HOPE FARM NOTES

BY
HERBERT W. COLLINGWOOD

REPRINTED FROM
THE RURAL NEW YORKER

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

To
L. D. C. and A. F. C.
who represent
“The Hen with one Chicken”
and
The Chicken.

Most of these notes were originally printed in the Rural New-Yorker from week to week and covering a period of about 20 years. Many readers of that magazine have expressed the desire to have a collection of them in permanent form. It has been no easy task to make a selection, and I wish to acknowledge here the great help which I have received from my daughter, Ava F. Collingwood, in arranging this matter. It has been thought best to arrange the notes in chronological order. “A Hope Farm Sermon,” and “Grandmother” were originally printed in 1902. The others follow in the order of their original publication. The reader must understand that the children alluded to represent two distinct broods,—the second brood appearing just after the sketch entitled “Transplanting the Young Idea.” From the very first the object of these notes has been to picture simply and truthfully the brighter, cheerful side of Farm Life.

CONTENTS

HOPE FARM NOTES

THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE BARN

As a boy on a little Yankee farm I had a “stent” set out for me every day. During the Winter it was sawing and splitting wood. Our barn stood so that somehow on a Winter’s day one side of it faced the road, and it always seemed to be warm and sunny. The other was turned so it was always cold and frosty, with little if any sun. The hens, the cow and the sheep always made for the sunny side of the barn, which represented the comfortable and the bright side of life. The old gentleman who brought me up always put the woodpile on the frosty side of the barn. He argued that if the boy worked too much on the sunny side, he would stop to look at the passers-by, feel something of the joy of living, and stop his work to absorb a little of it. We were brought up to believe that labor was a curse, put upon us for our sins, a serious matter, a discipline and never a joy. When the boy worked on the frosty side, he must move fast in order to keep warm. He would not stop to loaf in the sun, he could not throw stones or practise baseball so long as he had to keep his mittens on to keep his fingers warm. Thus the argument was that the boy would accomplish more on the frosty side, and realize that labor represented the primal curse which somehow seemed to rest particularly hard upon the farmer. And so as a child I did my work and passed much of my life on the frosty side of the barn, silent and thoughtful, while the hens cackled and sang on the sunny side. It seemed strange to me that people could not see that the thing which made the hens lay would surely make the boy work.

There will always be a dispute as to whether a boy or a man does his best work under the spur of necessity, or out of a full bag of the oats of life. And they do it with greater or less cruelty as more or less of their life has been spent on the frosty side. I never yet saw a self-made man who did anything like a perfect job on himself. They usually spoil their own sons by giving them too easy a time, while work is a necessity in building character. Work without play of some sort is labor without soul, and that is one of the most cruel and dangerous things in the world. I have noticed that most men who pass their childhood on the frosty side of the barn have what I call a squint-eyed view of youth. They spend a large part of their time telling how they had to work as a boy, and how much inferior their own sons are since they do not have chores to do. That man’s boys will pay no attention except when his eye is upon them, and rightly so, I think. The man looks across the table at mother, with a shake of his head, for is not the Smith family responsible for the fact that these boys do not equal their wonderful sire? I have learned better than to expect much sympathy from my boys for what happened 50 years ago.

The old gentleman would come now and then and look around the corner of the barn to see if I was at work. The frosty side of the barn in youth has one advantage. It forces the boy to think and reason out the justice of life. Uncle Daniel had not read enough of history to know that Guizot, the great French historian, says that the only thing which those who represent tyranny, injustice or evil are afraid of is the human mind. What he means is that whenever you can get the plain, common people to think clearly and with their own brains, they will sooner or later wipe off the slate of history and write freedom in big letters. On the sunny side I think I should have talked and so rid myself of my thought before it could print itself upon my little brain, but there on the frosty side of the barn I know that I said little, but reasoned it out with the clear wisdom of childhood. If Uncle Daniel had been a student of Shakespeare, he would have gone straight to that famous passage in Julius Cæsar which probably expresses the thought of 90 per cent of the humans capable of thinking, who have ever lived to maturity:

“Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights;

Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

I was thinking out my problem, and I want to tell you younger men that the questions which started at the teeth of my saw on the frosty side of that old barn have cut their way through the years, and chased and haunted me all through life. The injustice of labor and social conditions—that is the foundation of the trouble in the world. Upon it all helpful education should be based. Youth’s ideals will always chase you like that, if you give them half a chance, and you never can have better mental companions. I was trying to reason out one of two resolutions. Off in that dim future of manhood when I should grow up, my time would come, and I might have power over some other boy, or maybe a man. I could put him on the frosty or on the sunny side of the barn, as I saw fit. What would I do to him to pay for my session on the frosty side? Somehow I think it is natural for human beings to seek reparation and promise themselves to take their misfortunes out of someone else when their power comes. I think I should have grown up with something of that determination in mind had it not been for the poet Longfellow.

Now you will smile, you successful farmers, you dry old analyzers and solemn teachers and you budding young hopes. What has poetry to do with farming or agricultural education? What did the poet Longfellow ever do for farming? Did he ever have a hen in an egg-laying contest that laid 300 eggs in a year? Did he ever raise a prize pumpkin, or a prize crop of potatoes? Did he even originate the Longfellow variety of flint corn? Do not men need solid pith rather than flabby poetry in their thought? It is true that Longfellow would have starved to death on a good farm. Yet his poetry and the thought that went with it were one of the things that made New England dominate this country in thought. My childhood was passed at a time when we had no science to study. Bacteria were swimming all about us in the air, the food and the water. I had, no doubt, swallowed millions of them at every mouthful, and we grew fat on them. We had no books on science or bulletins, but every farmhouse had its copy of Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes. The best duck-raiser in our town was a man who could recite Bryant’s poem, “To a Water Fowl,” with his eyes shut. I think I could safely challenge many famous poultrymen to recite even one verse of that poem, yet who would say that he would not be a better poultryman and a better man if he could carry in his heart a few verses of that poem?

“There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast.”

...

“He who from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way which I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.”

I had recited Longfellow’s “Resignation” in school. I gave it about as a parrot would, but on the frosty side of the old barn one verse shoved itself into my little brain:

“Let us be patient;

These severe afflictions

Not from the ground arise;

But oftentimes celestial benedictions

Assume this dark disguise.”

Just think of that, a “celestial benediction”—it was a great thing for a boy to think about. I looked both words up in the dictionary and got, perhaps, half of their meaning. In all our town there seemed to be no one except our old minister to come around on the frosty side of the barn with comfort or promise, but this celestial benediction which the poet told about got right to you. It might even live under that awful pile of wood which I was to saw, and it would be worth the job of sawing it if I could find such a thing under the pile. I heard people speak of a “nigger in the woodpile” in terms of reproach, but a celestial benediction down under the wood was certainly entitled to all respect. I did not fully understand it, or what it meant, but it got into me and stayed there, where the multiplication table or the rule of square root never would remain. My belief is that if I had committed to memory in place of that poem some excellent classroom lecture at college I should have become a little anarchist, and gone through life pushing such people as I could reach toward the frosty side of the barn. As it was, that poem, repeated over and over, made me vow as a child that if I ever could influence or direct the lives of farmers I would do my best to see that they lived and did their work on the sunny side of the barn.

In my day children were brought up on “the Scriptures and a stick,” both well applied, and yet all these “lectures and lickings” never stuck in my life as did the noble poetry we read in school, and the few pictures which hung on the walls of the home. There is a curious thing about some of these pictures. I am told of a case where two boys in the Tennessee mountains volunteered for the navy. Their mountain home was as far removed from the ocean as it well could be. They had never seen even a large pond. For three generations not one of their ancestors had ever seen the salt water. Yet these boys would not listen to any call for the army, but they demanded a place in the navy. The story came to an officer in a nearby camp, and he became interested and visited that home. Both father and mother were puzzled over the action of their boys, and they could not understand why Henry and William had demanded the ocean. As the officer turned away he noticed hanging on the wall in the living-room of that house the crude picture of a ship under full sail and on an impossible blue ocean. It had come into that family years before, wrapped around a package of goods, and mother had hung it on the wall. From their youth those boys had grown up with that picture before them, and it had decided their lives. It was stronger than the influence of father and mother—they could not overcome it. I speak of that in order that you men and women with children of your own may understand how the dreams, the poetry, the visions of youth may prove stronger influences than any of the science, the wisdom, or the fine examples you may put before your little ones.

On the wall of our old living-room at home was a chromo entitled “Joseph and His Brethren.” It was an awful work of art. It showed a group of men putting a boy down into a hole in the ground. It would have made the head of an art department weep in misery, and yet it affected me deeply. I used to stand and study it, with the result that at least one chapter of the Bible gave me great joy, and that was the story of Joseph and his brothers. That story helped to keep me sweet and hopeful on the frosty side of the barn, for I reasoned it all out as I worked. Here, I thought, was a farm boy. He did rather more than his share of living on the frosty side, and see what he came to. I used to picture Joseph in mind as he came walking over the desert carrying his father’s instructions about the sheep and the management of the farm. His brothers saw him coming, and they said among themselves, “Behold, this dreamer cometh.” You see, even in those days, practical men could not understand the value of a dreamer, a poet or a thinker as the first aid to practical agriculture. I have no doubt that Joseph the dreamer often forgot to water the sheep. I have no doubt but that they got away from him when he was herding them, and so his brothers quickly got rid of him, and they sent him off to the place where they thought dreams never came true. And that is where they made their mistake, and the same mistake is often made in these days by other practical farmers, for dreams that are based on faith and pure ambition always come true. If Joseph had not been a dreamer, carrying the ideals of his childhood into Egypt, we can readily understand which side of the barn his brothers would have gone to when they appeared before him later. But Joseph was a man who remembered the dreams and the hopes of his childhood kindly; he gave those brothers the sunniest side of the barn, and by doing so he made himself one of the great men in history.

You may surely take it from me that at some time in your life, if you prove worth the salt you have eaten, your State or your country will call you up before the judgment seat, and will say to you:

“I demand your life. In your youth you had ideals of manhood and of service. I have trained you and given you knowledge. I now demand your life as proof that your old ideals were true.”

That comes to all men not only on the battlefield, but in all the humble walks of life—the farm, the factory, the shop, wherever men are put at labor, and it means a life given to service, the use of power and knowledge, in order that men less fortunate may live on the sunny side of the barn.

We had something of an illustration of this when America entered the great war. Many of us felt honestly that our boys were not quite up to the standard. We thought they were a little lazy, inefficient or spoiled, because they did not think as we did about labor and the necessity for work. We did not realize what the trouble was, and so we generally charged it to the influence of mother’s side of the family. We could not understand that by education, training and example, we had simply taught those boys only the material and selfish side of life. They demanded unconsciously more of its poetry and romance and thus the war swept them away in a blaze of glory. We suddenly woke up to find that under the inspiration of an unselfish desire, our lazy and careless boys had become the finest soldiers this world has ever seen. They were made so through the power of poetry and imagination, for “making the world safe for democracy” is only another name for making the great life offering in order that helpless men and women may know the comfort and glory of living on the “sunny side of the barn.”

I think I have lived long enough and under conditions which fit me to know human nature better than most men know books. Our present improved man came from a savage. Originally man was a confirmed dweller on the frosty side of the barn. As human life has developed, the tendency has been for this man to run for a warm place on the sunny side. In order to get there, his natural tendency has been to crowd some weaker brother back into the frost. We may not like to admit it, but as we have crowded poetry and imagination and love out of agricultural education, we have lost track of the thought that there is one great duty we owe to society for the great educational machine she has given us. That one great life duty is to try to carry some more unfortunate brother out of the frost into the comfort of the sunny side of the barn. We are too much in the habit of trying to leave this practical betterment to the Legislature or to the Federal Government, when it never can be done unless we do it ourselves, as a part of human sacrifice. You must remember that in spite of all our scientific work, the world is still largely fed and clothed by the plain farmers, whose stock in trade is largely human nature and instinct. The shadow which undoubtedly lies over farming today is due to the fact that too many of these men and women feel that they are booked hopelessly to spend their lives on the frosty side of the barn.

It is in large part a mental trouble, a feeling of deep resentment, such as in a very much smaller way came to me as a little boy, for you will see how real and true are the ideals of childhood. The great aim of all education should be to find some way of putting poetry and imagination into the hearts of the men and women who are now on the frosty side of the barn. There is more in this than any mere increase of food production, or increase of land values. A great industrial revolution is facing this nation. Such things have come before again and again. They were always threatening, and every time they appeared strong men and women feared for the future of their country. Yet in times past these dark storms have always broken themselves against a solid wall of contented and prosperous freeholders. They always disappear and turn into a gentle, reviving rain when they strike the sunny side of the barn. That is where the errors and mistakes of society are taken apart and remade, better than ever before, by skilled and happy workmen. It is on the frosty side of the barn, in the unhappy shadows, where men tear down and destroy without attempting to rebuild, for there can be no human progress except that which is finally built upon contentment and faith. Men and women must be brought to the sunny side of the barn if this nation is to remain the land of opportunity, and such men and women as we have here must do the work.

