CHAPTER V A FARM HAND
Williamsport, Lycoming County, Pa.,
Saturday, 3 October, 1891.
From Wilkesbarre it was an easy day's march to the village of Pleasant Hill, which lies in the way to Williamsport. The only notable incident of the tramp was one which confirmed me in an early formed policy. I have avoided railways, and have walked in preference along the country roads, as affording better opportunities of intercourse with people. But in going on that morning from Wilkesbarre to the ferry which crossed the river to Plymouth, I took the advice of a gate-keeper at a railway crossing and started down the track on a long trestle as a short cut to the ferry. All went well until I was half way over, and then two coal trains passed simultaneously in opposite directions, and I hung by my hands from the framework at one side, while the engineer and fireman on the locomotive nearest me laughed heartily at the figure that I cut, with the side of each car grazing my pack, and my hold on the railing growing visibly slacker.
It was a little after nightfall when I reached the tavern at Pleasant Hill. Of my wages I had fifty cents left. I questioned the proprietor as to the demand for work in his community. He was quite encouraging. Only that afternoon, he said, one of the best farmers of the neighborhood had been inquiring in the village for a possible man, and to the best of his knowledge he had not found one. I said that I should apply at his farm in the morning, and then I broached the subject of entertainment. We soon struck a bargain for a supper and breakfast, and the privilege of a bed on the hay; but when, after supper, I asked to be directed to the barn, the landlord silently led the way to a little room upstairs, and there wished me good-night.
In the early morning he pointed out to me the road to his neighbor's farm, which I followed with ready success. I was penniless now, and had only an uncertain chance of work. And then, if the farmer should ask me, I should be obliged to own to inexperience, and the demand for farm-hands I thought must be limited, at a date so far into the autumn. But the morning was exquisite, and the buoyancy that it bred was an easy match for misgivings, so that it was with a light heart that I turned from the road into a lane which leads to the house of the farmer, whom I shall call Mr. Hill.
All about me were the marks of thrift. The fences stood straight and stout, with an air of lasting security. On a rising ledge above the lane was the farm-house, a small, unpainted wooden cottage, bleached to the rich, deep brown of a well-colored meerschaum pipe, and as snug and tight as a pilot's schooner. Near it was a summer-kitchen that seemed fairly to glow with conscious pride in its cleanness, and the very foot-path from the gate to the cottage-door was swept like a threshing floor.
On the door-step sat a girl in a calico dress of delicate pink, with a dark gingham apron concealing all its front. She was shelling peas into a milk-pan which rested on her lap, and the morning sunlight was in her flaxen hair, and showed you the delicate freshness of a pink-and-white complexion. Sober hazel eyes were fixed on me as I walked up the foot-path, and of us two I was the embarrassed one. I have not got over a certain timidity in asking for work, and each request is a sturdy effort of the will, with the rest of me in cowardly revolt, and a timid shrinking much in evidence I fear.
"Is this Mr. Hill's farm?" I ask, and I know that I am blushing deeply.
"Yes," says the young woman, with grave dignity and the most natural self-possession in the world.
"Is he at home?" I am sweating freely now, as I stand with my hat crushed between my hands, and the pack feeling like a mountain on my back.
"He is down at the pond on the edge of the farm." And her serious eyes follow the line of the long lane which sinks from the house with the downward slope of the land.
With her permission I leave the pack behind, and then follow the indicated way. The barn is on my right, a large, unpainted structure, stained by weather to as dark a hue as the house, but there are no loose boards about it, nor any rifts among the shingles, and the doors hang true on their hinges, and meet in well-adjusted touch. The cowyard and the pigsty flank the lane, and the neatness of the yard and the tightness of the troughs make clear that there is no waste of fodder there. Farther down and on my left is the wagon-house, as good a building almost as the cottage, and with much the same clean, strong compactness. There are no ploughs nor other farming tools lying exposed to the weather, no signs of idle capital wasting with the wear of rust, but everywhere the active, thrifty strength of wise economy.
