to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the
year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and
half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the
City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again
from the country replenished and refreshed.

The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have
returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the
last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the
turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.

Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have
not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the
long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the
heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the
breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men
look up more seldom.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.

2

BLUFF AND SHORE

There is no playground like a sandy shore--and this was sheltered from
the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and
made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as
broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore
with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of
the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is
formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer
and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys
of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings
flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism
forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people
turn to it often from the classes.

The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented
cottages. It was while in the water that I