If you ask me how this is to be done, I can only go back to childhood once more for an illustration. I know all the characters of the following little drama. We will call the children John, Mary and Bert. John and Mary were relatives of the old gentleman who owned the farm, and they came for a long visit. Bert was the farm boy, put out to work on that farm for his board and clothes, one of the thousands of war orphans who represented a great legacy which the Civil War had left to this country. John and Mary were bright and petted and pampered. You know how such smart city children can usually outshine and outbluff a farm boy. The woman of the house, a thrifty New England soul, decided that this was her chance to get the woodshed filled with dry wood, and so she put the three children at it. Before Bert knew what was going on, those city children had it all “organized.” Bert was to work on the frosty side of the barn where the woodpile was, and he was to saw and split all the wood. John played until Bert had split an armful, then John carried it about two rods to the shed, where Mary took it out of his arms and piled it inside. I have lived some years since that time, and I have seen many enterprises come and go, and if that arrangement is not typical of thousands of cases which show the relation between the farmer and middleman and handler, I have simply lived and observed in vain, and Bert represented the farmer.

And the distribution of the rewards received in exchange for that combination was still more typical. Now and then the woman would think the woodshed was not filling very fast, so that some form of bribery to labor was necessary. She would then come out with half a pie, or a few cookies, to stimulate the work. Strange to say, the distribution of this prize was always given to the girl. She was doing that absolutely useless work of piling the wood, and yet the pie and the cookies were handed to her for distribution. For a great many centuries, it must be said that the farmer never had much of a chance with the town man when it came to receiving favors from the ladies, and in the distribution of that pie John and Mary usually ate about seven-eighths of it, and handed the balance to Bert, for even then those city children had formed the idea that a silent, unresisting farm boy was made to be the beast of burden, fit for the frosty side of the barn.

And just as happens in other and larger forms of business, there were, in that toy performance of a great drama, forms of legislative bribery for middlemen and farmers. Those children were told that if they would hurry and get the woodshed filled up, they would receive pleasure and a present. John and Mary, as middlemen, might go to the circus, while the boy on the saw would receive a fine present. This would be a book which told how a splendid little boy sawed 15 cords of wood in two weeks, and then asked his mother if he couldn’t please go down the road and saw five cords more for a poor widow woman during his play time. Ever since the world began, that seems to have been the idea of agricultural legislation. The real direct pleasure and profit have gone to John and Mary, while to Bert has gone the promise of an education which will teach him how to work a little harder. Looking back over the world’s history, the most astonishing thing to me is that society has failed to see that the best investment of public money and power is that made closest up to the ground, the great mother of us all. Other interests have received it, largely because they have been able to organize and make a stronger appeal to the imagination.

Of course in every drama of human life there has to be a crisis where the actors come to blows, and it happened so in this case. There came one day particularly cold, and with a special run of hard and knotty wood to be sawed. That gave John and Mary more time for play, and put an extra job on Bert. I cannot tell just how the battle started; it may have been caused by Mary, for a thousand times in the history of the world the relations between two boys and a girl have upset all calculations and changed the course of history. Or it may be that the spirit of injustice boiled up in the heart of that boy on the saw, and swept away his peaceful disposition. At any rate, when John found fault because he did not work faster, Bert dropped his saw and tackled the tormentor. If I am to tell the truth, I am forced to admit that there was no science at all about the battle which that boy put up for the rights of farm labor. He should, I suppose, have imitated some of the old heroes described by Homer and Virgil, but as the rage of battle came over him, the most effective fighter he could think of was the old ram, and I regret to say that he lowered his head, and, without regard for science, butted John in the stomach and knocked him down. Then he sat on his enemy, took hold of his hair with both hands, and proceeded to pound his head on the frosty ground, while Mary danced about, not caring to interfere, but evidently waiting to bestow her favors upon the victor. And just as John was getting ready to call “enough” the kitchen door opened and out came the woman of the house with the old minister.

She certainly looked like a very stern picture of justice as she peered over her spectacles at the boys on the ground, and the three children were arraigned before her. “What shall I do with these children? I shall never get this job done. I have spent nearly five pies on these children already, and see how little they have piled, and here they are fighting over it. I think the best thing I can do is to whip that lazy boy at the saw.”

I wish you could have seen the face of the old minister as he rolled up his wrinkles and prepared to answer. It was worth a good deal to see how he looked out of the corner of his eye at the boy on the saw.

“My good friend,” said he, “this is not a case for prayer or for punishment, or for investigation, or for education. It is a case for an adjustment of labor and pie. That boy on the saw has been doing practically all of the work, and getting almost nothing of the reward. He is discouraged, and I don’t blame him. You cannot crowd more work out of him with a stick. Move him out into the sun, give him the pie, and let him eat his share and distribute the rest. Make the other boy split and carry and pile all that wood, and put that girl at washing windows. The closer you put the pie up to the sawbuck, the more wood you will have cut.”

Now tell me, you scientists and you wise men, if that does not tell the whole story. It is the pie of life, or the fair distribution of that pie, which leads men and women to the sunny side of the barn. What we need most of all in this country is some power like that of the old minister, who can drive that thought home to human society, and it will not be driven home until our leaders and our teachers have in their hearts more of the poetry and the imagination which lead men and women to attempt the impossible and work it out. You will not agree with me when I say that in a majority of the farm homes today there is greater need of the gentle, humanizing influence of poetry and vision than of the harder and sterner influence of science and sharp business practice. As the years go on you will come to see that I am right.

I know that is one of the hardest things on earth for some of us to understand, for modern education has led us away from the thought. In our grasp for knowledge we have tried to substitute science entirely for sentiment, forgetting that the really essential things of life cannot stand close analysis, because they are held together by faith. In reaching out after power we have tried too hard to imitate the shrewd scheming of the politician and the big interests. We have failed thus far because we have neglected too many of our natural weapons. Over 200 years ago Andrew Fletcher wrote:

“I knew a very wise man who believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”

Andrew Fletcher’s wise man knew what he was talking about. Very likely some of you older people can remember the famous Hutchinson family in the days before the Civil War. I have seen the New Hampshire farmhouse where they were raised. It was just a group of plain farmers who traveled about the country singing simple little songs about freedom. That plain farm family did more to make the American people see the sin of slavery than all the statesmen New England could muster or all the laws she could make. There was little science and less art about their singing, but it was in the language of the common people and they understood it.

“The ox bit his master;

How came that to pass?

The ox heard his master say

‘All flesh is grass!’”

There came a crisis in the Civil War when soldier and statesman stood still wondering what to do next, for they were powerless without the spirit of the people. Then William Cullen Bryant wrote the great song in which he poured out the burning thought of the people:

“We’re coming, Father Abraham,

Three hundred thousand more,

From Mississippi’s winding stream

And from New England’s shore.

We leave our plows and workshops,

Our wives and children dear,

With hearts too full for utterance,

But with a silent tear.

“We’re coming, we’re coming, the Union to restore;

We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!”

Had it not been for such songs and the spirit they aroused the Civil War never could have been won. We now understand that during the great war the French army was at the point of mutiny, and was saved not by stern discipline but by a renewal of its spiritual power. I think it will be as hard as for a man to try and lift himself by his boot straps to try to put farming into its proper place through science and material prosperity alone. We need poets to give us songs and playwrights to put our story in such pictures that the world must listen to it and understand. The one great thing which impels us to work on and fight is the hope that the property which we may leave behind us will be safe and put to reasonable use. Some of us may leave cash and lands; others can give the world only a family of children, but at heart our struggle is to see that this heritage may be made safe.

For most of us make a great mistake in locating a storage place for the heritage which we hope to leave to the future. We work and we toil; we struggle to improve conditions; we strive to capitalize our worry and our work into money and into land in order that our children may carry on our work. Have you ever stopped to think who holds the future of all this? Many of you no doubt will say that the future of this great nation lies in the banks and vaults of the cities where money is piled up mountains high. We have all acted upon that principle too long, digging wealth from the soil and then sending it into the town for investment, until we have come to think that our future lies there. We are wrong; it is a mistake. The future of this land, and all it means to us, lies in the hands of little children, who are playing on the city streets or in the open fields of the country, and it is not so much in their hands as in the pictures which are being printed on their little minds and souls. And this future will be safer with poetry and imagination than with the multiplication table alone.

I know about this from my own start in life. I was expected to be satisfied with work until I was 21, and then have a suit of clothes and a yoke of oxen. One trouble with the farmers of New England was that they thought this a sufficient outfit for their boys. I think I might have fallen in with that plan and contented my life with it had it not been for a crude picture which hung in the shop where we pegged shoes. It was a poor color scheme, a perfect daub of art, in which some amateur artist had tried to express a thought which was too large for his soul. A bare oak tree, with most of its branches gone, was framed against the Winter sky. It was evening; a few stars had appeared, and the sky was full of color. The artist had tried to arrange the stars and the sky colors so that they represented a crude American flag, with the oak tree serving as the staff. His great unexpressed thought was that at the close of the Civil War God had painted His promise of freedom on the sky in the coloring of that flag. As a child, that crude picture became a part of my life. I have never been able to forget the glory of it, as I have forgotten the meanness, the poverty, the narrow blindness of our daily lives, so that all through the long and stormy years, wherever I have walked, I have seen that flag upon the sky, and I have waited hopefully for the coming of the sunrise of that day when, through the work of real education, when with the help of such men and such women as are here today, every hopeless man, every lonely woman, every melancholy child upon a sad and desolate hill farm, may feel the thrill of opportunity, and the joy and the glory of living upon the sunny side of the barn.

A HOPE FARM SERMON

No use talking, the best part of a vacation is getting home. We were all sorry to leave Cape Cod. To tell you the truth duty seemed to be stuck full of thorns a foot long as we looked back at it from the easy bed of a loafer on his vacation. No wonder the poor little Bud cried when our good host kissed her good-bye. We looked at her with much the same expression as that on the face of the woman who missed an important train by half a minute and listened to the forcible remark of a man who was also left! We got over that, however. The harness was put on our shoulders so gently that we hardly felt it, and here we are again with a soft pad of gentle and happy memories to put where the rub comes hardest. Everything was all O. K. at home. Grandmother was in good spirits, the Chunk reported good sales, and the weather had been fair for farm work. The boys had the corn all cleaned up and the weeds mostly cut. The strawberries have been transplanted; the alfalfa clipped off; the squashes have grown into a perfect tangle of vines, the sweet potatoes look well, and there is no blight in the late white ones! The children found nine new little pigs and 30 new chickens waiting them. Yes! Yes! It was a happy homecoming. I climbed the hill on Sunday and looked off over the old familiar valley. There were the same glorious old hills with the shadows chasing along them, the little streams stealing down through their fringes of grass and bushes, the cultivated fields, and the homes of neighbors peeping out through the orchards! Surely home is a goodly place after all. Other places are good to come away from, but home is the place to go to!

Now, I know that many of my readers are in trouble. I am, and every mail brings news from people who are carrying crosses and facing hard duties with more or less bravery. There are women left alone on the farm, striving to drag a heavy heart through life. Men have seen wife and child pass away. Others have seen hopes and ambitions crushed out. This season has been hard for many. I will quote from a letter just at hand from central New York, where flood and storm have scarred the hillsides and ruined crops:

“One neighbor hung himself; one says he shall have an auction and go to the old ladies’ home; another had the blues until he cried.”

Now, in spite of all the talk we have of the Nation’s great prosperity, I know that there are thousands of sad hearts in country homes, sad because they have seen the cherished things of life and the work of self-denying years swept out of their grasp by a power which they could neither master nor comprehend. The picture of a strong man dropping his head upon the table and crying like a child is the saddest vision that can rise before our eyes. Farm life has its tragic side, and the sadness of it would crush us down at times if we would permit it to do so. No wonder men and women grow despondent when with each year comes a little more of the living blight which slowly destroys hope and faith in one’s physical ability to master the secret of happiness. I do not blame men and women who give way to despondency under pressure of griefs which have staggered me. I only regret that they cannot realize that for most of the afflicted of middle years the only true help is a moral one.

