as necessary on the
farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.

But to come back to the fox.

Now, I have lived long enough, and I have had that fox steal roosters
enough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. I
fully sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for the
fox?

At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great. More than once
(three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I
have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, many
more. Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster is
almost a poem. So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost a poem,
standing on the bare knoll here near the house, his form half-shrouded
in the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned
toward the yard where the hens were waking up.

Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, something
furtive, crafty, cunning--the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at
sight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that whole
tame day.

I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For that is too gross, too
cheap a price to pay for a glimpse of wild life that set the dead
nerves of the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather I would
ask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have a
woodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?

Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods,
better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given
all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material,
mere beans--only more of them--until the farm is run on shares with all
the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the
sunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and rich
crop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independence
and liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks.

But, if farm life tends constantly to become earthy, so does business
life, and professional life--beans, all of it.

The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the merchants, the preachers,
doctors, lawyers, educated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere
beans? A great fortune, a great congregation, a great practice, a
great farm crop, are one and all mere beans? Efficiency is not a whole
education, nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the whole man.

And I sa