Two men are at work at the pond, and I pick my man at once. They are plainly brothers, but the Mr. Hill of whom I am in search is the stronger-looking man, and is clearly in command of the job. I am reminded of a certain type which one comes to know on "the street," a clean-cut, vigorous man, who keeps his youth till sixty, and who, for many years, has had a masterful, compelling hand upon the conduct of affairs, has put railways through the West, and opened up mining regions, and knows the inner workings of legislatures and of much else besides.
I wait for a pause in the work, and try to screw my courage to the sticking-point; and then I tell Mr. Hill that the landlord at the tavern has sent me to him in the belief that he needs a man, and I add that I shall be glad of a job. Without preliminary questions Mr. Hill engages me on the spot, and makes me an offer of board and lodging, and seventy-five cents a day, which, he says, is the usual rate on the farms at that season. I close with the bargain, and ask to be set to work immediately. A minute later I am walking up the lane with a message for Mrs. Hill, to the effect that I am the new "hired man," and that she will please give me, to take to the pond, a certain "broad hoe" from the wagon-house.
Mrs. Hill understands the situation at once; she makes no comment, but goes with me to the wagon-house, where she points out the hoe among other tools in a corner. She has said nothing so far, and I feel a little uncomfortable, but now she turns to me with a frank directness of manner that is very reassuring.
"I ain't got no room for you in the house, but I guess you'll be comfortable sleeping out here. You can fetch your grip, and I'll show you your bed."
Pack in hand, I follow her up the steps to the loft of the wagon-house, and she points to a cot near the farther window and a wooden chair beside it. "Some time to-day I'll make up your bed, and if there's anything you want you can tell me." This is her final word as she leaves me to return to the house. I slip on my overalls and take note of my new quarters. Windows at both ends of the loft provide ample ventilation. The cot is covered with a corn-husk mattress, as clean and fresh as a cock of new hay. The very floor is free from dust. The rafters hang thick with bunches of seed-corn on the cob, with their outer husks removed and the inner husks drawn back and neatly interwoven, the whole effect suggesting stalactites in a cave. The air is fragrant with the perfume from slices of apples, that are closely threaded and hung up to dry in graceful festoons from rafter to rafter.
Five minutes later I am at work at the pond. The pond is an artificial one, created by a wooden dam. The water has been allowed to flow out, and the old woodwork is to be renewed.
My immediate task is to dig a ditch along the outer side of the rotting planks, so that they can be removed and replaced by new ones. I am soon alone on the job, for the farmers' work calls them elsewhere. The experience in the sewer-ditch at Middletown is all to my credit, and my spirits rise with the discovery that I can handle my pick and shovel more effectively, and with less sense of exhaustion. And then the stint is my own, and no boss stands guard over me as a dishonest workman. At least I am conscious of none, and I am working on merrily, when suddenly I become aware of my employer bending over the ditch and watching me intently.
It is a face very red with the heat and much bespattered with mud, into which my tools sink gurglingly, that I turn up to him.
"How are you getting on?"
"Pretty well, thank you."
"You mustn't work too hard. All that I ask of a man is to work steady. Have an apple?"
He is gone in a moment, and I stand in the ditch eating the apple with immense relish, and thinking what a good sort that farmer is, and how thoroughly he understands the principle of getting his best work out of a man! He has appealed to my sense of honor by intrusting the job to me, and now he has won me completely to his interests by showing concern in mine.
The work is hard, and the morning hours are very long, but the labor achieves its own satisfaction as the task grows under one's self-directed effort, and there is no torture of body and soul in the surveillance of a slave-driving boss.
But I am thoroughly tired and very hungry when Mr. Hill calls to me from across the pond that it is time to go to dinner. I join him in haste, and we walk up the lane together, while he drives his team before him, and points out with evident pride the young colts and other stock in the pasture.
On a bench near the door of the summer-kitchen are two tin basins full of water, and there we wash ourselves, drawing by means of a gourd-dipper from a brimming bucket near by any fresh supply of water that we want. A coarse, clean towel hangs over a roller above the bench, and at this we take our turns.