I feel like repeating that last sentence, though it may come like the application of a liniment I knew as a boy. The old man who brought me up invented a certain “lotion.” Whenever I cut or burned my flesh that lotion bottle was hauled out, a hen’s feather inserted and a liberal allowance smeared over the wound. It was like rubbing liquid fire on the flesh, but it did pull the smart out and carry it far away. I used to imagine that the “lotion” gathered the pain all into a lump and pulled it out by the roots with one quick twitch. One of the most helpful books I have ever read is a little volume entitled “Deafness and Cheerfulness.” I read it over and over, and I wish that every deaf man or friend of a deaf man could have it. I find in this little book the following message which I commend to all who feel their courage giving way:

“The noblest dealing with misfortune is in manly silence to bear it; the next to the meanest is in feebleness to weep over it; the wholly unpardonable is to ask others to weep also.”

With the first and third of these propositions I fully agree. It is not always a sign of weakness for a man to get off into solitude somewhere and find relief in tears. When the tear glands are completely dried up the man loses an element of character which all the iron in his will cannot replace. But “manly silence” is the “noblest dealing with misfortune”—and also the hardest. It is human to cry out and complain at the pain of what we call injustice, but if the child is human should not the grown man be something more? What are years and the burning balm of experience given us for if not to enable us to rise up nearer to divine strength? As I look about me it occurs that most of us who have reached middle life or beyond have grown unconsciously away from childhood and youthful strength. We somehow feel that people ought to regard us as others did 25 years ago. The fat man of 45 is no longer the young sprout of 20, though he may think so. If I am not mistaken, one great trouble with many of us is the fact that we crave and beg for the things that go with youth when in reality we are grown-up men and women! It is our duty now to face life and its problems, not with the careless hope of youth, but with the sober and abiding faith that should come with mature years. Run over a child’s ambitions and, after his short grief, his spirits rise again for the next opportunity. The man’s hopes are shaken by repeated defeat, and hope of physical victory finds itself caged at every turn by former defeat. We may grieve or despond over this and play the child; or we may act the man, raise our hopes and ideals above the range of former defeat, and find comfort and courage in doing the things which shame infirmity and affliction. I know some of you will say that this complacent man may moralize—but give him a touch of trouble, and how he would whine! I hope not! Trouble has taken many a mouthful out of us but, if I thought any honest friend really meant that, it would be the greatest trouble of all. I repeat that the greatest comfort to the despondent must be a moral one, yet the riding of some harmless hobby helps one to walk with fortitude. Let a man say to himself that he will study and work to breed the finest pigs or raise the finest strawberries or master some science or public question, and he will find strength and comfort in his work! I’ll promise not to attempt any more preaching for a good while if you will let me end this little sermon with a quotation from Whittier:

“Soon or late to all our dwellings come the specters of the mind;

Doubts and fears and dread forebodings, in the darkness undefined.

Round us throng the grim projections of the heart and of the brain,

And our pride of strength is weakness, and the cunning hand is vain.

In the dark we cry like children; and no answer from on high

Breaks the crystal spheres of silence, and no white wings downward fly.

But the heavenly help we pray for, comes to faith and not to sight,

And our prayers themselves drive backward all the spirits of the night.”

GRANDMOTHER

The last celebration of Thanksgiving was about the most startling that any of the Hope Farmers remember. I have passed this holiday under quite varied conditions. “Boy” on a New England farm and in a boarding-house, cattle herder on a Colorado ranch, sawyer in a lumber camp, teacher in a country school district, hired man and book agent on a Michigan farm, “elocutionist” in a dramatic company, “professor of modern languages” (with a slim grip on English alone) in a young ladies’ seminary, printer’s devil in a Southern newspaper office, ditcher in a swamp, and other capacities too numerous to mention. A man may perhaps lay claim to a bit of helpful philosophy if he can find some fun in all such days and carry along in his mental pocket “much to be thankful for.” He is sure to come to a time in life when these “treasures of memory” will be very useful. I would not refer to family matters that might well be marked “private” and locked away with the skeleton in the closet if I did not know that the plain, simple matters of family record are things that all the world have in common.

A pirate or a man trying to hide himself might have seen virtues in the dull, misty fog that settled upon the city the night before Thanksgiving. Grandmother had been slowly failing through the day. The night brought her greater pain than ever. All through these long months we had been able to keep from her the real nature of her disease. I took it upon myself to keep the children happy. If we grown-ups found it hard to be thankful we would see that the little folks put out enough thanks for the whole family. I took them down to the market to pick out a turkey! We had a great time, and finally found a turkey fat enough. The market man gave each of the children a handful of nuts—and they now want Mother to give him all her trade. They went home fairly radiant with happiness. Was it not better for them to go to sleep with the pleasant side of the day in their hearts rather than the shadow which the rest of us could feel near us?

The morning came dark and dismal. It didn’t seem like Thanksgiving as the Bud and I went after the doctor. The clerks and professional people seemed to be taking a holiday, but the drivers, the diggers and heavy workmen were at their jobs as usual. The streets were filled with children dressed up in ridiculous costumes, wearing masks or with faces blackened. These urchins went about begging money from passers-by. Our little folks were rather shocked at this way of celebrating Thanksgiving. Where this ridiculous mummery came from or how it crept into a Thanksgiving celebration is more than I can say. It may be as close as a city child can come to thanking Nature for a bountiful harvest! Charlie and his family came in from the farm, and Jack came from his school. Grandmother made a desperate struggle and was finally able to sit up so that her children and grandchildren might be about her. As the children grew restless in the house I took them out and we walked along the river. My mind was busy with other matters relating to other days, but the little folks, happily, saw only the great bright side of the future. Their past was too small to cast any shadow. We went as far as Grant’s Tomb and passed through the room where the great general’s remains are lying. As we passed in, the Graft and Scion saw the men take off their hats and they did the same.

“Why do they make you take off your hat?” asked the Graft, when we came out.

I tried to explain to him that this was one of the things that people should not be made to do. They should do it because they wanted to show their respect or reverence. I doubt if I made him understand it, for when a boy is hungry and other boys are playing football in a nearby vacant lot even the gentlest sermon loses its point. Our dinner was such a success that we did not have chairs enough to go around. The children had to sit on boxes and baskets. A taste of everything from turkey down went in to Grandmother, but she could eat little. The plates came back again and again until the Hope Farm man was obliged to say:

“Well, Mother, I shall have to turn this turkey over after all.”

He had not only to turn it over but scrape many of the bones clean. The farm folks finally went home and Jack too was obliged to go. Happily the little folks were tired out and they were asleep early. About two o’clock Mother woke me. She did not do it before, because it might have alarmed Grandmother, who did not, I think, clearly understand her true condition. There was apparently no pain or struggle at the end. We noticed that her face lighted up with a strange, puzzled look, of surprise and wonder—and well it might when one is called upon to lay down the troubles and toil of such a life as hers in the dim, mysterious country which one must die to enter.

Perhaps the hardest part of it all was to tell the children about it. They must have known that some strange thing was happening. They woke up early and saw the undertaker passing through the room. Then Mother got them together and told them that poor Grandmother had suffered so long that God pitied her and had taken her to Him. The little folks sat with thoughtful faces for a while and then one of them said with wide-open eyes:

“Is Grandmother dead then?”

And so the body of poor Grandmother passed away from us while her spirit and memory passed deeper than ever into the lives of the Hope Farm folks. Life with her had ceased to be comfortable. It was merely a steady, hopeless struggle against pain and depression. Mother was able to go through these long months calmly and hopefully because she knows that her mother had every service that love could render. It is with that thought in mind that I feel like saying a solemn word to those whom I have never met, yet who seem to be as close as personal friends can be. Do not for an instant begrudge the money, the time or toil which you may spend upon those of your loved ones who need your help. That is a part of the cross which you must carry cheerfully or reject. Do not let those whom you serve see that it is a cross, but glorify it from day to day. It is not merely a part of hard, cold duty, but the vital force in the development of character. It may be that I am now talking to someone who is putting personal comfort above the self-denial which goes with the sacred trust which God has put into our lives. Where will the flag of “comfort” lead them when the discomforting days come? A conscience is a troublesome thing at best, but one that has been gently and truly developed through self-sacrifice is a better companion than the barbed finger of trouble thrust into the very soul at last by the relentless hand of fate!

A novelist could weave a startling romance out of the plain life record of this typical American woman. She was born in Massachusetts—coming from the best stock this country has ever produced. This is not the narrow-eyed, cent-shaving Yankee, but the children from the hillside farms who went to the valleys and at the little water-powers laid the foundations of New England’s manufacturing. These sturdy people saw clearly into the future, and as they harnessed and trained the power of the valley streams they cultivated and restrained their own powers until the man as well as the machine became a tremendous force. Honorable misfortune befell this manufacturing family, but could not crush it. In those days the boys, under such circumstances, dropped all their own ambitions and took the first job that presented itself, without a murmur and with joy that they could do it. The girls did the same, though there were few openings for women then outside of housework and the schoolroom. Grandmother had a taste for music, and became a music teacher. She finally secured a position as teacher in a little town in Mississippi, and in about the year that the Hope Farm man was born she went into what was then a strange country for the daughter of a Massachusetts Abolitionist! What a journey that must have been, before the Civil War, for a young woman such as Grandmother was then. The South was in a blaze of excitement, yet this quiet, gentle Northern girl won the love and respect of all. There she met the man who was to be her husband—a young lawyer, able and ambitious, but weighted down by family cares, political convictions and ill health. He was a Union man whose family had made their slaves free and who opposed secession to the last. Grandmother was married and went to the South just before the storm broke. What a life that was in the dreary little town during those years of fighting! Her husband was at one time drafted into the Confederate service and sent to the front only to have a surgeon declare him too feeble and sick for even that desperate service. He cobbled shoes, leached the soil in old smokehouses for salt, and “lived” as best he could. Once he took Grandmother through the lines with a bale of cotton which he sold to pay passage money to the North. After the war he was State Senator and Judge under the patched-up government which followed. Carpetbaggers and rascals from the North lined their pockets with gold and brought shame upon their party and torture and death to the ignorant black men who followed them. In the midst of this carnival of shame and thieving Grandmother’s husband never touched a dishonest dollar and did his best to give character to a despised and degraded race. Of course he failed, for the race did not have strength enough to see that what he tried to offer them was better than the hatred of their old masters and the dollars which the carpet-baggers held out. It was not all lost, for when he was buried I am told that around his grave there was a thick fringe of white people and back—at a respectful distance—acres of black, shining faces which betrayed the crude, awkward stirring of manhood in hearts untrained yet appreciating true service to country.

I speak of these things to make my point clear that Grandmother was a woman capable of supporting her husband through these trials and still capable of holding the love of those who opposed him. In the face of an opposition so frightful that few of us can realize it this quiet, unflinching woman kept steadily on, respected and trusted by all. She took up her burdens without complaint, hid her troubles in her heart, and walked bravely on in her quiet, humble way, until at last she found a safe haven with her children. A true and sincere Christian woman she lived and acted out her faith and did her life’s duty with dignity and cheerfulness. The little folks as they sit beneath the tree at Hope Farm and talk of Grandmother will have only blessed memories of her.

LAUGHTER AND RELIGION

I have learned to have deep sympathy for the man who cannot laugh. He may have great learning or power or skill or wealth, but if fate has denied him a keen sense of humor he is like a McIntosh apple with the glorious flavor left out. Most of the deaf are denied what we may call “the healing balm of tears.” Unless there chance to be some volcanic eruption of the heart they must go in dry-eyed sorrow through their years. Yet, if they are able to laugh it is probable that the deaf see more of the ludicrous side of life than do those who have full hearing. It comes to be amusing to notice how men and women strive and worry over the poor non-essential things of conversation, and waste time and strength trying to make others understand simple things which the deaf man comes to know at a glance. Those who are so unfortunate that they are forced to hear all the litter and waste-basket stuff of conversation may wonder why the inability to hear may act as a torture to the tender heart. They do not know how closely sound is related to the emotions. They cannot understand without losing many of the finer things of life. Yet, as between the tearless man and the unfortunate soul who is denied the joy of laughter, the latter is more deserving of sympathy. One may be nearer insanity but the other is nearer the gallows.

One great reason why the negro race has come through its troubles with reasonable success is because fate has given the black man the blessed privilege of laughter. Many a time when other races would have gone out to rob and kill the black man has been able to sing or laugh his troubles away. So, as between the man who cannot weep or lash himself into a rage and he who cannot laugh, the latter is a far more dangerous citizen and far more to be pitied.

