Chapter 8 THE PROSE OF NEW ENGLAND FARM LIFE

A life whose parlors have always been closed.

IK MARVEL.

Sunshine is tabooed in the front room of the house. The "damp dignity" of the best-room has been well described: "Musty smells, stiffness, angles, absence of sunlight. What is there to talk about in a room dark as the Domdaniel, except where one crack in a reluctant shutter reveals a stand of wax flowers under glass, and a dimly descried hostess who evidently waits only your departure to extinguish that solitary ray?"

At a recent auction I obtained twenty-one volumes of State Agricultural Reports for seventeen cents; and what I read in them of the Advantages of Rural Pursuits, The Dignity of Labor, The Relation of Agriculture to Longevity and to Nations, and, above all, of the Golden Egg, seem decidedly florid, unpractical, misleading, and very little permanent popularity can be gained by such self-interested buncombe from these eloquent orators.

The idealized farmer, as he is depicted by these white-handed rhetoricians who, like John Paul, "would never lay hand to a plow, unless said plow should actually pursue him to a second story, and then lay hands on it only to throw it out of the window," and the phlegmatic, overworked, horny-handed tillers of the soil are no more alike than Fenimore Cooper's handsome, romantic, noble, and impressive red man of the forest and the actual Sioux or Apache, as regarded by the cowboy of the West.

It's all work, with no play and no proper pay, for Western competition now prevents all chance of decent profits. Little can be laid up for old age, except by the most painful economy and daily scrimping; and how can the children consent to stay on, starving body and soul? That explains the 3,318 abandoned farms in Maine at present. And the farmers' wives! what monotonous, treadmill lives! Constant toil with no wages, no allowance, no pocket money, no vacations, no pleasure trips to the city nearest them, little of the pleasures of correspondence; no time to write, unless a near relative is dead or dying. Some one says that their only chance for social life is in going to some insane asylum! There have been four cases of suicide in farmers' families near me within eighteen months.

This does not apply to the fortunate farmer who inherited money and is shrewd enough to keep and increase it. Nor to the market gardener, who raises vegetables under glass; nor to the owners of large nurseries. These do make a good living, and are also able to save something.

In general, it is all one steady rush of work from March to November; unceasing, uncomplaining activity for the barest support, followed by three months of hibernation and caring for the cattle. Horace Greeley said: "If our most energetic farmers would abstract ten hours each per week from their incessant drudgery and devote them to reading and reflection in regard to their noble calling, they would live to a better purpose and bequeath better examples to their children."

It may have been true long years ago that no shares, factory, bank, or railroad paid better dividends than the plowshare, but it is the veriest nonsense now.

Think of the New England climate in summer. Rufus Choate describes it eloquently: "Take the climate of New England in summer, hot to-day, cold to-morrow, mercury at eighty degrees in the shade in the morning, with a sultry wind southwest. In three hours more a sea turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees. Now so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire, then floods carrying off all the dams and bridges on the Penobscot and Androscoggin. Snow in Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by lightning in Rhode Island. You would think the world was coming to an end. But we go along. Seed time and harvest never fail. We have the early and the latter rains; the sixty days of hot corn weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us; the Indian summer, with its bland south winds and mitigated sunshine, brings all up, and about the 25th of November, being Thursday, a grateful people gather about the Thanksgiving board, with hearts full of gratitude for the blessings that have been vouchsafed to them."

Poets love to sing of the sympathy of Nature. I think she is decidedly at odds with the farming interests of the country. At any rate, her antipathy to me was something intense and personal. That mysterious stepmother of ours was really riled by my experiments and determined to circumvent every agricultural ambition.

She detailed a bug for every root, worms to build nests on every tree, others to devour every leaf, insects to attack every flower, drought or deluge to ruin the crops, grasshoppers to finish everything that was left.

Potato bugs swooped down on my fields by tens of thousands, and when somewhat thinned in ranks by my unceasing war, would be re-enforced from a neighbor's fields, once actually fording my lakelet to get to my precious potato patch. The number and variety of devouring pests connected with each vegetable are alarming. Here are a few connected closely with the homely cabbage, as given by a noted helminthologist under the head of "Cut-worms":

"Granulated," "shagreened," "white," "marked," "greasy," "glassy," "speckled," "variegated," "wavy," "striped," "harlequin," "imbricated," "tarnished." The "snout beetle" is also a deadly foe.