The dinner is a quiet meal, and tends to solemnity. Mrs. Hill and her daughter sit opposite the farmer and me. Little is said, but for me there is absorbing interest in the meal itself. It is worthy of the best traditions of country life, clean in all its appointments to a degree of spotlessness, really elegant in its quiet simplicity, and appetizing?—how was I ever to stop eating those potatoes that spread under the pressure of my fork into a mass of flaky deliciousness, or the ears of sweet-corn fresh from a late field, or the green peas that swim in a sweet stew of their own brewing, or, best of all, the little pond pickerel that are grilled to a crisp brown turn?
In our more artificial forms of living we habitually eat when we are not hungry, and drink when we are not thirsty, and we know little of the sheer physical delight in meat and drink when our natures seize joyously upon the means of life, and organs work in glad adaptation to function, and the organism, in full revival, responds to its environment!
The work moves uninterruptedly in the afternoon; and at six o'clock, as I wearily drag my feet along the lane by the farmer's side, I can see his daughter driving the cattle through the pasture to the cowyard, and I wonder how I shall fare at the evening milking. But I am not put to that test; for the farmer declines my offer of help, with the explanation that, under our arrangement, my day's work is done at six o'clock, and that he is not entitled to further help, nor does he need it, he adds, for his wife and daughter always lend a hand at the chores.
Supper is almost a repetition of dinner, with a pitcher of rich milk kindly pressed upon me when I decline the tea, and with apple-sauce and cake in the place of pumpkin-pie. Soon after, I am lighting my way with a lantern through the dark to my cot in the loft, and for ten hours I sleep the sleep of a child, and awake at six in the morning to the farmer's call of "John, hey John!" from under the window.
All of that day, which was Wednesday, was given to completing the work on the dam. The necessary excavation was soon finished, and then we laid the timbers, and nailed the new planks into place, and filled in and packed the earth behind them. Over the completed job the farmer expressed such a depth of satisfaction that I felt a glow of pride in the work, and a sense of proprietorship, which was splendidly compensating for the effort which it had cost.
The remaining three days of the week we spent in picking apples. Behind the wagon-house was an orchard. Mr. Hill first selected a tree, and then we placed under it the number of empty barrels, which, in his judgment, corresponded to its yield, a judgment which was always singularly accurate. Then, each supplied with a half-bushel basket with a wooden hook attached to the handle, we next climbed among the branches, and suspending our baskets, we carefully picked the apples with a quick upward turn of the fruit, which detached them at the point at which the stem was fast to the twig. Both baskets were usually full at about the same moment, and then we took turns in climbing down and receiving the baskets from the tree, and emptying the apples into the barrels with great caution against possible bruising.
All this was Arcadian in its joyous simplicity. All day we moved among the boughs, breathing the fragrance of ripened fruit and the mellow odor of apple-trees turning at the touch of frost; picking ceaselessly the full-juiced apples "sweetened with the summer light," while above us white clouds fled briskly before the northwest wind across the clear blue of the autumn sky; and below us lay the pasture, where the patient cattle grazed, and beyond stretched open country of field and forest, which, in that crystal air, met the horizon in a clean, sharp line.
Mr. Hill and I were growing very chummy. A faint uncomfortable distrust of me, which I suspected through the first two days, had wholly disappeared. We talked with perfect freedom now and with a growing liking for each other, which, for me, added vastly to the charm of those six days on the farm.
I tried at first to lead the talk, and to draw Mr. Hill into expressions of his views of life, that I might learn his attitude toward modern progress, and catch glimpses of the growth of things from his point of view. But Mr. Hill was proof against such promptings. He was a shrewd, practical farmer, with a masterful hold upon all the details of his enterprise, and with a mind quickened by thrifty conduct of his own affairs to a catholic taste for information. His schooling had been limited, he said, but he must have meant his actual school training; for life itself had been his school, and admirably had he improved its advantages. He was a trained observer and a close student of actual events. Instead of my getting him to talk, he made me talk, but with so natural a force as to rob it of all thought of compulsion.
The talk drifted early into politics, and I soon found that my light-hearted generalizations would not pass muster. Back and back he would press me upon the data of each induction, until I was forced to tell what I knew, or was confronted with my ignorance.