I suppose I ought to be an authority on this subject, as some years ago I was in the business of trying to inoculate some very serious and sad-minded people with the germ of laughter. We had some specimens so tough and so hard-boiled that it was a difficult matter to start them. I was stranded in a farm neighborhood in a Western State working as hired man through a very dull winter. Back among the hills, off the main roads when prices are low and crops are poor, you strike a gloom and social stagnation which the modern town man can hardly realize. I did my work by day and at night went about to churches and schoolhouses “speaking pieces.” We called those gloomy and discouraged people together and tried to make them laugh.

I remember one such entertainment held in a country schoolhouse far back in the mud of a January thaw. The dimly lighted room was crowded with sad-faced, discouraged men and women to whom life had become a tragedy through dwelling constantly upon their own troubles. At intervals during my entertainment two sad-faced women and a couple of men who would have made a success as undertakers at any funeral sang doleful songs about beautiful women who died young or children who proved early in life that they were too good for this world. During one of these intervals a farmer led me outdoors for a conference. Your modern artist can command a salary which enables him to ignore criticism, but in that neighborhood the financial manager was the boss.

“See here now,” said the farmer, “we hired you to come here and make us laugh. Why don’t you do it? I’ve got my hired man in there. He’s all ready to go on a spree and he will do it if you don’t make him laugh. We have paid you $2.50 to come here and speak. That means $1.25 an hour or $12.50 for a 10-hour day. No other man in this neighborhood gets such wages. It’s big money, now go back and earn it. Make that man laugh! It’s a moral obligation for you to do it.”

There was the hired man, a great hulk of humanity feeling that he would be a hero, the champion of the neighborhood, if he could hold humor at bay. When I went back into the schoolroom the teacher stood up by the stove and said it was the unanimous request of the audience that I should read or recite the “Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe. That was not exactly in my line, but who is large enough to resist such an appeal? Years before I had heard a great actor in Boston recite the poem, and with the noble courage of youth I started the best imitation I could muster. No one, not even the author, ever considered the “Raven” as a humorous poem, but it struck the hired man that way. I had cracked jokes in and out of dialect. I had “made faces” and played the clown generally without affecting the hired man. Yet, at the third repetition of “Quoth the Raven—Nevermore!” the hired man exploded with a roar that shook the building, and the rest of the entertainment was one long laugh for him. The rest of the audience joined with him, and long after the meeting closed and the lanterns twinkled down the dark and muddy roads, you could hear roars of laughter from the farmers, as they journeyed home. Just what there was about the “Raven” to explode that man I have never known. It changed his life. It broke a spring somewhere inside of him and his jokes and roars of laughter changed the whole social life of that neighborhood. The minister told me in the Spring that his people had received a great spiritual uplifting during the Winter. He gave no credit whatever to Poe and the hired man.

That same Winter I went to a church for another entertainment. I sat in the pulpit beside the minister and every time I stopped for breath he would lean over and whisper:

“Make them laugh! Give them something humorous! Make them laugh!”

He saw that laughter was religion at such a time. It was a gloomy night. The people were sad and discouraged. Their religion was a torment to them at the time. Nothing but laughter could cure them, and I did my best with discouraging results. I will confess that I lost faith for once in my life and quit trying. There was one intelligent and prosperous farmer in the front pew. He seemed to be a leader and I directed my efforts straight to him. It came to be the one desire of my life to make that solemn-faced man laugh, and he would not do it. It seemed to me as if he sat there with his solemn face a little bent forward, like some wise old horse listening to the chatter of a young colt. I could not stir him and I confess that I quit ingloriously and “took up the collection.”

But, when we all went out on the church steps while lanterns were being lighted and the boys brought up the horses I saw my solemn-faced friend talking with another farmer.

“John,” said the farmer as he snapped down the globe of his lantern, “how did you like the show?”

“Well, Henry, it was good all the way through. I am so sore around my ribs that I’m going home to rub liniment on my sides.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, Henry, that young feller was so funny that I never come so nigh to laughing in the House of God as I done tonight. When I get home out of sight of the elder, I am going to stand right up on my hind-legs and holler.”

A DAY IN FLORIDA

A man told me last week that Florida was too dull for him. He would rust out. There was “more life and human nature on Broadway, New York, in 15 minutes than in a week of Florida.” So I thought I would see how much “real human nature” the sun could observe as Putnam County revolved beneath his eye.

As I came outdoors the sun was bright with hardly a cloud in the sky. The mercury stood at about 65 degrees. Most of the bloom had fallen from the orange trees and the young fruit had begun to form, while the new leaves showed their light green against the darker old leaves. On the tree by the gate, there were peaches as large as walnuts. A drove of half-wild hogs from the woods went slowly along the village street, with one eye open for food and the other watching for a possible hole in a fence through which they might crawl into a grove or garden. For while no one seems to think it worth while to bolt or even shut a house door at night except for warmth, there must be barbed wire around every growing thing that a hog could fancy. Two red hens with their broods of chickens ran about under the orange trees. In front of the house I found a group of “redheads and towheads” gathered around a fisherman who carried a fertilizer sack. He had caught three young alligators and the children were buying them. They finally got the three for a dollar, and they intend taking the hideous things back to New Jersey to “raise” them. You may yet see an improved breed of Hope Farm alligator. Finally the school bell rang and the older children scattered while the little ones played on. I have said that the child crop is a vanishing product in this locality. I understand there are but four white children of school age—not enough to maintain a school! There is a broken and abandoned schoolhouse here, but it has not been occupied for some years. There is a school for colored children. Our people opened a school here, but in this locality the State actually does more for educating colored children than for whites. Think over what that means and see if Broadway can match the “human nature” which comes out of such a situation. Our own children are rosy as flowers. They ought to be, for they have played out in the sun every day since December 1. They would have gone barefoot nine days out of ten, but for sand burrs and hookworms—for that dread disease gets into the system through the feet. Florida is surely a Winter paradise for children and elderly people. As these children pen up their alligators and separate for school and play, an old man walks with firm and active steps down the shaded street to the store. He is 89 years old and is still planting a garden—very likely for the seventieth time! On the platform of the store he will meet a group of men who will sit for hours discussing the weather or looking off through the pines toward the blue lake. On Broadway, people are rushing to and fro with set, anxious faces, tearing their hearts out in the fierce struggle for food, clothing, amusement and shelter. There is quite as much “human nature” about these slow and gentle dreamers, basking in the Florida sun. In this little place where our folks have wintered there are nine different men who live alone. There are perhaps 30 voters in this district, and strange as it may seem they are about evenly divided between the two great parties. That is because a number of old soldiers have moved in here. They draw their pensions, work their gardens or groves and live in peace in this carefree land. “Human nature?” Ask these old soldiers with “warfare over,” as the sun goes down and they look out over the lake, why they ever came to Florida, and if they are disappointed. If you started a contest with a prize for the man who can take the longest time to travel a mile, I could enter several citizens. Yet it was in Florida that the world’s record for speed with a motor car was recently made. While some of our neighbors might consume two hours in going a mile, it was in Florida that Oldfield drove a car one mile in 27⅓ seconds. This contest in speed is a very good illustration of the contrary character of Florida climate and conditions. Many people fail here because they try to fit Broadway “human nature” to this balmy gentle land. You cannot use the same brand!

The forenoon wore off lazily. Across the road a man was working a mule on a cultivator—tearing up the surface of an old orange grove. The only auto in the town went by over the pine-paved road, the very cough of the exhaust pipe sounding like a lung rapidly healing in the soft air. Charlie went by followed by a big colored man. They carry spades and axes for Charlie is sexton, and this is one of the rare occasions when a grave is to be dug, for some old resident is being brought home to be buried.

Mother and I had planned to take the train at noon and go south for a few miles to do some shopping and look up a “colony” or land boom scheme. So we got ready and went to the station in ample time. And there we waited, as everyone else does in this land of tomorrow. An hour crawled by, and still there was nothing in sight up the track except the distant pines and the heat rising from the sands. No one quarrels with fate in Florida—what is the use? Under similar circumstances in New Jersey I should have been held in some way responsible for the delay, but here it did not matter—if the train did not come, another day would do. We waited about 100 long minutes and then the good lady announced that she was going home, as there would not be time to get around, and home she went, good-natured and smiling as the Florida sun.

Let me add that the next day we waited nearly two hours again and then went home once more, but who cares whether he goes today or some future “tomorrow”?

Having been cut out of our trip I became interested in the funeral. A little group of wagons was drawn up under the pines waiting for the train. I have said that an old resident was coming “home”—to be buried by the side of husband and relatives—in the rough little cemetery behind the pines. At last, a puff of thick smoke up the track showed where the dawdling train was showing the true speed of a hearse. Down the grade it came, halting with many a wheeze and groan in front of the little station where the fated box was taken off. Our little funeral procession was quickly made up. Uncle Ed drove old Frank ahead with the minister and the Hope Farm Man as passengers. Then came the dead in a farm wagon, and half a dozen one-horse teams straggling on behind. Your funeral on Broadway with its gilded hearse, black horses and nodding plumes might be far more inspiring. Who can say, however, that there was less of “human nature” in this little weatherbeaten string crawling over the Florida sand? I was thinking as we went how this dead woman had seen what seemed like the death of hope in this land. For right where we were passing, on these dead fields, she had seen orange groves in full fruitage, and had seen them all wiped out in a day of frost!

You would have said that Charlie stood leaning on his spade beside two great heaps of snow. The soil was pure white sand, and as they threw it from the grave it had drifted in over the sides until no dark color showed. On Broadway there would have been an imposing procession, the organ pouring out tones that seemed to carry a message far beyond the comprehension of the living. Here in this lonely little clearing, my friend the minister led the way, the little group of mourners followed, and Charlie and Uncle Ed with a few neighbors carried the dead. I wish I could have had you there with me—you who say that life and human nature crowd into the “lively” places. I wish I could paint the picture as I saw it.

The minister and the station agent’s wife began to sing. One of the men who helped carry the coffin laid down his load and joined the singers. They wanted me to make a quartette, but I am no musician and I could not have made a sound. It was better for me to stand in the background against a tree, by the side of the colored man who leaned on his shining spade and bowed his gray head. For does not the color line fade out at the grave? I wish you could have seen it, the trio of singers, the sad group under the pines, the earth piled up like snowdrifts, the pine tops quivering and moaning, and the Florida sun streaming over all. I felt the pine tree against which I leaned tremble as the wind blew through it. In a tree over us a gray squirrel turned his ear as if to listen. For gathered around those piles of glistening sand were men and women who carried all the world holds of “human nature”—tragedy, despair, hope, sorrow and peace. Not 100 feet from where I stood was a row of six little white stones where six old army comrades were buried. I studied their names, six men of the army and navy from New York, Maine, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont and Ohio. There they lie in the sand, sleeping “the sleep that knows no waking.” And this woman wanted to be brought back to this lonely place that she might rest with her people. “Human nature?” I made a dull companion as old Frank toiled back with us to the village.

Our folks had left the house and I followed them along the shady path to the lake. The younger people had been in bathing. They were sitting on the lake shore, the children were shouting and playing as they ran about the beach. I am glad they were not at the funeral. As Mother and I walked slowly back, the little ones came trailing on, waving branches of palm and singing. And there over the fence was our famous gallon-and-a-half cow—easily the most energetic citizen in the place.

Night comes quickly in Florida and brings a chill with it. The sun seems to tumble directly into the west and to leave little warmth behind. Before we ended our slow walk home, darkness had fallen and Uncle Ed had started a grateful fire of logs. As if to demonstrate the Florida axiom that there are only two absolutely sure things—death and taxes—we found the county assessor before the fire. He had reached us on his rounds and was ready to tell us how much we owed the State. You will see therefore that the human life in Florida is much the same as anywhere else only “more so” for here there is no artifice or straining after effect. Men and women are naturally human—as they were meant to be.

THE BASEBALL GAME

“Two strikes, three balls!”

A silence so intense that you could feel it fell upon 60,000 people who saw the umpire put up his hand to announce the second strike. It was the crisis of the first baseball game for the world’s championship between New York and Philadelphia. The great stands were black with people, and thousands more were perched upon the rocks which rose above the level in which the ball grounds are laid out. The boy and I sat on the bleachers. It was the only place we could get; we sat there three hours before the game began—and we were among the last to get in. Of course you will say we should have been at home picking apples—but without discussing that I will admit that we were packed away in that “bleacher” crowd.

There were some 25,000 of us crowded on those wooden benches with our feet hanging down. Here and there in this black mass of hats a spot of lighter color showed where a woman had crowded in with the rest. There may have been 100 women in this crowd. The “stands” where the reserved seats are placed were bright with women’s gay colors. Our seats were not reserved, but well “deserved” after our struggle for them.