To realize this horror, this worse than Pharaoh plague, you must either try a season of farming or peruse octavo volumes on Insects injurious to Vegetation, fully illustrated.

In those you may gain a faint idea of the "skippers," "stingers," "soothsayers," "walking sticks or specters," "saw flies and slugs," "boring caterpillars," "horn-tailed wood wasps," etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.-a never-ending list. The average absolute loss of the farmers of this country from such pests is fully one million dollars per annum.

Gail Hamilton said of her squashes:

"They appeared above-ground, large-lobed and vigorous. Large and vigorous appeared the bugs, all gleaming in green and gold, like the wolf on the fold, and stopped up all the stomata and ate up all the parenchyma, till my squash-leaves looked as if they had grown for the sole purpose of illustrating net-veined organizations. A universal bug does not indicate a special want of skill in any one."

Not liking to crush the bug between thumb and finger as advised, she tried drowning them. She says: "The moment they touched the water they all spread unseen wings and flew away. I should not have been much more surprised to see Halicarnassus soaring over the ridge pole. I had not the slightest idea they could fly."

Then the aphides! Exhausters of strength-vine fretters-plant destroyers! One aphis, often the progenitor of over five thousand million aphides in a single season. This seems understated, but I accept it as the aphidavit of another noted helminthologist. I might have imagined Nature had a special grudge against me if I had not recalled Emerson's experience. He says: "With brow bent, with firm intent, I go musing in the garden walk. I stoop to pick up a weed that is choking the corn, find there were two; close behind is a third, and I reach out my arm to a fourth; behind that there are four thousand and one!

"Rose bugs and wasps appear best when flying. I admired them most when flying away from my garden."

Horace Greeley said that "No man who harbors caterpillars has any moral right to apples." But one sees whole orchards destroyed in this way for lack of time to attack such a big job. Farmers have been unjustly attacked by city critics who do not understand the situation. There was much fine writing last year in regard to the sin and shame of cutting down the pretty, wild growth of shrubs, vines, and flowers along the wayside, so picturesque to the summer tourist. The tangle of wild grape, clematis, and woodbine is certainly pretty, but underneath is sure to be found a luxuriant growth of thistle, wild carrot, silk weed, mullein, chickweed, tansy, and plantain, which, if allowed to seed and disseminate themselves, would soon ruin the best farms. There is a deadly foe, an army of foes, hiding under these luxuriant festoons and masses of cheerful flowers.

Isn't it strange and sad and pitiful, that it is the summer guest who alone enjoys the delights of summering in the country? There is no time for rest, for recreation, for flowers, for outdoor pleasures, for the average farmer and his family. You seldom see any bright faces at the windows, which are seldom opened-only a glimpse here and there of a sad, haggard creature, peering out for curosity. Strange would it be to hear peals of merry laughter; stranger still to see a family enjoying a meal on the piazza or a game on the grass. As for flowers, they are valued no more than weeds; the names of the most common are unknown. I asked in vain a dozen people last summer, what that flower was called, pointing to the ubiquitous Joe Rye weed or pink motherwort. At last I asked one man, who affected to know everything-

"Oh, yes, I know it."

"What is it?" I persisted.

"Well, I know it just as well, but can't just now get the name out." A pause, then, with great superiority: "I'd rather see a potato field in full bloom, than all the flowers in the world."

Perhaps some of Tolstoi's disciples may yet solve the problem of New England's abandoned farms. He believes that every able-bodied man should labor with his own hands and in "the sweat of his brow" to produce his own living direct from the soil. He dignifies agriculture above all other means of earning a living, and would have artificial employments given up. "Back to the land," he cries; and back he really goes, daily working with the peasants. But 'tis a solemn, almost tragical experience, not much better than the fate of the Siberian exile. Rise at dawn; work till dark; eat-go to bed too tired to read a paper;-and no money in it.