And then he delighted in talk of other people than our own, and his knowledge of a somewhat general contemporaneous history was curiously varied and accurate. Stories of succeeding English ministries, and even of the short-lived French cabinets, were ready to his use, and he tactfully righted me in my errors. But he held me closest to my memories of things among the common people, the agricultural laborers in England, and their relation to the farmers, and theirs in turn to the landed proprietors, and the promise which the land could give of continued support to three classes, under the changed conditions of modern life. All that I could remember of a typical laborer's home, and of its manner of life, and of the general aspect of an English farm, seemed only to whet his appetite, and to strengthen his demand for what I knew of the continental peasantry. His interest centred strongly in the French, and there was plainly a peculiar charm for him in every detail which I could give of the French farmers, with their small holdings, and their inherited habits of thrift, and of the close culture of their lands. But he would even lead me on to speak of great cities, and of the life in them of the rich and poor, and of any signs, of which I knew, of growing social discontent. And with an interest that never flagged, he questioned me on works of art; and followed patiently, and with a zest that warmed one's own enthusiasm, through endless churches, and long dim galleries, and by narrow, crooked streets of a modern city to the ruins of its distant past. And there we restored the crumbling piles, until there stood clear to his imagination a vision of Imperial Rome, and his eyes kindled to some great general's triumph moving through the Via Sacra, and the people swarming to the very chimney-tops, their infants in their arms, and on the air the deep, rich moving roar of high acclaim!
Sunday was the last day of my stay on the farm. When, in the middle of the week, I found that Mr. Hill was likely to keep me, I was conscience-stricken, because I had not told him that my stay would be short. He said nothing at first in reply to my announcement, but presently remarked that it was very hard to get men in that part of the country.
"But, surely," I said, "more men apply to you for work than you can possibly employ."
He looked at me with some wonder, at my ignorance.
"For a long time I have been looking for a man to help me," he said. "I'm growing old, and I can't do the work that I once did. If I could find the right man, I'd keep him the year round, and pay him good wages. But the best young fellows go to the cities, and the rest are mostly a worthless lot. There's hardly a day in the year when I haven't a job for any decent man who'll ask for it. I have to go looking for men, and then I generally can't find one that's any account."
This was much the longest speech that he had made to me so far, and a very interesting one I thought it, and I am only sorry that I cannot reproduce the exact phraseology, with its Anglo-Saxon words set, by an instinctive choice, into rugged sentences which admirably expressed the man. I waited hopefully for further speech from him, and at last it came, quite of its own accord; for I had given up trying to draw him out.
We were sitting together on Sunday evening on the platform of the pump in front of the farm-house. It had been a very restful Sunday. In the morning I went to the village church, where two services followed each other in quick succession. The first was a prayer-meeting, attended by a little company of farming people and village folk, who conscientiously parted company at the door on the basis of sex, and sat on opposite sides of a central aisle.
The service was a simple one. The leader read a passage from the Bible, and offered prayer, and then gave out a hymn. When the singing ceased, one after another, the older men, with nervous pauses between, rose to "testify" or sank to their knees, and prayed aloud. I chiefly remember one as a typical figure—an old man, whose thick white hair mingled with a bushy beard that covered his face. I noticed him first in comfortable possession of a bench along which he stretched his legs. On his feet were loose carpet-slippers; and with his shoulders braced against the wall, and his head thrown back, and his eyes closed, he looked the vision of physical ease, which matched the expression of deep contentment that he wore. There was no suspicion of sleep about him. Most evidently he followed with liveliest sympathy every word that was said or sung. I looked up presently at the sound of a new voice, and found the old man on his feet. He was adding his "testimony" to what had gone before, and was speaking rapidly in a deep, gruff voice with blunt articulation. There was a strong reminder in the performance of a school-boy's "speaking his piece;" the monotonous, unnatural tone; the rapid flow of conventional, committed phrase; and the nervous tension, which communicated itself to his hearers in a fear that he might forget.