I enjoyed the crowd as much as the game. Many of you have no doubt read that description in “Ben Hur” of the motley crowd which surged out to the Crucifixion. Gibbon describes the masses of humans who attended the Roman games. The world as known at that time gathered at these spectacles, yet I doubt if those old-time hordes could produce the variety of blood or color which showed within 1,000 feet of where we sat. Within four feet sat two colored men showing traces of two distinct African races. The young man on my right was certainly an Irishman. The fat man, who was wide enough to fill two seats, was a German. In front an Italian, behind a Swede, off there a Frenchman, a Spaniard and even a Chinaman. There was an Arab whose father ate dates in the desert. The son looked forward to this date as an oasis in the desert of hard work. Here were Indians, Japanese, Mexicans, Russians, Turks—the entire world had poured the blood of its races into that vast crowd. I do not believe the great Coliseum at Rome ever held a larger company. Yet this crowd was different. In the savage hordes of centuries ago the air was filled with a babel of sound—each race shrieking in its own language. This vast army of “fans” thought and spoke in the common languages of English and baseball. For there is a true language of baseball. Nothing can be popular unless it acquires a language of its own. It was an orderly crowd too. Somehow these waiting men seemed to feel that they had come to the hush and dignity of a great occasion. You may laugh at us—you poor unfortunate people who do not know a home run from a fly catch, but you have missed a lot of the thrill and joy of life. We feel sorry for you. To the true baseball crank this game represented the climax of the year, for here were the best 18 players in the world ready for the supreme struggle. So these thousands sat silent and watchful. As you know, when stirred by passion 60,000 people can give vent to the most hideous and awesome sound. Yet when stilled by the thought of what is to come the silence of this great army is most profound. Now, of course, you and I may say—what a pity that all these people and all the energy and money they represent could not be used for some more useful purpose. I could name half a dozen things which this country needs. If it were possible to gather 60,000 people in behalf of any of these things with the claws of elemental savagery barely covered with thin cotton gloves no Legislature in the land would dare refuse the demanded law. That is true, but it is also true that human nature has not yet evolved from the point where at the last analysis the physical power and what it stands for appeals first to the young and strong. You cannot get away from that, and it must be considered in all our regrets about the “younger generation.” We can have anything we want in legislation and reform whenever we can work up a spirit and a demand for it which is akin to this baseball feeling! For in this silent, orderly crowd there was nothing but cotton over the claws. There was a dignified-looking citizen not far from us who looked like a fair representative of the “City of Brotherly Love.” You would choose him as one of a thousand to take charge of a Sunday school. Yet when a Philadelphia player raced home with the first run there came a hoarse cry that might have startled even a listless Cæsar 2,000 years ago. There was our Philadelphia friend on one foot waving his hat and shrieking defiance and taunts at the crowd of New York “fans.” Why, the germ of that man’s mind was back in the centuries, clad in hairy flesh and skins shouting a war cry at what were then its enemies! And when New York tied the score the entire bleachers seemed to rise like a great black wave of humanity with shrieks and cries and waving hats. For the moment these were hardly human beings—as we like to consider the race. They were crazy barbarians lapsed for the moment back to elemental motives. And as I came back to find myself standing up with the rest I was not sure but that the brief trip back to barbarism had after all been a profitable one!

But we left the umpire standing with his hand up calling two strikes! It was the fifth inning, with the score one to one. There were two out and New York had worked a man around to third base. One more pitched ball would tell the story. Consider the mix-up of the races in this “American game.” The man on third base straining like a greyhound to get home was an Indian. The man at bat was of French blood, while the next batter was an Irishman with a Jew close behind him. The catcher was an Englishman and the pitcher a pure Indian. This Indian stood there like a silent representative of fate with the ball in his hand, eyeing that Frenchman, who shook his bat defiantly. I presume neither of them thought for the instant how 200 years ago it would have been tomahawk against musket in place of ball and bat. Yet the race traits were evident—the light and airy nerve of the Gaul and the crafty silence of the red man! Oh, how that ball did go in! “Ball!” shouted the umpire and the batter took his base. Then it seemed as if bedlam had broken loose. Men and women shouted and cheered and laughed and cried, for they thought that the Indian was “rattled” at last. But his ancestors went through too much fire for that. He stood in the center as cool as a cake of ice. The play for the man on first was to run to second when the ball was pitched, and run he did. I noticed that the catcher jumped six feet to the right as that Indian threw the ball. It went like lightning right into the catcher’s hands. The second baseman had run up behind the pitcher and took the throw from the catcher. Of course the runner on third tried to run in on this throw, but back came the ball ahead of him and he was out! Then in an instant the mighty crowd saw that New York had been ambushed. It was a great trick, and played so accurately and quickly and with such daring that even the Philadelphia “fans” were mind-paralyzed and forgot to cheer. The silence which followed the Indian to the players’ bench was the most eloquent tribute of the day. And it happened, as every “sport” already knows, that New York finally won two to one. The needed runs were made on mighty hits by an Indian and an Irishman, and the great crowd filed out and home to talk it over. I wish I could tell my children how some Cape Cod Yankee had a hand in it, but too many of these are occupied in telling what they or their ancestors used to do. I think the game was invented and developed by Yankees, and that they have made the most money out of it. Probably Cape Cod is willing to rest content with this and let the others handle the ball. I am ready to admit we ought to have been home picking apples, but we saw the game, and the apple harvest will go better to pay for it.

TRANSPLANTING THE YOUNG IDEA

Of all the planting that a farmer finds it necessary to do there is nothing quite equal to transplanting home-grown plants in the garden of education. Some homes might be called hotbeds, others are very cold frames, and there are grades running all between. Children grow up away from childhood and show that they are ready for transplanting—with evidences around the head to be compared with those on a tomato plant. You cut off their roots, and try to trim their heads and plant them in the hard field of practical life or in the sheltered garden of education. It is a large undertaking, for here is the best crop of your farm put out at a hazard. You may not have grown or trimmed it right, and the soil in which you plant it may not prove congenial, or some wild old strain from a remote ancestor may “come back” when it should “stay out.” You cannot tell about these things except by experiment, therefore there is nothing quite equal to this sort of transplanting. That is the way Mother and I felt as we took the two older children off to college. My experience has taught me both the power and the weakness of an education. He who can grasp the true spirit of it acquires a trained mind, and that means mastery. He who simply “goes to college” and drifts along with the crowd without real mental training is worse off than if he never had entered. He cannot live up to his reputation as a college man, and when a man must go through life always dragging behind his reputation he is only a tin can tied to the tail of what was once his ambition. I can imagine an intelligent parrot going through college, and perhaps passing the examinations, but all his life he would be a parrot, unable to apply what he had learned to practical things. I made up my mind long ago to give each one of the children opportunity. That means a chance to study through a good college. Each and every one must pay back to me later the money which this costs. My backing continues just as long as they show desire, through their labor, to think and work out the real worth of education. Should they become mentally and morally lazy and assume that “going to college” is like having the measles or raising a beard—out they come at once, for if I know anything at all it is the fact that the so-called student who goes through college just because his parents think it is the thing to do makes about as poor a drone as the human hive can produce.

Where should the children go? The case of the girl was quickly settled by her mother. Years ago this good lady had her own dreams of a college education and knew just where she wanted to go. Denied the privilege of going herself, she nominated her daughter as her substitute. That settled it—there was no primary or referendum or special election. There seemed to me something of poetic realization in this setting of the only bud into the long-desired and long impossible tree of knowledge. As for the boy—the case was different. I would like to send at least one child back to my old college, and I think a couple of the smaller ones will go later. I know better than to try to crowd boys into associations which are not congenial. If your boy has intelligence enough to justify his going to college let him use his intelligence to decide something of what he wants. I advised the boy to select one of the smaller colleges of high reputation and keep away from the great universities. He made what I call a good choice—an institution of high character, lonely location and with one great statesman graduate who stands up in history like a great lighthouse, to show the glory of public life and the dangerous rock of his own private habits.

Well, Mother and I traveled close to 900 miles up and down through New England on this trip of planning in the garden of education. I could write a book on the memories and anticipations which filled the minds of this Hope Farm quartette. As the train rushed up the country, winding through villages and climbing hills, we took on groups of bright-faced boys on their way to college. Before we reached the end of our journey the train was crowded with them. There was one sour-faced old fellow on the train who viewed those boys with no benevolent eye.

“A lazy, careless lot. I’d put them all at work!”

The old man was wrong—he was sour. Even the evidence of hope and faith in the future which those bright-eyed boys brought could not sweeten him. Here were the thinkers and dreamers and workers of the future. Underneath their fun and careless hope they carried the prayers of their mothers and the poorly expressed dreams of fathers who saw in those boys the one chance to carry on a life work. While the old man scowled on I found myself quoting from “Snow Bound,” Whittier’s picture of the college boy who taught the winter school:

“Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he

Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.”

The responsibility of acting as “young apostles” would have wearied these boys, but unconsciously they were absorbing part of the spirit which will fit them for the work. Finally the train stopped and poured us out into a dusty road. There were not teams enough to carry 10 per cent of the crowd, and the rest of us cheerfully took up our burdens, crossed the river and mounted a steep and dusty hill. It took me back 30 years and more, to my first three-mile dusty walk to college. At the hilltop, as the glory of the college campus stood revealed in the shimmering light of the setting sun, it must have seemed to the freshmen that they had surely been “walking up Zion’s hill.” To me it was like old times patched up and painted with perhaps a few ornaments added. Two boys went by bending under the weight of mattresses. When I first hit college I bought a bedtick, carried it to the barn and stuffed it with straw. It was all the same, only there was the difference which the years naturally bring in comfort and convenience. But finally the darkness came and the moon seemed to climb up over the college buildings, flooding the campus with long bright splinters of light. As we walked back under the trees there came back to me the one, unchangeable, holy thing of college life—the undying, gentle, kindly spirit of the college which a man must carry as long as he lives.

We got up before five o’clock and traveled far down the Connecticut Valley to plant the family flower. Those of you who have read “The Princess” and have fairly active imaginations may realize how the Hope Farm man felt at this institution. Here men did not even reach a back seat. There was absolutely nothing for me to do except stand about, hat in hand, and pay the bills. At the railroad station three good-looking girls of the Y. W. C. A. met us and told us just where to go. At the college another girl took a suitcase and walked off with it to show my daughter’s room. The express business and the trunks were all handled by a fine-looking woman who gave points on good-nature to any express agent I ever saw. The sale of furniture, the bureau of information, the handling of money—the complete organization was conducted by women and girls. It was all well done, in a thoroughly business-like manner and with rare courtesy. True, the girls who conducted the information bureau stopped now and then to eat popcorn or candy. College boys of equal rank would probably have smoked cigarettes. There was just one other man in the hall, who, like me, had brought his daughter there to plant her in the garden of education. I caught his eye, and knew that our thoughts were twins. I fully expected at any time to see “two stalwart daughters of the plow” approaching to do their duty.

The spirit of this college seemed excellent. It may be a debatable question with some as to whether a school taught, organized and conducted entirely by women is more desirable than one taught by men or where co-education is permitted. There is no debate in our family, since the ruling spirit, whose instincts are usually right, has decided the question. It seemed to me that the training at this school is sure to give these girls responsibility and dignity. My two girls went into a store to buy furniture for the room, and I stayed outside until the time came for my part of the deal—paying for it. Across the campus and up the street came a beautiful woman walking slowly and thoughtfully on. Tall and shapely, but for her years she might have represented Tennyson’s Princess. Every movement of her body gave the impression of power. Her face seemed like a mask of patient suffering with an electric light of knowledge and faith behind it. I remember years ago to have seen another such woman walking across the village green in a country town. A rough man a stranger to me, took off his hat and said:

“Some woman—that!”

Yes, indeed—“some woman!” It is possible that some of these “daughters of the plow” had an eye on the Hope Farm man for watching ladies walking across the campus, but had they arrested me I should have told them the story of Billy Hendricks. Billy was apprentice in a printer’s shop in England. The boss offered a prize and a raise in wages to the apprentice who could set up a certain advertisement in the best form. Billy needed the money. He went to the foreman and asked:

“How can I make this ‘ad’ so it will show true proportions?”

“Look at me!” said the foreman.

There he stood, big and broad-shouldered, a true figure of a man, and as Billy studied him he found the words of that “ad” shaping themselves in his mind. The others were mechanical. Billy had vision and won. Some of us who must admit that we have neither beauty nor shape are glad to have before our children an example of what the coming woman ought to be.

