up on a farm till I was busted." The boy
brought in the smoke consumer, and after the old man had puffed a few
times, and found it did not make him sick, he continued: "In the first
place, you are getting too old to learn farming. When city people have
a call to farm it, they buy a farm, put up a windmill, get plumbers
out from town, put in a bathtub with hot and cold water, and buy some
carriages with high backs, and go in for enjoyment, regardless of the
price of country produce. They put in hammocks and lawn tennis, and
the young people wear knickerbockers and white canvas dresses, and roll
their pants up, and all that. There is no money in farming that way.
Now, you have got your city habits formed; you don't get up in the
morning till after 7, and you have to take a bath, and have fresh
underclothes frequently. You would want to lay in the shade too much and
ride on the hay. Did it ever occur to you that before you could ride on
the hay it has to be cut, and cured, and cocked up, and raked around?
It takes a whole lot of backaches to get a load of hay ready for you to
ride on. Now, you are going on 20 years old. If you had been born on a
farm, you would be just about ready to quit it and come to town to learn
something else. You would have a stomach full of farming, for you would
have worked about twelve years, day and night; your hands would be
muscular, and you would have callouses inside of them. You go out on a
farm now, at your age, and when you get the first blister on your hands
you want to send for a doctor, and you throw up the job and come back on
my hands. Suppose you started out next Monday morning to learn to be a
farmer. Let me make out a programme for you. You would go to bed Sunday
night at 9 o'clock, and lay awake thinking of the glory of a farmer's
life, and at 3 a. m. you would go to sleep, and at 4 you would hear the
door to the attic open, and a voice that would sound like an auctioneer
would yell to you to come down and get to work. You couldn't argue the
case with the farmer, as you do with me when I try to get you up early
to go fishing; and you would get up and put on a pair of cowhide shoes,
brown overalls, a hickory shirt with bed-ticking suspenders, and you
would go out into a barnyard that smelled like fury, and milk nine or
fifteen cows on an empty stomach; and while another hired man was taking
the milk to a creamery, you would see that it was not daylight yet, but
you would go in the