It was a warm April night, and I was foolish with spring fever. I began to play with the idea. I got up and opened my tin box, to investigate the visible paper tokens of my little fortune. There was, in all, about $30,000, the result of my legacy from my parents and my slender savings from my slender salary, for I had never had any extravagances except books and golf balls. I had heard of farms being bought for $1,500. That would still leave me more than $1,200 a year. Perhaps, with the freedom from this college grind, I could write some of those masterpieces at last–even a best seller! I grew as rosy with hope as an undergraduate. I looked at myself in the glass–not yet bald, face smooth, rather academic, shoulders good, thanks to daily rowing. Hands hard, too! I sought for a copy of the Transcript, and ran over the real estate ads. Here was a gentleman’s estate, with two butler’s pantries and a concrete garage–that would hardly do! No, I should have to consult somebody. Besides $1,200 a year would hardly be enough to run even a $1,500 farm on, not for a year or two, because I should have to hire help. I must find something practical to do to support myself. What? What could I do, except put sarcastic comments on the daily themes of helpless undergraduates? I went to bed with a very poor opinion of English instructors.
But God, as the hymn remarks, works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Waking with my flicker of resolution quite gone out, I met my chief in the English department who quite floored me by asking me if I could find the extra time–“without interfering with my academic duties”–to be a reader for a certain publishing house which had just consulted him about filling a vacancy. I told him frankly that if I got the job I might give up my present post and buy a farm, but as he didn’t think anybody could live on a manuscript reader’s salary, he laughed and didn’t believe me, and two days later I had the job. It would be a secret to disclose my salary, but to a man who had been an English instructor in an American college for seven years, it looked good enough. Then came the Easter vacation.
Professor Farnsworth, of the economics department, had invited me on a motor trip for the holidays. (The professor married a rich widow.)
“As the Cheshire cat said to Alice,” he explained, “it doesn’t matter which way you go, if you don’t much care where you are going to; and we don’t, do we?”
“Yes,” I said, “I want to look at farms.”
But he only laughed, too. “Anyhow, we won’t look at a single undergraduate,” he said.
In the course of our motor flight from the Eternal Undergraduate, we reached one night a certain elm-hung New England village noted for its views and its palatial summer estates, and put up at the hotel there. The professor, whose hobby is real estate values, fell into a discussion with the suave landlord on the subject, considered locally. (Being a state congressman, he was unable to consider anything except locally!) The landlord, to our astonishment, informed us that building-sites on the village street and the nearby hills sold as high as $5,000 per acre.
“What does farm land cost?” I inquired sadly.
“As much as the farmer can induce you to pay,” he laughed. “But if you were a farmer, you might get it for $100 an acre.”
“I am a farmer,” said I. “Where is there a farm for sale?”