But there came at length, without calamity, the final "Pray for me that I may be kept faithful," and then he knelt in prayer. Invocations from the Prophets, and supplications from the Psalms, and glowing exhortations from the Epistles, were interwoven with strangest interpolations of his own, while his voice rose and fell in regular cadences and he audibly caught his breath between. But he was losing himself in his devotion, and presently his voice fell to a natural tone, and his words grew plain and direct, as he held converse with the Almighty about our common life—of sin and its awful guilt, of temptation and its fateful trial, of suffering and its terrible reality, of sorrow and its cruel mystery. Then, as though quickened by the touch of truth, his faith rose on surer wings, and his prayer breathed the sense of sin forgiven, and of life made strong by a power not our own, and of hope exultant in the knowledge "of that new life when sin shall be no more!"
A solemn stillness held us when he rose, and made us feel the presence in our common lot of things divine and that deep sacredness of life which awes us most.
A short preaching service followed. The preacher drove up on the hour from another parish, and started off, at the meeting's end, for yet a third appointment.
This is a long digression from Mr. Hill's talk of the evening, and I have said nothing yet of the afternoon. We took chairs out on the grass in front of the cottage, after dinner, and sat in the shade. We soon had visitors. Mr. Hill's brother and his wife walked up from the lower farm, and a little later there came Mr. Hill's son and his young bride. The son is a physician, whose practice covers much of that country-side; and it was interesting to me to learn that his professional training was got at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.
Fearful of disturbing the family gathering, I drew off a little, and gave my attention to a book. Late in the afternoon I was roused by the coming of another guest. He was an old neighboring farmer out in search of a heifer which had broken through the pasture-fence. As he joined us he was speaking so swiftly and incoherently about the heifer's escape that I felt some doubt of his sanity, but he quieted down in a moment, and threw himself on the grass with the evident purpose of resting before resuming the search. He was lying flat upon his back, and his long bony fingers were clasped under his head. He wore no hat, nor coat, nor waistcoat, and a dark gingham shirt lay close to the sharp outlines of his almost fleshless body. Braces that were patched with strings passed over his lean shoulders, and were made fast to faded blue jeans, whose extremities were tucked into an old pair of cowhide boots. A long white beard rested on his breast, reaching almost to his waist. Only a thin fringe of hair remained above his ears; and over the skull the bare skin was so tightly drawn that you could almost trace the zigzagging junctures of the frontal and the cranium bones.
But skeleton as he was, he was marvellously alive. His eyes were aflame, and prone as he lay and resting, he impressed you as a man so vitalized, that with a single movement he could be upon his feet and in intense activity. He was talking on about the heifer, nervously repeating to us, again and again, the details of where he had seen her last, and the rift which he had found in the fence, and how he had sent his hired man in one direction, and had gone in another himself.
He was a rich farmer, Mr. Hill told me afterward, and he lived alone, except for an occasional hired man whom he could induce to stay with him for a season. But even in his old age he worked on his farm with the strength and endurance of three men, laying aside, year by year, his store of gain. Without a single human tie he worked on as though spurred by every claim of affection and the highest sense of responsibility to provide for those whom he loved; and all the while a vast misanthropy grew upon him, and he would see less and less of his fellow-men, and an almost life-long scepticism hardened into downright unbelief.
So far he had not noticed me; but now he turned my way, lifting himself upon his elbow, and fixing his sunken, burning eyes on mine, while the white hairs of his beard mingled with the blades of grass.
"You're hired out to Jim, ain't ye?"
Jim was his designation of Mr. Hill.
"Yes," I said.
"What's he payin' you?"
I told him.
Mr. Hill was squirming in nervous discomfort.
"What's your name?"
I gave it him.
"Where are you come from?"
"Connecticut."
"Connecticut? That's down South, ain't it?"
"No, that's down East."
"Was you raised there?"
I do not know into what particulars of my history and of my antecedents this process might have forced me had not the heifer come to my relief. She was a beautiful creature, with a clean sorrel coat, and wide, liquid, mischievous eyes; and as she ran daintily over the turf at the side of the lane, saucily tossing her head, you knew that she was closely calculating every chance of dodging the gawky country boy who, breathing hard, lunged after her.
