There is one man in the State who is much exercised over this place.  He is a farm-hand, raised in a hamlet fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest railway, and, greatly daring, he has wandered here.  The bustle and turmoil of Main Street, the new glare of the electric lights and the five-storeyed brick business block, frighten and distress him much.  He has taken service on a farm well away from these delirious delights, and, says he, ’I’ve been offered $25 a month to work in a bakery at New York.  But you don’t get me to no New York, I’ve seen this place an’ it just scares me,’ His strength is in the drawing of hay and the feeding of cattle.  Winter life on a farm does not mean the comparative idleness that is so much written of.  Each hour seems to have its sixty minutes of work; for the cattle are housed and eat eternally; the colts must be turned out for their drink, and the ice broken for them if necessary; then ice must be stored for the summer use, and then the real work of hauling logs for firewood begins.  New England depends for its fuel on the woods.  The trees are ‘blazed’ in the autumn just before the fall of the leaf, felled later, cut into four-foot lengths, and, as soon as the friendly snow makes sledging possible, drawn down to the woodhouse.  Afterwards the needs of the farm can be attended to, and a farm, like an arch, is never at rest.  A little later will come maple-sugar time, when the stately maples are tapped as the sap begins to stir, and be-ringed with absurd little buckets (a cow being milked into a thimble gives some idea of the disproportion), which are emptied into cauldrons.  Afterwards (this is the time of the ‘sugaring-off parties’) you pour the boiled syrup into tins full of fresh snow, where it hardens, and you pretend to help and become very sticky and make love, boys and girls together.  Even the introduction of patent sugar evaporators has not spoiled the love-making.

There is a certain scarcity of men to make love with; not so much in towns which have their own manufactories and lie within a lover’s Sabbath-day journey of New York, but in the farms and villages.  The men have gone away—­the young men are fighting fortune further West, and the women remain—­remain for ever as women must.  On the farms, when the children depart, the old man and the old woman strive to hold things together without help, and the woman’s portion is work and monotony.  Sometimes she goes mad to an extent which appreciably affects statistics and is put down in census reports.  More often, let us hope, she dies.  In the villages where the necessity for heavy work is not so urgent the women find consolation in the formation of literary clubs and circles, and so gather to themselves a great deal of wisdom in their own way.  That way is not altogether lovely.  They desire facts and the knowledge that they are at a certain page in a German or an Italian book before a certain time, or that they have read the proper books in a proper way.  At any rate, they have something to do that seems as if they were doing something.  It has been said that the New England stories are cramped and narrow.  Even a far-off view of the iron-bound life whence they are drawn justifies the author.  You can carve a nut in a thousand different ways by reason of the hardness of the shell.