The Swede asked William Pender, a thin, vague, grumbling man, of whom he hired the land,
“How long time to clear these fields of stones?”
“Ninety-nine years!” said William solemnly. But the Swede, a fair, strong-built man named Jansen, went to work, with his wife and his three children. They put on leather aprons, and worked early and late, in every spare minute that could be taken from planting and cultivating. (William looked on, from his brother’s farm, whither he had retreated, in a mixture of incredulity, disapprobation and envy.) They worked in the rain; and now, after three years, the farm is clear of stones, and Jansen owns it clear. He has a thousand hens, and sells his eggs and broilers at fancy prices in New York; and Mrs. Jansen’s lawn and flower-beds are as gay as those of a neat farm in Holland.
The Italian farmer is a larger pattern of man. He came here as a young fellow with no better start than a push-cart, but he came of good intelligent Tuscan people, and has not only endless industry, but wits to see, and enterprise to take, all sorts of chances. He did not take any chances, though, when he married Alice Farrell, the daughter of one of our best farmers, a strong pretty girl, as industrious as her husband, and even more intelligent, with a free sort of outlook, and something kindling about her. Her husband is now the big man of his neighborhood. The district goes by his name, and he has represented it in the Legislature. He owns a fine herd of registered Guernseys, and his apples bring fancy prices.
A friend of mine, a farmer, once asked one of the great Connecticut nurserymen to what he attributed the success of the Italians in nursery work and truck farming. The older man’s eyes twinkled.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “They’re willing to work in the rain!”
Our farm conditions are improving, almost while you watch them. The Agricultural Department of the State University is doing yeoman service. People are beginning to realize what science is bringing to agriculture, and the young men are fired by it. They are especially beginning to realize what ignorance it was to leave so many farms deserted, and to condemn so much of the land as hopeless and used up. The friend who asked the question about the Italians said of our own farmers:
“They stick to their grandfathers’ ways, and not to their grandfathers’ enterprise and ambition for improvement.” But this statement is fast coming to be untrue.
Interspersed, however, among the prosperous districts there are curious, backward hamlets, where the woods seem to encroach. Their hills shut them about too closely. Some set of the tide of human affairs, some change of transportation or of market, cuts off the wholesome currents of life from them, and they stagnate like cut-off water and become degenerate.
There is a sad combination of receding prosperity and a run-out population in a town a long day’s drive from us. Poor place, it has become bankrupt. Its timber was cut off, and the cooperages, on which its tiny livelihood depended, moved away. Its farms straggle up the flanks of a round-topped mountain. Apple-raising might perhaps have saved it, but either such of its people as had the enterprise for this moved away, or it possessed none such. The people I saw there looked as different as possible from our hearty sun-and-air neighbors. Unkempt faces thronged the dirty windows of farms that were mere shacks. They looked at once ambitionless and sinister. “Merricktown folks,” people of the neighboring districts say, when tools disappear or robes are stolen from the sleighs at a Grange supper.