Without a word of parting, and as abruptly as he came, the old man was gone to head her off in the right direction at the mouth of the lane. And so he disappeared, as strange a human being as the world holds, living tremendously a life of strenuous endeavor, yet Godless and hopeless and loveless in it all, except for the greedy love of gain, which holds him in miserable bondage, as he works his life away.
It was soon after supper that Mr. Hill and I sat down together on the platform of the pump. There was little movement in the air, and it was very mild for the twenty-seventh of September. As the stars appeared, they shone upon us through a mellow warmth, like that of summer, in which they seem magically near, and one feels their calm companionship in human things.
"And you've made up your mind to go in the morning?" Mr. Hill began.
"Yes," I said, "I must be off. I am truly sorry to go. But you surprise me by what you tell me of the difficulty in the country of getting men to work. One hears so much about 'the unemployed,' that any demand for labor, which remains unsupplied, seems to me an anomalous condition."[A]
"That's a big question," he said, with a deep sigh, as he leant back against the pump and looked at me out of blue eyes that were gray and keen in the starlight. "It reminds me of what we used to call a hard example in arithmetic in the district school when I was a boy. There's a good many things you've got to take account of, if you work it out right, and there's a good many chances of mistake, and a mistake goes hard with your answer. I haven't worked this sum and I haven't seen it worked, but I've studied it a good while, and I think I know how to do parts of it."
He paused for a moment and then went on: "In the last hundred and fifty years there have been great changes in the world in the ways of producing things—'improved methods of production' the books call it. Some say it ain't really 'improved,' only faster and cheaper, but I'm not arguing that point. The power of people to produce the necessaries of life is a big sight greater than it was a hundred and fifty years ago—that's my point. It's what the books call 'increased power of production.' And among civilized people there's been this increase of producing power in about all the forms of production. In some forms it's been very great, and in others not so great; but I guess there ain't many kinds of business that haven't been changed by it.
"Now, I think that the farming business has lagged behind the rest. Not that there ain't been improvement, for there's been great improvement. There's the steam-ploughs, and the reapers, and harvesters, and mowers, and the threshing-machines; and then there's the science of agricultural chemistry. But I'm judging of what I know of the farming business as it's carried on.
"Now, here's my farm: it's part of a tract that my great-grandfather settled on and cleared. I've heard my grandfather tell many a time of the Indians that were all about here when he was a boy, and even my father often went hunting deer down on the lake this side of the woods.
"Well, I know this country pretty well, and I find that a farmer now don't work any bigger farm than my grandfather did, nor the work isn't much lighter, nor he doesn't get much more for it. There's been a good many changes, but as the farming business goes, there ain't any increased production that's kept up with other kinds of business when you calculate how many farmers there are and how much they do.
"I read in a book the other day that twenty-five men, with modern machinery, can produce as much cotton cloth as the whole population of Lancashire could produce in the old way; but there ain't any twenty-five men who could work the farms of this township with all the modern farming machinery.
"Take it day in and day out the whole year round on the farms, and a man's work or a team's work is pretty much what it was a hundred years ago.
"And here's another thing that makes a great difference between farming and other kinds of business. When I go to the city I most generally visit some factory and go through it as carefully as I can. The machinery is interesting and wonderful, and if it's something useful they're making, I like to compare the productive power of the factory hands with what it would be if they were all working separately by the old methods. But besides this, there's the wonderful economy that I see. The factory is built so as to save all the carting that's possible, and there's men always studying how they can make it more convenient, and can improve the machinery and cut down the costs. And then I don't find any leakage anywhere that can be helped; and it's most wonderful what they do in some kinds of manufacturing with what you'd think was the very refuse, working it up into some by-product that makes the difference between profit and loss in the whole business. It's close culture of the closest kind applied to manufacture.
"Sometimes I've had a chance to talk to a superintendent of a factory, and he's told me about the business from the inside—how carefully he must study the market and how closely he must calculate a hundred things; and how exactly his books must be kept, and how easy it is for a little thing that's been miscalculated or overlooked to ruin the business.
