We were supposed to be doing this for our health. We had never been robust, though always very sound as to appetite, and the family said the fresh air and joyous work of the fields would do us so much good, poor boy. It nearly did us for good and all. When we got home to mother after a year of it, with callouses on our hands and on our soul, the house-dog sat up and howled in anguish of mind, and the town-undertaker licked his lips and measured our length and breadth—there wasn't much breadth—with his eye. We could see him wondering whether the family would stand for solid silver handles or just the plain oxidized kind.
For years afterwards the mere mention of the word "farm" would cause us to tremble from head to foot and perspire clammily at every pore. We couldn't look at a cow without wanting to heave a brick at her, or a hired man without a sudden desire to go over and shake his honest hand and murmur a few words of sympathy.
So when a wealthy friend of ours—we make a point of picking 'em rich—called us up last summer and suggested that we should go out to his "little place in the country" for the week-end, we feared the worst. We realized in a moment that his hired man had quit or had died of over-exertion, and that he was trying to work us in as a substitute—for our keep. But we couldn't think of any decent excuse to give, so we yielded a dismal consent.
"You mustn't expect too much," he warned us, "it's the simple life, you know—no fol-de-rols, but just good plain farm fare."
Our heart sank at the words. Not that we have ever been so stuck on fol-de-rols. We don't mind an occasional fol-de-rol—a fol-de-rol for two, say, with a quart of "extra dry" in a tin pail of ice alongside. But we have never hankered for them as a steady diet. At the same time the warning sounded ominous. Plain farm fare!—we could see the platter of pork and cabbage and the slab of marmoreal pie.
He called for us—or rather, we stood on the street-corner and he picked us up in a ten-thousand-dollar limousine, lined in grey silk, with a big bouquet of roses concealing the chauffeur from the gaze of the occupants.
This cheered us up somewhat, but we had a feeling that our doom was merely postponed. We had a notion that we were being lured. We had heard of people who had been made "white slaves" that way. And if a farm-hand is not a white slave, we would like to know who has any better right to the title. Not that he is so very white, but....
With the engine purring softly and the cushions heaving voluptuously, we swiftly glided—or should it be "glid" or "glode?"—out past the last suburban lot, meaning about thirty miles. It was a beautiful pastoral region, occupied mostly by golf-clubs and villas. Long rows of peonies and Canterbury-bells and flowering shrubs were the nearest approach to farming we could see—these and a few cows of the domestic-pet variety.
Our host was very chatty all the way, and his talk was of the beauties of the simple life and the general rottenness of civilization as evidenced by stock-exchanges and clubs and all-night restaurants.
"Luxury and indolence," he assured us over and over again, "are eating the heart out of modern society. We are all living too fast and too high. We have too much money—that's what's wrong with people in our class."