“Why,” said my friend, “he has a couple of peach-trees for every month, from June till frost, that furnish as many peaches as he, and his wife, and ten children can dispose of. And then he has grapes, apricots, etc.; and last year his wife sold fifty dollars’ worth from her strawberry patch, and had an abundance for the table besides. Out of the milk of only one cow they had butter enough to sell three or four pounds a week, besides abundance of milk and cream; and madam has the butter for her pocket money. This is the way country people manage.”
“Glorious!” thought I. And my wife and I could scarcely sleep, all night, for the brilliancy of our anticipations!
To be sure our delight was somewhat damped the next day by the coldness with which my good old uncle, Jeremiah Standfast, who happened along at precisely this crisis, listened to our visions.
“You’ll find it pleasant, children, in the summer time,” said the hard-fisted old man, twirling his blue-checked pocket-handkerchief; “but I’m sorry you’ve gone in debt for the land.”
“Oh, but we shall soon save that—it’s so much cheaper living in the country!” said both of us together.
“Well, as to that, I don’t think it is, to city-bred folks.”
Here I broke in with a flood of accounts of Mr. B.’s peach-trees, and Mrs. B.’s strawberries, butter, apricots, etc., etc.; to which the old gentleman listened with such a long, leathery, unmoved quietude of visage as quite provoked me, and gave me the worst possible opinion of his judgment. I 475 was disappointed, too; for as he was reckoned one of the best practical farmers in the county, I had counted on an enthusiastic sympathy with all my agricultural designs.
“I tell you what, children,” he said, “a body can live in the country, as you say, amazin’ cheap; but then a body must know how,”—and my uncle spread his pocket-handkerchief thoughtfully out upon his knees, and shook his head gravely.
I thought him a terribly slow, stupid old body, and wondered how I had always entertained so high an opinion of his sense.
“He is evidently getting old,” said I to my wife; “his judgment is not what it used to be.”