THE SLEEPLESS MAN

Some of our people are telling us about the best or the most satisfying meal they ever ate. This question of food seems to depend on habit, hunger and personal taste. I saw a man once in a lumber camp eat plate after plate of a stew made of meat, potatoes and carrots—cooked in a big iron kettle over an open fire. At home, this man would have growled at turkey or terrapin, but here he was pushing back his plate again and again asking the cook to put more carrots in. “Why,” he said, “I thought carrots were made for horses to eat. I didn’t know human beings ate them!” He never had been a real human before—not until hunger caught him and pulled him right up to that iron pot. At his club in the city he could not have eaten three mouthfuls of that stew.

It is different with sleep. The man with no appetite can get on after a fashion, but if he cannot sleep he is a pitiable object. I met one once—a rich man who had worked too hard—starved himself for sleep in order to get hold of rather more than his share of money and power. He had passed the limit of nerves and was denied the power of sleeping. A few snatches of rest were all he could get, but through the long still nights he lay awake, thinking, thinking with the constant terror that this would end in a disordered mind.

We sat before this man’s fire late at night, and he told me all about it. To you sleep seems like a very common and simple thing. The night finds you tired and you shut your eyes and before you know it you are sailing off into a peaceful, unknown country. Here was a man who could not sleep. He must remain chained to the cares and terrors of his daily life, and the bitterness of it was that all the money he had slaved so hard to obtain could not buy him what comes to you and me with the mere closing of the eyes. It seemed to me the most despairing mockery for this man to repeat Sir Philip Sidney’s “Ode to Sleep”:

“Come sleep; O Sleep! the certain hour of peace,

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,

The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,

The indifferent judge between the high and low;

With shield of proof, shield me from out the prease

Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;

O make in me these civil wars to cease

I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.

Make thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,

A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,

A rosy garland and a weary head.”

“That’s it,” said my friend, “A weary head, a weary head. Mine is weary, but sleep will not come.” He sat looking at the fire for a long time, and then he turned suddenly with a sort of haunted look in his eyes.

“I wish you would tell me about the best sleep you ever had. Men may tell of their best meal, but I want to know about rest—the best sleep.”

It was a strange request, but as I sat there, my mind went back to a hillside near the New England coast where the valley slopes away to a salt marsh with a sluggish stream running through it. A low, weatherbeaten farmhouse crouches at the foot of the wind-swept hill. It is a lonely place. Few come that way in daylight, and at night there are no household lights to be seen.

It had rained through the night, and the morning brought a thick heavy fog. It was too wet to hoe corn, and Uncle Charles said we could all go gunning. He was an old soldier, a sharpshooter, and a famous shot. So we tramped off along the marsh following the creek until it reached the ocean. What a glorious day that was for a boy! I carried an old army musket that kicked my shoulder black and blue. We tramped along the shore and through the wet marsh, hunting for sandpipers and other sea fowl. Now and then a flock of birds would seem to be lost in the fog, and Uncle Charles would whistle them to where we lay in ambush. It all comes back,—clear and distinct,—the cries of the sea fowl and dull roar of the ocean as it pounded upon the beach. Late in the afternoon we tramped home wet and tired, but with a long string of birds. The ocean roared on behind us louder than ever as the wind arose.

It was not good New England thrift to eat those birds—the guests at the Parker House in Boston would pay good money for them. While we had been hunting, Aunt Eleanor and the girls in the lonely farmhouse had been busy with a “New England Dinner.” There was a big plate of salt codfish, first boiled and then fried crisp with little cubes of browned salt pork mixed with it. There were boiled potatoes which split open in a rich dry flour, boiled onions and carrots and great slices of brown bread and butter. Then the odor from the oven betrayed the crowning act of all—a monstrous pan-dowdy, or apple grunt! Ever eat a genuine pan-dowdy in a New England kitchen as a wet dreary night is coming on after a tiresome day? No? I am both sorry and glad for you. You have missed one of the greatest joys of life, but you have much to look forward to. When Uncle Charles began to cut that pan-dowdy, we boys realized that we could not do it full justice, so we went out and ran around the house half a dozen times to make more room for the top of the feast.

After supper the dishes were washed, the house cleaned up, and we washed out our guns. The old musket had kicked my shoulder so that I could hardly raise the arm, but no human being could have made me admit it. We got Uncle Charles to tell us about the time he shot at the officer at Port Hudson during the war, and about the humpbacked man who carried the powder from Plymouth to Boston during the Revolution. Then through the gloom and fog came two young men to call on the girls. In those days it seemed to me very poor taste for one to listen to the conversation of girls rather than war stories. True, the war stories were time-worn, but the girl conversation was older yet. Soon the little melodeon was talking up and a quartette was singing the old songs of half a century ago. It may have been the day’s tramping, the old musket, the last plate of pan-dowdy or the tap of the rain on the windows, but sitting there by the warm kitchen stove, I felt a delicious drowsiness stealing over me.

Bed is the place for sleep, and we boys climbed the stairs past the great center chimney, and quickly tumbled into bed. In the room below that quartette had started an old favorite:

“Along the aisles of the dim old forest

I strayed in the dewy dawn

And heard far away in their silent branches

The echoes of the morn.

“They stirred my heart with their low, sweet voices,

Like chimes from a holier land,

As though far away in those haunted arches

Were happy—an angel band.”

There was one great booming bass voice which had unconsciously fallen into the key of the dull roar which the distant ocean was making. The rain was gently tapping on the roof, and all the joys and pleasant memories of youth were whispering happy things in our ears as we sailed off on the most beautiful voyage to dreamland.

I told this as best I could before the fire while my weary friend listened, leaning back in his easy-chair with his hand shading his face. And when I stopped sleep had come to him at last—sweet and blessed sleep. There are very few of us who would stand for a photograph taken while we were asleep, but this man’s face was free from care. An orator might not think it a high tribute to his powers that he sent his audience to sleep, but I am not an orator, and I would like to be able to give my friends what they consider the blessed things of life! And Peace, blissful Peace, had put her healing hand upon my poor friend’s head.

LINCOLN’S BIRTHDAY

It brought the worst storm we have had this Winter. This season will pass on into history as about the roughest we have had in 20 years. There came a whirl of snow which filled the air and sifted in through every crack and hole. We let the storm alone, and got away from it. Merrill sorted out seed corn at the barn. Philip had some inside painting to do, the women folks kept at their household work, and the children got out into the storm. They came in now and then to stand by the fire—with faces the color of their hair. As for me, I cannot say that I hurt myself with hard labor. We piled the logs in the open fireplace and started a roaring fire. With a pile of books on one side and a pen and paper at the other, my big chair gave a very good foundation for a Lincoln celebration. I presume we all have our personal habits of reading. Some people read only one kind of books, and stick to the one in hand until it is finished. My plan is different. Right now I am reading Dante, “Rural Credits,” “Manufacture of Chemical Manure,” Whittier’s Poems and Lowell’s essay on Abraham Lincoln. A poor jumble of stuff for a human head you will say, but I turn from one to another, so that instead of a mixed-up jumble I try to have these different thoughts in layers through the mind. In this way one may get a blend which is better than a hash. It may seem absurd to think of putting poetry into rural credits or fertilizers, but unless you can do something of the sort you can never get very far with them.

That was the great secret of Lincoln’s power. As judged by knowledge or training or what we call “education,” there were many abler men in the country at his time, but Lincoln knew how to appeal to the imagination of the plain, common people. Read his speeches and papers and see how he framed a fact with a mental picture which the common people could understand. There were some wonderful pictures at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Some were called masterpieces of fabulous value. People stood before them and went on with something of awe in their heart—not quite grasping the artist’s meaning. One less pretentious picture was named “The Breaking of Home Ties,” and day by day a great throng stood before it, silent and wet-eyed. It was a very simple home scene, picturing a boy leaving his country home. Men studied it, walked away and then turned and slowly came back that they might see it once more. As long as they live people will remember that picture, because the poetry of it appealed to them as the higher art could not do. I think Lincoln held the imagination of the plain people much as that picture did. He was one who had suffered and had been brought up with plain and simple family habits which were fixed.

The children have come running in to warm their hands. They are lined up in front of the big fire, rosy-faced and covered with snow. They stand looking at me as I write. Dinner is nearly ready, and there is no question about their readiness for it. Here comes Mother to look out at the storm, and she forgets to remember that this group of snowbirds by my fire have forgotten to stamp the snow off their feet. There will be a puddle of water when they move off—but it will soon dry up. As I watch them all it seems a good time to pick up Lowell’s essay on Lincoln:

“He is so eminently our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to their own thinking aloud.... He has always addressed the intelligence of men. Never their prejudices, their passion or their ignorance.”

Now I think that intelligence and power to speak as people think can only come out of good family relations. Do I mean to say that the family group is superior to the college, the school or the other great institutions for training human thought? I do, wherever the family group is bound together as it should be by love, good will, ambition and something of sacrifice!

This nation and every other is ruled by the family spirit. All public government is based on self-government, and the family is the training school for all. What could the college or the school do with a great crowd or mob of students who have never known the restraints of good family life? Ask any teacher to tell you the difference between children reared in a clean, careful family and those reared where the family relations are much like a cross-cut saw. Line up the adults you know, make a fair estimate of their character and see whether you can select those who in their childhood had a fair chance in family life. There are, of course, exceptions to all rules, but generally the boy or girl will carry through life the habits and the human policies which are given him in the family. As a rule these will be carried into the new family which the boy or girl may start, and thus be handed on like those qualities which are transmitted through blood lines. No use talking—the family unit is the most important element in human society. A nation’s fame rests upon the nation’s family.

I think a man may fairly be judged by the way he treats his parents, his children and his wife. I do not care how he gets out and shows himself off as a great man and a good citizen. He might get an overwhelming vote for Congress or Governor, but God will judge him more by the votes of father, mother, son, daughter, wife! To me there can be nothing more beautiful than the best relation between a man of middle years and his aged parents. Perhaps the latter are feeble and not well-to-do. When they can sit in their son’s home happy and comfortable, knowing that the entire family has been taught to put them first of all in family regard, you have struck about the finest test of a man’s character that good citizenship can offer. When the children chase their father about and, out of their own thought, run to anticipate his wants, you can make up your mind that in that family are being trained men and women who can go out and absorb education and financial power which will be used for the true benefit of humanity. Most of us can never hope to be great men or to handle large public affairs, but we can make our family a training school for good citizenship. I have no thought that in this group of bright-eyed youngsters lined up by my fire we are to have any great statesmen or authors or merchant princes or big folk generally. On the whole I hope not, as it would seem to me that the great man has a rather lonely life. I do expect, however, that these children will always remember Hope Farm, and that in future years when the world may turn a very cold side to them they will remember this stormy day and will feel the warmth of this kindly fire.

I have wandered away from what I wanted to say about Lincoln and his power over the people. It was this family feeling which made him strong, and if you want your boy or girl to be really worth while you must give them and their mother the best family surroundings you can possibly secure. The man who taps the spring or the well and sends the water running through his house does far more for his country than he who runs for Congress and taps the public pocket-book.

But here comes Mother again, with “Come now, dinner’s ready. Don’t let it get cold!” Get cold? The children are already at the table! I wish you could come right along with me. I would put two sausage cakes on your plate and fill it up with mealy potatoes and yellow turnips. Then you would have rice in another dish. There is a dish of thick, brown gravy and nothing would suit me better than to have you call for an egg—fried or boiled. The Reds are laying well now. There are two kinds of bread and plenty of butter, and we will take a family vote as to whether we shall take peaches, strawberries, Kieffer pears, cherries or raspberries off the pantry shelves. I vote for Crosby peaches, but you will have a free choice and all you can eat. Surely the table makes a very strong family tie. Come on!

UNCLE ED’S PHILOSOPHY

Uncle Ed had his home in Florida, but spent the Summer working at Hope Farm. At the time I speak of we were hoeing corn at the top of our hill. We had just planted the apple orchard, and we both realized the long and weary years of toilsome waiting before there could be any fruit. It was a hot day, and at the end of the row we stopped to rest under the big cherry tree where the stone wall is broad and thick. It was a clear day, and far off across the rolling country to the East we could see the sparkle of the sun on some gilded-top building in New York. It gave one a curious feeling to stand in that shady retreat on $50 land in a lonely neighborhood, practically untouched by modern development, and glance across to the millions and the might crowded at the mouth of the Hudson. Most of us feel a sort of pride on viewing the evidence of wealth and power, even though we have no share in it, or even when we know it means blood money taken from our own lives. I felt something of this as I pointed it out to Uncle Ed, and told him how probably the overflow of that great city would some day make an acre of our orchard worth more than a farm in Florida.

