hool.
Industry, patience, perseverance are qualities inherent in the very
atmosphere of country life. The so-called manual training of city
schools is only a poor makeshift for developing in the city boy those
habits which the country boy acquires naturally in his daily life. An
honest, hard-working country training is the best inheritance a father
can leave his son.

And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a tool. A cornfield, a plow, a
woodpile, an oak tree, will cure no man unless he have it in himself to
be cured. The truth is that no life, and least of all a farmer's life,
is simple--unless it is simple. I know a man and his wife who came out
here to the country with the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith,
simple. They were unable to keep the chickens out of their summer
kitchen. They discovered microbes in the well, and mosquitoes in the
cistern, and wasps in the garret. Owing to the resemblance of the seeds,
their radishes turned out to be turnips! The last I heard of them they
were living snugly in a flat in Sixteenth Street--all their troubles
solved by a dumb-waiter.

The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a man
is in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place of
all places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where he
can _grow_. The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it often
destroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces,
the desire for the higher life which animates every good man.

While on the subject of simplicity it may be well to observe that
simplicity does not necessarily, as some of those who escape from the
city seem to think, consist in doing without things, but rather in the
proper use of things. One cannot return, unless with affectation, to the
crudities of a former existence. We do not believe in Diogenes and his
tub. Do you not think the good Lord has given us the telephone (that we
may better reach that elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the highest of
human ideals) and the railroad (that we may widen our human knowledge
and sympathy)--and even the motor-car? (though, indeed, I have sometimes
imagined that the motor-cars passing this way had a different origin!).
He may have given these things to us too fast, faster than we can bear;
but is that any reason why we should denounce them all and return to
the old, crude, time-consuming ways of our ancestors? I am no
reactionary. I do not go back. I neg