if we’d noticed the cows failing since they went on the grass. You don’t notice that so much for an evening once or twice a week, but when you have to live with it day in and day out it’s terrible. The doctor says my nerves are bad and that I’ve got to go away for a change, but with three small children one can’t pick up and go away. Anyway, I wouldn’t leave Joe alone with no one to do for him. I’ll tell the doctor to prescribe some good reading and I’ll get my change at home.’
“But what a shame it is that you couldn’t have had a chance at four-squaring Joe when he was younger and more plastic. There are other boys here with the same need. Just now the church is getting up a concert to help ‘raise the stipend,’ and it is the custom to have a two or three act play, usually a comedy, which necessitates the entertainment being taken from the church to the Orange Hall. I wish you were here to help them create a pantomime from ‘The Hanging of the Crane.’ I want to go over it with you myself to see again just how wonderful some of the pictures are.
“I know about the social work you’re doing—keeping open house with a grate fire on snowy, dusky Sunday afternoons, and bringing lonely young people in for supper. We would have a grate fire here too, and we could find people just as lonely.
“Our neighbor down the road has a daughter, very bright, and actually suffering for young friends and a ‘good time.’ He won’t let her go to the dances in the Orange Hall, in which his judgment may be sound enough, only he doesn’t try to find a substitute for this diversion, and the neighborhood provides nothing else. Some miles in the other direction we have another neighbor, a young man just starting to farm for himself. Whether Angus goes to the hall or not, I don’t know, but if he does he must have some trouble supplying conversation in the intervals between dances. He gets on much better talking about Sir Walter Scott and politics and the habits of bees, ... If we could bring them home here some Sunday afternoon I don’t suppose they would speak ten words to each other, but he would take her home afterwards and a few nights later we would see a light in her parlor window, an entirely new occurrence, and considered quite an omen in the neighborhood.
“And how the neighbors here would welcome you. You would find the social life very different; but there’s something very genuine about it. They would not drop in for a formal call after they were sure you were completely settled. You would possibly find a woman climbing the hills in a snowstorm the first day after you arrived, bringing a jar of black currants and wanting to know if she couldn’t help you hook a mat or
quilt a quilt. I think we could give our house a social squaring here that it might miss anywhere else.
“A few years ago I would have been frightened and embarrassed at the responsibility of trying to establish a spiritual corner in my house or in myself. The square idea makes it seem the most practical, natural thing in the world, and then there is some inspiration in seeing the lack of it. In the mountains skirting off from the farmlands here there is a settlement that is a little kingdom of heathenism such as one might find in a country where no churches exist. I am told that almost every county has such a nest somewhere within its boundaries and that it seldom appeals to anyone as a home mission field. The people just naturally run to wickedness and break every commandment shamelessly. This is one extreme. The other is not much less serious. In a lot of the ‘solid old farm homes’ there is a rigid dominance of a thing called religion which is not beautiful nor compassionate nor consistent. Children suffer under it and grow up to hate the name it stands for. Old Jonas Birchfield had a tractor cutting wood at his place last week, and his son, in some way, broke a delicate part of the engine. They worked at it until noon with the old man’s wrath growing hotter every minute. I dropped in with the mail just as they were sitting down to dinner and overheard Jonas shouting: ‘It just
seems you’ve been sent to aggravate me. I’ve tried every way to teach ye and ye get stupider every year. I’ll be glad when the day comes that ye’re old enough to turn on the road, and I’ll never see yer cursed face again. Now after dinner ye can walk the six miles to town and get a new bolt—Bless, we pray Thee, Lord, a portion of this food, etc., etc.—Maybe that’ll get some of the gum out o’ your brain. And mark ye, ye don’t get to school another day till ye’ve cut enough wood with the axe to pay for the bolt, often enough to teach ye a lesson.’
“I suppose Jonas thought he was giving his family something of a Christian environment by repeating that blessing at every meal, regardless of the spirit pervading the house at the time. But they won’t know much about such promises as ‘Like as a father pitieth his children,’ will they? I don’t know much about it myself, but it would be wonderful to help keep other children from missing it. I’m glad you’ve made it so clear how the Christ way of living can be such a practical thing, even in a little farm house.
“Perhaps I should hesitate to even want you out here. There are a lot of ‘advantages’ in town, I suppose. I remember in our college days, we used to make a great deal of the cultural value of higher life, operas, travel, books and the like. Seems to me we were far too content to take our thrills at second hand. There are no operas here,