"I tell you that I've come to see pretty clearly that the business that pays in these times of competition is a powerful lucky one and powerful well managed. When the year's work is done and the wages have been paid, and the rent and the interest on the capital paid up, and the salaries paid to the brains that run the thing, it's a remarkable business that's got anything over in the way of profit.
"Now, the farming business, as I look at it, is a long way behind all that. We don't know much about close culture in farming in America, and I don't believe there's one farmer in five hundred that keeps books and can tell you exactly where he stands; and these things we've got to learn. It's terrible easy to let things go their own way pretty much—until the fences are falling down and your buildings are out of repair, and your tools are going to ruin with rust, and your children are not having good advantages. You may think that you're too poor to afford anything different and that it's economy to live so. But it ain't; it's the worst kind of waste. It takes a sight of hard work, brainwork, and handwork, too, to get good, substantial buildings and fences, and tools and stock, and to keep them good and to raise your children well. You've got to make a close calculation on every penny, but it's the only true economy. The difference between the economy of shabbiness and the economy of thrift is the difference between waste and saving.
"My father could not give me much school learning, but he learnt me to farm it thoroughly. I've been at it a good many years now, and I know by experience the truth of what he taught me. If there's ever been anything more than our living at the end of the year, it's only because we all worked hard, my wife and daughter as hard in the house as me and my son on the farm; and because we studied to raise the best of everything we could, and to get the best prices we could, and we saved every penny that could be saved.
"My son wanted to study to be a doctor when he was growing up, and so I gave him the best schooling that he could get around here; and when he was old enough, and I saw his mind was made up, I sent him to the best medical college I could find. And I've given my daughter all the schooling she's had the strength for. It's the best economy to get the best, whether it's buildings, or tools, or stock, or education; and there's a great deal more satisfaction in it besides. I tell you this because it's my experience, and I know it, but I owe it mainly to the raising my father gave me. It's hard work, and it's hard study, and it's awful careful economy in little things as well as big, that makes a man succeed in any business.
"You've heard the saying that 'the luxuries of one generation are the necessities of the next.' That's certainly true in the country. I've heard my grandfather say that when he was a boy it didn't take more than ten dollars a year to pay for everything that the family bought. All that they wore and ate and drank they raised on the farm, and they built their own buildings, and made their own tools, mostly, and worked out most of their taxes.
"I'm not saying that farmers must go back to that. It ain't possible. It's every way better now to buy your cloth than to make it, and so with your tools, and many other things; but when I see a farmer's family spend in a year for clothes and feathers and finery as much as ten families did for all they bought in the old days, and at the same time their fences are falling and their stock suffering from neglect, I see that these people don't know their business. And when I see a farmer mortgage a piece of land to give his daughter a fashionable wedding, and then complain that there ain't a living to be made any more in farming, I'm sorry for him.
"You see, in the old days the ways of farming were primitive and simple, and the ways of living were primitive and simple, too, and they matched each other. Now both have changed. Farming is different, and living in the country is different. The style of living in the country is copied from the towns, where there's been the greatest increase of producing power; and I argue that the increase of producing power on the farms hasn't by any means kept up to what it is in the cities.
"Now, this difference ain't unnatural. Everybody knows that the big fortunes of the last hundred years have mostly been made in manufacture in the cities, and in the increase of land values in the cities, and in the development of railroads and mines. And where the big fortunes have been made, there's been the best chances for brains and energy and enterprise. And where brains and energy and enterprise are at work, there all kinds of labor will go, for it's these that make employment for labor.
"Now, it ain't saying anything against farmers to say that the best brains that have been born on the farms for the last hundred years haven't stayed on the farms. The farming business hasn't had the benefit of them, but they've gone to the professions, and the business in the cities, where the most money was to be made.
"So that through all this time of 'increasing power of production' there's been a constant drain from the country of its best brains and blood, and it ain't strange that the farming business has lagged behind the others which these have gone into.
