I want to talk today to the boys on the farm, and the old gray-haired boys who were raised on the farm. I think the old boys will appreciate my talk the most because they have had the experience I shall talk about. The farm boy nowadays knows nothing of the old experience that used to come to us older farm boys who were obliged to go barefooted the greater part of the summer and autumn. Say, you old gray-headed farm hand, do you remember how you used to chase the cows up on a cold, frosty morning, and use the warm spot to warm your half-frozen feet? I do. Often when obliged to go to the fields for the cows on a frosty October morning I would chase the cows up and then stand in the warm spot to thaw out my red feet.
Well, that game has been reversed on me a hundred times since that day, and I have been chased up from my bed that others might warm their feet at my expense. Once in particular I owned, or thought I owned, a tract of mountain land. I was saving the timber for a future day. It was all the property I had in the world. The man who owned the tract adjoining mine sold it to my neighbor. This neighbor was an amateur surveyor, and spent much time running old lines through the woods. I thought it was for the practice he was getting out of the work, but I soon learned differently.
He had discovered an old line running through the centre of my tract of mountain land. It was two years older than the line between his new possessions and my land. He jumped the tract and said that all above the old line he found was his—that it belonged to the tract he had purchased. He began at once to cut down the timber I had been saving for a future day, and laughed at me when I protested and told him I had bought the land in good faith, and it belonged to me.
I employed a surveyor, who counted the growths of the trees since the blazes were made, and he agreed with my surveying neighbor that he was right—the line to which he claimed was two years older than the line to which I had purchased land. I was obliged to get up and let him warm his feet in the one spot on earth I had warmed.
It all came back to me how I used to chase the cows up to warm my bare feet. It wasn’t exactly bread coming back on the water, but it was the cold coming back to my feet. I was taken with cold feet and gave up the land.
Since then I learned that the old line that served so well to swindle me out of my mountain land was an old township line, and had nothing to do with dividing the tracts of privately owned land. Did my surveying neighbor know this to be a fact at the time? I fear he did, for he had previously gone over that same township line from the starting point at the river, and had learned the truth about the line through the woods. With this knowledge he chased me out of my warm spot and proceeded to warm his feet.
Strange to say, we are friends today. I wouldn’t do him an injury for any price, and I don’t think he would injure me—any more than to chase me out of a warm spot again, and warm his feet at my expense; for this seems to be the game of life with most business people. Some of them prosper and some of them do not. My neighbor has gained but little. He took all I had in the world, but it didn’t prosper in his hands. I would not trade positions or future prospects with him today.
It doesn’t always pay to chase a man up to get possession of the warm spot he occupied.
It didn’t pay me at all when I used to chase the cows up for the same purpose. The intermittent moments of cold and warm feet made the cold feel all the more chilly when I left the warm spot and stepped into the frost-laden grass.