nnot see
the way! How our hearts beat with sympathy when we find a man who has
turned his back upon it all and who says "I will live it no longer." How
we flounder in possessions as in a dark and suffocating bog, wasting
our energies not upon life but upon _things_. Instead of employing our
houses, our cities, our gold, our clothing, we let these inanimate
things possess and employ us--to what utter weariness. "Blessed be
nothing," sighs a dear old lady of my knowledge.

Of all ways of escape I know, the best, though it is far from
perfection, is the farm. There a man may yield himself most nearly to
the quiet and orderly processes of nature. He may attain most nearly to
that equilibrium between the material and spiritual, with time for the
exactions of the first, and leisure for the growth of the second, which
is the ideal of life.

In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered the
disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one
another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them
intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families
were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life:
neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the
rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly
changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of
mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane
at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country trolleys, more
schools and churches, and cheaper railroad rates, have all helped to
bring the farmer's life well within the stimulating currents of world
thought without robbing it of its ancient advantages. And those
advantages are incalculable: Time first for thought and reflection
(narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom of
action--which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who has
his feet firmly planted upon his own land.

A city hammers and polishes its denizens into a defined model: it
worships standardisation; but the country encourages differentiation, it
loves new types. Thus it is that so many great and original men have
lived their youth upon the land. It would be impossible to imagine
Abraham Lincoln brought up in a street of tenements. Family life on the
farm is highly educative; there is more discipline for a boy in the
continuous care of a cow or a horse than in many a term of sc