This did not seem to impress him greatly. He ran his eye over the glowing prospect and then slowly filled his pipe for a smoke. I am no friend of tobacco, but I confess that sometimes I enjoy seeing a man like Uncle Ed slowly fill his pipe. I feel that some sort of homely philosophy is sure to be smoked out.

“The trouble with you folks up in this country,” said Uncle Ed, “is that you work too hard. You get so that there is nothing in you but work and save. And for what? How many of you ever get the benefit of your own work? Down where I live we don’t exist for the mere sake of working. I have known the time when I got up determined to do a good day’s work cultivating. I got the horse all harnessed, only to find that my neighbor on the south had borrowed the cultivator, and I couldn’t do that. Then I thought I’d hoe, but the boys lost the hoe in the brush and couldn’t find it. Then there was the woodpile to be cut up, but my neighbor on the north had borrowed the ax.

“Now up in this country if fate challenged a man like that he would start picking up stones and making a stone wall. Here is one now that we are resting against. I’ll bet some old owner of this farm piled up this heap of stones because he was determined that the boys never should play or go fishing. It is now the most useless thing you have on your farm. If, instead of picking up stones and building this useless wall, that old-timer had quit when fate gave him the sign, taken a day off and let the boys go fishing or play ball, this farm would be worth far more than it is today. Down in my country when the cultivator and the hoe and the ax all get away from us we accept it as a voice from some higher authority, and we drop everything and go fishing. After that I notice things straighten out and work goes right. You fellows work too hard, and don’t know it. But this won’t buy the woman a dress—we must hoe this corn out.”

The rows ran to the south, and as we hoed on I could see, far away, that bright sparkle on the gilding of the big city. And I answered with the old familiar argument:

“You have just told in a few words why there are more savings of the poor and middle-class people in that big city yonder than there are in the entire State of Florida.” That was 16 years ago and the statement was probably true at the time. Florida has gained since then.

“Up in this country we believe that the Lord gives every man of decent mind and reasonable body a chance to provide for himself and family before he is 45. If he doesn’t do it by that time, he isn’t likely to do it at all. We think that there are three ways of getting money. You can earn it through labor, steal it, or have it given to you. For most of us there is only one way—that is to dig it out by the hardest work, and then practice self-denial in order to hold it. Up in this country the men who quit and go fishing when conditions turn against them, spend their declining years without any bait. That money off there where you see that sparkle was produced by men who did not go fishing when conditions turned against them.”

As I look back upon it now that seems pretty cheap talk, but it was the way we looked at it in those days.

“I know,” said Uncle Ed, “but how much better off are they when you sum it all up? I claim that the man who goes fishing gets something that the man who built that stone wall never knew. Who piled up all that money in the big city? Some of mine is there. The interest I have paid on my mortgage has come into one of these big buildings for investment. The profit on many a box of oranges I shipped before the freeze never got away from New York. It stuck there and you can’t get it out. And that’s just what I mean. You fellows work your fingers stiff and make a little money, and then you put it into some bank or big company or into stocks or bonds. In the end it all gets away from you and runs down hill to that big city. The hired man took $25 to the county fair. Ten dollars of it went for beer and rum. The local saloonkeeper passed the $10 on to the wholesaler, he to the brewer and he sent part of it to Germany and the rest to Wall Street. The other $15 mostly went in chance games or petty gambling. He lost $5 betting that he could find the little red ball under the hat. The man who won his $5 lost it that night playing poker. The gambler who won it lost it a few nights later in a gambling house. The gambling house man bought bogus oil and mining stocks and lost it that way. The oil stock man had sense enough to salt it down in respectable securities, and there it is now under that bright sparkle in the big city. You and the rest of you do pretty much the same. This man who built your stone wall did it. The money he made was not invested here. If it had been you never could have bought this farm. It is off there under that bright sparkle—and the boys and girls run after it. You fellows work too hard!”

I undertook to come back with that text about the man who provideth not for his family—but I never was good at remembering texts. That is probably because I do not study them as I ought to. But at any rate I undertook to argue that it is a man’s first duty to provide for his family and also for his own “rainy day.” “The night cometh, when no man can work.”

“Down where I live,” said Uncle Ed, “we don’t have such rainy days as you do up here. Life is simple and straight and old people are cared for. We want them to live with us—we are not waiting for them to pass off and leave their money. Off in that big city where your money is turning over and over, thousands of human lives get under it and are crushed out of all shape. Down there under that sparkle only the poor know what neighbors are. Many a man lives his life in some tenement or apartment house never knowing or caring what goes on in the room on the other side of the wall. There may be joy or sorrow, death or life, virtue or crime. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, because this never-ending grind of work has changed sympathy into selfishness. And in the end that is what all those dollars which you folks dump into the big city come to. If the habit is so strong that you’ve got to work and try to catch up with the man who has a little more than you have, why not invest your money at home and in the farm? Those fellows off under that sparkle will come chasing after your money if you invest it here, and you would be boss instead of servant! Am I right?”

That was 16 years ago, and many things have happened since then. Uncle Ed has passed away—after many troubles and misfortunes. The world has been shaken up by the war and by great discoveries, so that we hardly know it. Yet there is a brighter sparkle than ever on the gilded roofs of the big city—greater wealth and more blinding poverty crouching beneath it. The hill where we hoed corn is now covered with big apple trees. Where then Bob and Jerry toiled slowly along with half a ton of fruit the truck now flashes down the hard, smooth road with two tons. But sitting on the old stone wall of a Sunday afternoon in late August I look across the valley and wonder how much there really is in Uncle Ed’s philosophy after all. What do you think?

A GOD-FORSAKEN PLACE

James and William Hardy were twins—born and bred on a New Hampshire farm. The family dated far back to pioneer times, when John Hardy and Henry Graham, with their young wives, went into the wilderness as the advance guard of civilization. It came to be a common understanding that a Hardy should always marry a Graham, and through four generations at least this family law had been observed until there had been developed one of those fine, purebred New England families which represent just about the highest type of the American. As the father of these twins married a Graham girl you had a right to expect them to be as much alike as two peas in the family pod—both in appearance and in character. Here you surely might expect one of those cases where the twins are always being mixed up, when not even their mother could be sure which was Jim and which was Bill. In truth, however, the boys were distinctly different from the day they were born—different in size, in appearance and in character.

These twins innocently brought to the surface a sad spot of family history which both the Grahams and the Hardys hoped had been buried too far down ever to show itself. Far back in the French and Indian war a band of raiders from Canada burst out of the forest and carried off a dozen prisoners. Among them was the pride of the Graham family—a beautiful girl of 16. The settlers, hiding in their blockhouse, could only look on and see their relatives start on the long march to Canada. The next year some of these prisoners were ransomed, and came back to say that the girl had married a young Frenchman. She was happy, and sent word to her parents that she preferred to stay with her husband. Years went by, until one night there came to Henry Graham’s house a Canadian ranger and a young girl. It was their granddaughter and her father. The mother had died and had begged her husband to take her daughter back to the old folks as her offering of love. The father delivered his message, bade his daughter farewell and silently vanished into the forest. They never saw him again, but they realized that he had given full measure of devotion to his dead wife. The girl grew up to be a beautiful creature much like her mother, only darker, and at times there was a bright glitter in her eyes. She married a Hardy and settled down as a farmer’s wife. She was dutiful and kind, but sometimes her husband would see her standing at the door—looking off into the Northern forests with a look which made him shake his head. Years went by, and this spot on the family history had been forgotten until these twins uncovered it! Their mother knew in her heart that the spirit of the restless Frenchman was watching her from the cradle through the black shiny eyes of her strange baby. James, the light-haired, steady, purebred infant, slept calmly or acted just as a good Hardy should, but the wild spirit of the forest had jumped three generations right into the cradle, where this black-haired little changeling stared at her!

There never were two children more unlike than these twins. Jim was solid, sound, a little slow, but absolutely trustworthy—“a born Hardy” as they said. Bill was bright, quick, restless, full of plans and visions. He did not like to work, and had no respect for the family skeleton. This was a mortgage, which for many years had sunk its claws into the rocky little farm. The truth was that this farm never should have been cleared and settled. It was rocky and sandy; farther out of date than the old mill rotting unused by the old mill pond. The mortgage hung like a wolf at the back door, demanding its due, which came out of the little farm like blood money. Jim Hardy, like his father and grandfather, grew up to regard that mortgage as a fixed and sacred institution. It was a family heirloom or tradition—something like the old musket which an older Hardy carried at Bunker Hill, or like grandmother’s old spinning-wheel. As for the poor, rocky farm, Jim and his father would stay and grind themselves away in a hopeless struggle just because the Hardys who went before them had done so. It was different with Bill. He had no use for the mortgage or for the rocky pastures, for the dash of French blood had put rubber, or yeast, into the covering of the stern New England thought. His father never could understand him and one day, when Bill was 17, the blood of the “changeling” burst into open mutiny. The father knew of only one way to act. He ordered the boy around behind the barn and took the horsewhip to him. As a Hardy, Bill was expected to stand and take his punishment without a murmur. As the descendant of a wild forest ranger he could only resent the blows. What he did was to catch his father’s arms and hold them like a vice. Neither spoke a word. They just looked at each other. The older man struggled, but he was powerless—he knew that his son was the master. He dropped the whip from his hand and bowed his head. The boy released him, broke the whip in two, and threw it away. The father walked to the house, a dazed and broken man. Bill watched him and then walked out to the back lot where Jim, the steady and faithful, was building a fence.

“Good-bye, Jim,” he said. “I’m off. It had to come. I’m different, and yet the same, as you will see. You stay here and look after father and mother. I will help some day.” It was the Hardy in both the boys which made it impossible for them to come any closer in feeling. Bill walked on over the pasture hill; at the top he paused to wave his hand. Then he was gone.

Bill was clean and sound at heart, and the French blood had given him a quick active brain. Instead of striking for the wilderness he headed for New York and he prospered. The old French ancestor drove him on with tireless energy, and the long line of clean farm breeding kept him true to his purpose to go back some day and show the old folks that he was still a Hardy. Years passed, until one day there came to Bill an uncontrollable longing to go home. Just a few brief, unresponsive letters had passed between him and Jim, but the time came when Bill longed with a great longing to see the old farm once more. And so, the next day, a well-dressed, prosperous man walked into the old yard and looked about him. There was Jim, the same old Jim, walking in from the barn with the night’s milk. Father was cutting wood at the wood pile and mother stood at the kitchen door—just the same home picture which Bill knew so well. Bill did great things during his short stay. He paid that mortgage, ordered a new barn built and left capital for Jim to improve the farm. He did everything that a Hardy ought to do—and more—and yet he could not satisfy himself. It all seemed so small and narrow. He had hoped to find great music in the wind among the pines, but it filled him with a great loneliness, which he could not overcome. He had hoped to find peace and rest, but these were for the untried farm boy—not for the restless and worried business man. It broke out of him at night on the second day, when he and Jim were on the pasture hill looking for the sheep. The loneliness of the early Fall day fairly entered his heart.

“Jim,” he said, “old fellow, I don’t see how you live in such a God-forsaken place!”

“Why, Bill,” said Jim, “New York must be like Paradise to beat the old homestead.”

“Better a week on Broadway than a lifetime on these lonely hills.”

“I’d like to try it and see!” said Jim.

So Jim Hardy, the plain farmer, went to New York to visit Brother Bill. He had everything he could call for. Bill lived in a beautiful apartment, and he gave Jim a white card to see and do what he wanted. Bill was too busy to go around much, but Jim made his way. For a couple of days it was fine—then somehow Jim, just like Bill at the old farm, began to grow lonesome and oppressed. Right through the wall of Bill’s apartment house was a family with one child. The janitor told him the child was sick, so Jim knocked at the door to sympathize with the neighbors. They froze him with a few words and got rid of him. He saw a man on the street and stopped to converse with him. “Get out!” said the stranger. “You can’t bunco me.” Day after day Jim Hardy, the farmer, saw the fierce, selfish struggle for life in the big city. The great buildings, the theaters, Broadway at night—they were all splendid, but behind and under them lay the meanness, the selfish spirit, the lack of neighborly feeling, which galled the farmer to the heart. On the third night Bill took his brother to a great reception. Just as they walked into the brilliant room Jim glanced from the window and saw a policeman throw a weak and sickly man out of a public room where he was trying to get warm.

“What did I tell you, Jim?” said Bill. “Isn’t this worth a year on your old hills?” And Jim could only think of one thing to say:

“Bill, old fellow, I don’t see how you can live in such a God-forsaken place!”

What do you make of it? One brother thinks God has forsaken the country, while the other says He has forsaken the city! To me they prove that God is everywhere. Some may not find Him, since they look for Him only in things which are agreeable to them, and those are rarely the places in which to look. I think, too, that, like Jim and Bill, all children come into the world with natural tendencies and inclinations which, if worthy, should be encouraged rather than repressed. Both Jim and Bill are needed in American life.

