeed, I have sometimes imagined that the motor-cars passing this way had a different origin!).  He may have given these things to us too fast, faster than we can bear; but is that any reason why we should denounce them all and return to the old, crude, time-consuming ways of our ancestors?  I am no reactionary.  I do not go back.  I neglect no tool of progress.  I am too eager to know every wonder in this universe.  The motor-car, if I had one, could not carry me fast enough!  I must yet fly!

After my experience in the country, if I were to be cross-examined as to the requisites of a farm, I should say that the chief thing to be desired in any sort of agriculture, is good health in the farmer.  What, after all, can touch that!  How many of our joys that we think intellectual are purely physical!  This joy of the morning that the poet carols about so cheerfully, is often nothing more than the exuberance produced by a good hot breakfast.  Going out of my kitchen door some mornings and standing for a moment, while I survey the green and spreading fields of my farm, it seems to me truly as if all nature were making a bow to me.  It seems to me that there never was a better cow than mine, never a more really perfect horse, and as for pigs, could any in this world herald my approach with more cheerful gruntings and squealings!