Yet our lads and lassies are eager to leave the country and go to large cities, where gas-lit streets are thronged with humanity and entertainments provided every hour.

A country boy said to me:  “Mr. Bain, you go everywhere; you see everything; I live out here in the country and see nothing.”  I have tried it all.  For about twenty-eight years I lived in the country.  Since then my life has been in cities and on railroad trains between the oceans.  My experience is, there is no life that keeps the heart so pure and the mind so contented as life in the country.

Some years ago I gave two addresses at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, on Saturday evening a popular lecture, and on Sunday an address to young men.  I had the popular lecture made but not the Sunday talk.  For three months I promised myself to get that lecture but kept on delaying.  As I neared the time I hoped something would prevent my going.  The time came, I was at Ocean Grove, knew I would have a great audience, for the day was ideal, and still I did not have the lecture except in skeleton form.  After breakfast Sunday I began to walk the floor, working out clothing for that skeleton and racking my brain for climaxes.  My wife was with me and she never would worry over my having nothing to say.  Into every sentence I would weave she would inject a piece of her mind about home or children or some woman’s dress or bonnet.  I said:  “This is a trying time with me, won’t you take a stroll along the beach and let me be alone today?” Like a good wife she gratified my request, and left me to work and worry over that lecture.  At four o’clock p.m., I could not see daylight, and in the darkness cried out:  “O Lord, if you will help me this time I won’t ask you again for awhile.”  The Lord did help me.  My friends said I never did so well as that evening.  At the close of the lecture the audience arose and handkerchiefs, like so many white doves, fluttered in the air.  In the midst of that scene, an old superannuated minister of the New York Methodist Conference planted a kiss on my cheek, and I have wondered often, why a man should have thought of that instead of a woman.

At the close of the service a friend said:  “That must have been the proudest moment of your life, for surely I never witnessed such a scene.”

I said:  “No, I can recall one that was greater than the white lilies.”

Away back in Bourbon county, Kentucky, when I was not quite twenty I was married to a girl of nineteen.  Soon after, we went to housekeeping in a country home.  It was supper time.  I had fed the chickens and horses, and washed my face in a tin pan on the kitchen steps, when a sweet voice said:  “Come, supper’s ready.”  As I entered the dining room my young wife came through the kitchen door, the coffee pot in her hand, her cheeks the ruddier from the glow of the cook stove, her face all lit up with expectancy as to what her young husband would think of his first meal prepared by his wife.  All the operas I have heard since, and all the cities I have seen, dwindle into insignificance compared with that pure, peaceful home in the country.