"I believe there's going to be a change. I believe the change is begun. Competition is so keen now in about all kinds of business, that the chances of making a fortune and making it quick are very few. There's about so much interest to be got for your capital, and if the security is good, the interest is very low, and there's about so much to be got for your brains, unless you've got particular rare brains; and as the competition grows keener, brains begin to see that there's about as much to be made out of farming as out of other kinds of business. Invention has done a lot already, and when the same economy and thrift and thorough business principles are used in farming as are used in other kinds of production, the farming business will soon catch up with the others. And where the brains and enterprise and energy go, labor will soon follow; and for a time anyway, there won't be as many unemployed in the cities, nor as many farmers in the country looking for men to work. But why are there unemployed in the cities, while there is already a demand for men in the country? Why, because many of the unemployed ain't fit for us to take into our homes as hired men, and many don't know that there's such a chance for them, and many if they do know, would sooner starve in the cities than work and live on a farm. I've got an idea that when the farming business is developed, there'll be a big change in country life. Where there's plenty of brains and push and enterprise, there's likely to be excitement.
"But it's got to come naturally; you can't pump interest into country living by legislation. I had to laugh the other day when I was reading a speech that Mr. John Morley made in Manchester, I think it was. Anyway, he was arguing for parish councils, and he said that this 'gregarious instinct' that makes country people flock into towns that are already overcrowded, is something that we ought to counteract by making country life more interesting, and he thought that parish councils would help to do that. Lord Salisbury got into him pretty well a short time after, when he said in a speech that he never had thought it was the duty of the government to provide amusement for the people, but if he was making a suggestion in that line, he would like to recommend the circus.
"There's another reason besides the keen competition in other kinds of business that makes me think that farming is going to be brought up to the others, and that is, that so many of the colleges are teaching scientific farming. You ain't going to see any very great result from this in a year, nor in ten years, for there's a pretty big field to work on. But when smart young fellows that are raised in the country, and other smart young fellows that see a good chance to make something at farming—when they all get a thorough training in scientific farming, and when they all get down to work, just as they would in some other highly developed form of production, you will see results. There won't be much in shiftless farming when the scientific kind pretty generally sets the pace.
"I've read a good deal, of late years, about 'organized charities' in the cities, and it certainly does seem as if charity was a good deal more sensible than it used to be. It's hard to see how there can be any kind of serious destitution in the cities that ain't got some society to relieve it. And the rich in the cities do certainly spend a powerful lot of time and work and money in keeping up these charities and amusements for the poor; but I don't see any signs that the poor love the rich any more, nor that there's any less danger but that some day they'll rise up in war against society.
"It seems to me that a good deal of all this time, and labor, and money, and a good deal more besides, might be better spent in providing that no child among the poor grows up without proper education, technical education in useful trades; especially, I think, in scientific farming.
"If the rich lived simpler and less showy, the poor wouldn't envy them as much, nor feel as bitter against society, and the money that was saved could be pretty well invested in kinds of education that would cure poverty and destitution by preventing them, and the people that would be thrown out of work by the economies of the rich might be a good deal better employed in more productive work. It seems a pity, anyway, to keep people at practically useless labor, when the brains and the money that keep them employed in that way might be used in keeping them at productive labor, and it's all the greater pity as long as there's bitter want in the world for the necessaries of life."
This, in substance, is what he said. I apologize for the injustice of the account, its vagueness in contrast with his clearness, its circumlocutions in contrast with his crisp sententiousness, its weakened renderings of his vigorous forms of native speech; but I have tried to suggest it all, and to give the sense of its manly, wholesome spirit.
Under the stars we sat talking until nearly midnight, and, quite inevitably, we launched upon the subject of religion. Mr. Hill appeared curiously apathetic, I thought, as I urged what seemed to me vital. And when, at the end, he narrowed it all to the single inquiry as to whether I believed in a real recognition in some future life among those who have loved one another here, I found myself wondering, with a feeling of disappointment, at so wide a drift from essentials, on the part of a mind which had impressed me as so natively clear and strong. I looked up in my surprise. Even in the starlight I could see the tears, and from a single halting sentence, I got the hint of a daughter dead in early childhood, and of a sorrow too deep for human speech, and of an eager questioning of the future that was the soul's one great desire.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known," was all that I could say to him, and I went to bed pitying myself for my shallow judgment, and my ignorance of life.