LOUISE

“How is Louise now?”

“She seems a little better!”

That message came over the ’phone on Friday evening, just as the members of the Hope Farm family were separating for the night. Early in the year we had a letter from a woman in the West who came back to the paper after 15 years’ absence. As a girl she lived in New York State. Father took the paper and she remembered the talks about the Bud, Scion and Graft. “What has become of those children?” she asked. “Since I left home I have lost track of them. Now that I have a home and children of my own I would like to know what they came to.”

These were the names given to the four children of our first brood. We had one little girl of our own whom I called the Bud. Her mother did not want her brought up alone, so we took in a small boy—a little fellow of an uncertain age. We did not adopt him, but he was treated just like our own child, and “grew up” in our home. I called him the Seedling! A noted botanist argued with me to prove that these names should have been transposed—but I let them go, for we tried to graft good things upon the Seedling. Then came two other little ones—Mother’s niece and nephew, needing home and protection. We took them in, and I called them Graft and Scion. These names may not have betrayed any great knowledge of botany, but they seemed to fit the children, although as the little ones grew up we were glad to let those names drop.

This quartette of little ones grew and thrived. It was at times rather hard sledding for the Hope Farmers in those early years, but youth greases the runners with hope, and kids never know the true taste of tough mutton. They grew on through sickness, the wilfulness of childhood, powers of heredity and all the things which confront common children. For they always seemed to me just kids of very common clay, though Mother would at times come back from places where other children “behaved” and say: “You must understand that we have some very superior youngsters!” Of course I realized that the “Bud” would most likely be pretty much what her parents were, and it was a long-time hope that she would throw out our many undesirable qualities and concentrate upon the few good ones. Now comes our friend asking what has become of them—and I will try to answer for all! The Bud is a senior at one of the great Women’s Colleges; the Graft is with an engineering party running a new railroad through the Arizona wilderness; the Seedling is a captain in the Salvation Army—the Scion! ah! That is why I am writing this!

Louise grew up a small, rather delicate young woman, ambitious, clear-brained and with a quick, active mind. There came a time when greater family responsibilities came upon us all. Her father died, and her mother became hopelessly ill, and four younger brothers and sisters came to us to form what we call our second brood. Even as a young girl Louise began to realize the stern responsibilities of life for those little ones. When she finished high school her ambition to be of service to this family group became fixed. She wanted to become self-supporting and to have a hand in helping with these younger children. Teaching is the great resource of educated women who are naturally fitted for the work, and Louise saw in the schoolroom her best chance for useful service. I think this was one of the rare cases where women are willing to work and prepare themselves for true unselfish service. Louise was timid and naturally nervous—not strong or with great dominating power. I do not think any of us understood how much it really meant to her to face direct responsibility and force her way through.

Mother and I have always felt that if any of our children show real, self-sacrificing desire for an education we will practise any form of needed self-denial that the child may be college-trained. For an education worked out in that way will become a glory and an honor to all who have to do with it. So we felt it no burden, but rather a privilege, to send Louise to the Normal School. How well and faithfully she worked no one can ever realize. I often think that most reputations for bravery in this world are not fairly earned. Some strong, well-bred, naturally optimistic character, with health and heritage from a long line of dominating ancestors pushes and smashes his way through obstacles and acquires a great reputation for courage. I think such are far less deserving than women like Louise, small and delicate and nervous, who conquer natural timidity and force themselves to endure the battle. It is even harder to win confidence in yourself—to conquer the inside forces—than to fight the outside ones.

Louise did this. She did it well, without boasting or great complaint and without flinching. At times she was depressed, for the task seemed too much for her, but she rose above it and won. She won honors at her school, and long before she expected it, on her own little, honest record in the schoolroom, she was employed to teach at a good salary. It was to be only four miles from home—amid the best surroundings—and there was no happier woman on earth than was Louise when she wrote us the first news about it. It came just before Christmas. There are many women who could not see any cause for Christmas joy in the thought of long years of monotonous and wearying service, but Louise saw in this something of the joy of achievement, for through honest, trained labor, the outcome of her own patience and determination, she was to become self-supporting and a genuine help to the children. I presume no one but a conscientious and ambitious woman can realize what that means. I know women who would look upon such power of self-support simply as selfish freedom. Louise saw in it the power of greater service. We have tried our best to train our children for that view of a life work.

You may therefore imagine that the holidays at Hope Farm seemed like holy days indeed. They were all there except the Seedling and the Graft, and they sent messages which left no regret, no sadness to creep in out of the past. Somehow I hope all you older people may know before you pass on something of what Mother and I did about our two broods as the old year passed on.

Yet there it comes again—the old question. I came home a little later than usual on Friday night. The night was wet and foggy, and Mother met me at the train. One of the little boys who usually comes for me had gone to meet Louise. Her first week of school was over, and she was coming home—a teacher! As we drove into the yard the family ran out to meet us—“Something has happened—they want you on the ’phone at once!” Ah! but these country tragedies may flash upon us without warning. Halfway home Louise had been stricken desperately ill, and she now lay at the parsonage—three miles away—helpless. Just as quickly as fingers could put the harness on our fastest horse, Mother and “Cherry-top” were driving off into the fog and rain. We waited until they reached the parsonage and then we kept the ’phone busy. The poor girl, riding home after her first fine week in the schoolroom, had been stricken with an internal hemorrhage—and it was doubtful if she could rally! At nine o’clock came the message: “She seems to be better.” The little boys were coming home—and they soon appeared, white and troubled. Mother was to stay all night and she sent a hopeful message about coming in the morning with Louise. We went to bed to get strength and nerve for any emergency. In the early morning Mother walked into my room and turned up the light. We looked at each other for a moment. Then there were six words:

“How is Louise?”

“She is gone!”

We said nothing more, but we were both thinking the same thing!

“The first break in our big family has come. How is Louise now?”

There was no way of saving her. Human skill and human love had failed. She was dead!

It was a beautiful service. There were only our own family and perhaps a dozen friends. We all wanted it so. We do not like the wild grief and public curiosity so often displayed at large funerals. There was just a great bank of flowers, a white casket and a simple service over this brave and loyal girl. I do not say “poor” girl, nor do I dwell upon the sadness of it. I thought that all out as Mother and I sat at the head of the casket. She died gloriously—like a soldier at his duty. She died when life was young. She had just won her little battle in the great world of affairs. She died in the joy of victory and in the faith that all things are possible. The wine of life was full. She never knew the sting of defeat, the shame and meanness of false friendships and ambitions, which has come to those of us who linger on the way. And so at the end of it all I ask the old question once more:

“How is Louise now?”

“She is better! Thank God! She is better!”

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY

It is well enough to keep the Christmas tree standing until Spring cleaning at least. There may be those who open the closet door once a year and let the Christmas spirit out—somewhat like the family skeleton, to food and water—and then lock it up again. That does not suit me, for I would like to keep the door open so that Christmas may be with us every day in the year. The celebration just closed is about the best our family and community ever had, and it will do us permanent good.

On Wednesday evening the children had their celebration at the church. It was a cold clear night, with good sleighing, so we hitched the two big grays to the bob sled and filled the box with straw, and the children cuddled down into this nest and pulled blankets over them. The Hope Farm man drove, with Mother on the seat beside him to direct the job and tell him when and where to turn out. Tom and Broker seemed to feel that they were, in their way, playing the part of reindeer, for they trotted off in great shape—a little clumsy on their feet, perhaps, but with strength enough to pull down a house. Broker is inclined to be lazy, and Tom did most of the pulling unless we stirred his partner up with the stick. Through the clear starlight we went crunching and jingling on over the hills and through the narrow level valleys, for our country has a badly wrinkled face.

Part of the way lies through the woods, and then a stretch along the banks of a little river. There was just enough wind to make a little humming in the trees. Now and then a rabbit jumped out of the shadow and went hopping off across the snow. There was no danger—it was Christmas, and we do not carry firearms. I think I can tell you much about a person’s character and circumstances if you will tell me what comes into mind on a lonely road, when the wind is playing its wild tunes among the trees.

“Over the chimney the night wind sang,

Chanting a melody no one knew.”

To some this melody brings sad memories or fear of trouble, but the happy group in our big sled heard nothing of these in the sound. As Tom and Broker pulled their load on beneath the trees I think each one of us heard in the wind’s singing something of the song which the angels sang when the shepherds listened long years ago. This may be but a fancy of mine, yet I think our little group came nearer to understanding what Christmas means—on that lonely road—than we had before.

You know how pleasant it is to come trotting along a country road on a cold starry night and see the lights of the church burst into view far ahead. Our church is an old stone structure, full of years and honorable history. It was here, at least part of it, during the Revolution, and at one time Hessian prisoners were confined in it. There were no prisoners except those of hope inside the church that night. The boys and I made Tom and Broker comfortable and then we went inside to find a big Christmas tree and a crowd of happy children. Surely Christmas is children’s day, and they owned the church that night. Mother marshaled her big primary class for one chorus, and it seemed as if the entire end of the church was made of children. A couple of our Cherry-tops lent a little color to it. The Hope Farm man was escorted up to a front seat, where he was expected to look the part of prominent citizen. They ran him into the programme too for a Christmas story, so he got up and told the company about “Pete Shivershee’s Miracle”—a little Christmas memory of life in a lumber camp many years ago. Finally the simple presents were distributed, the sleepy little ones aroused, good wishes spoken and we all piled in once more for the home trip. Broker takes life as it comes, but Tom was chilly and disposed to be a trifle gay over the prospect of barn and cornstalks once more. He proceeded to pull the entire load, Broker trotting on with dangling traces! It was a sleepy and happy crowd that finally turned off the road into Hope Farm. “We had a big time!”

In two of the villages near us the people organized community Christmas trees. These trees were placed in the public square or some prominent spot, the electric wires were connected, and colored bulbs hung all over to take the place of candles. These were lighted on Christmas Eve and kept going all through the holiday week. It was a great success, for it brought people together, made a better community spirit, and helped us all. In addition to this community tree arrangements were made to have singers go about the town singing the old Christmas carols. This revival of the old English custom was a beautiful thing and a great success.

Shortly after three on Christmas morning our folks were awakened by music. I think the Cherry-tops thought it was Santa Claus, as it probably was. Out in front of our house a motor car carrying six young men had turned in from the road. There in the frosty morning they were singing:

“O come, all ye faithful,

Joyful and triumphant,

O come ye! O come ye

To Bethlehem.

Come and behold Him

Born the King of angels,

O come let us adore Him,

O come let us adore Him,

O come let us adore Him,

Christ the Lord.”

They were beautiful singers and our folks will never forget that Christmas morning.

“Silent night! Holy night,

All is calm. All is light.

’Round young Virgin mother and child

Holy infant so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace.”

Finally the car started off, moving slowly down the road with the music creeping back to us through the clear air:

“Hark, the Herald angels sing.”

Our folks heard them at the next neighbor’s, far down the road. I have no doubt many a weary and troubled soul waking in the night at the sound went back to happier dreams of a better tomorrow. It was a beautiful thing to do, and never before did Christmas morning come to us so happily as this year.

I thought of these things all day, and the conviction has grown upon me that what we people who live in the country need more than anything else is something of this spirit which binds people together and holds them. We need it in our work, our play and in our battles. It is another name for patriotism, which means the unselfish love of country. The Duke of Wellington said the battle of Waterloo was won on the playgrounds of England, where boys were trained in manly sports. He told only half of it, for the spirit which turned that play into war came from the singers who in English villages sang Christmas carols or English folk songs. In like manner the wonderful national spirit which the German nation has shown has been developed largely through the singing societies which have expressed German feeling in song. In 1792 a band of Frenchmen marched from the south of France to Paris dragging cannon through a cloud of dust and singing the Marseillaise hymn, and even to this day the loyal spirit of France traces down from those dusty singers. Do I mean to say that farmers can come together and sing their troubles away? No, for some of the troubles have grown so strong and penetrated so deep that they must be pulled out by the roots. What I do say is that before we can hope to remove these troubles and make our conditions what they should be we must feel toward our friends and neighbors the sentiments which are expressed in these beautiful old songs. The time has gone by when we can hope to obtain what we should have from society as individuals playing a cold, selfish game of personal interest. We have tried that for many years and steadily lost out on it. The only hope for us now is in a true community spirit of loyalty and sacrifice, instead of the effort to get all we can for ourselves. That is why I say that there should be something of Christmas in every day of the year, and why I give these holiday memories.