Let these once prosperous farms be given up to Swedish colonies, hard working and industrious, who can do better here than in their own country and have plenty of social life among themselves, or let wealthy men purchase half a dozen of these places to make a park, or two score for a hunting ground-or let unattached women of middle age occupy them and support themselves by raising poultry. Men are making handsome incomes from this business-women can do the same. The language of the poultry magazines, by the way, is equally sentimental and efflorescent with that of the speeches at agricultural fairs, sufficiently so to sicken one who has once accepted it as reliable, as for instance: "The individual must be very abnormal in his tastes if they can not be catered to by our feathered tribe." "To their owner they are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Their ways are interesting, their language fascinating, and their lives from the egg to the mature fowl replete with constant surprises."[1]

Footnote 1: This clause is true.

"To simply watch them as they pass from stage to stage of development fills the mind of every sane person with pleasure." One poultry crank insists that each hen must be so carefully studied that she can be understood and managed as an individual, and speaks of his hens having at times an "anxious nervous expression!"

"Yes, it is where the hens sing all the day long in the barn-yard that throws off the stiff ways of our modern civilization and makes us feel that we are home and can rest and play and grow young once more. How many men and women have regained lost health and spirits in keeping hens, in the excitement of finding and gathering eggs!"

"It is not the natural laying season when snows lie deep on field and hill, when the frost tingles in sparkling beads from every twig, when the clear streams bear up groups of merry skaters," etc.

After my pathetic experience with chickens, who after a few days of downy content grew ill, and gasped until they gave up the ghost; ducklings, who progressed finely for several weeks, then turned over on their backs and flopped helplessly unto the end; or, surviving that critical period, were found in the drinking trough, "drowned, dead, because they couldn't keep their heads above water"; turkeys who flourished to a certain age, then grew feeble and phantom-like and faded out of life, I weary of gallinaceous rhodomontade, and crave "pointers" for my actual needs.

I still read "Crankin's" circulars with a thrill of enthusiasm because his facts are so cheering. For instance, from his latest: "We have some six thousand ducklings out now, confined in yards with wire netting eighteen inches high. The first lot went to market May 10th and netted forty cents per pound. These ducklings were ten weeks old and dressed on an average eleven pounds per pair. One pair dressed fourteen pounds." Isn't that better than selling milk at two and a half cents per quart? And no money can be made on vegetables unless they are raised under glass in advance of the season. I know, for did I not begin with "pie plant," with which every market was glutted, at one cent per pound, and try the entire list, with disgustingly low prices, exposed to depressing comparison and criticism? When endeavoring to sell, one of the visiting butchers, in reply to my petition that he would buy some of my vegetables, said: "Well now, Marm, you see just how it is; I've got more'n I can sell now, and women keep offering more all the way along. I tell 'em I can't buy 'em, but I'll haul 'em off for ye if ye want to get rid of 'em!" So much for market gardening at a distance from city demands.

But ducks! Sydney Smith, at the close of his life, said he "had but one illusion left, and that was the Archbishop of Canterbury." I still believe in Crankin and duck raising. Let me see: "One pair dressed fourteen pounds, netted forty cents per pound." I'll order one of Crankin's "Monarch" incubators and begin a poultry farm anew.

"Dido et dux," and so do Boston epicures. I'll sell at private sales, not for hotels! I used to imagine myself supplying one of the large hotels and saw on the menu:

"Tame duck and apple sauce (from the famous 'Breezy Meadows' farm)." But I inquired of one of the proprietors what he would give, and "fifteen cents per pound for poultry dressed and delivered" gave me a combined attack of chills and hysterics.

Think of my chickens, from those prize hens (three dollars each)-my chickens, fed on eggs hard boiled, milk, Indian meal, cracked corn, sun-flower seed, oats, buckwheat, the best of bread, selling at fifteen cents per pound, and I to pay express charges! Is there, is there any "money in hens?"

To show how a child would revel in a little rational enjoyment on a farm, read this dear little poem of James Whitcomb Riley's:

AT AUNTY'S HOUSE.

One time when we's at aunty's house-

'Way in the country-where

They's ist but woods and pigs and cows,

An' all's outdoors and air!

An orchurd swing; an' churry trees,

An' churries in 'em! Yes, an' these

Here red-head birds steal all they please

An' tech 'em if you dare!

W'y wunst, one time when we wuz there,

We et out on the porch!

Wite where the cellar door wuz shut

The table wuz; an' I

Let aunty set by me an' cut

My wittles up-an' pie.

Tuz awful funny! I could see

The red heads in the churry tree;

An' bee-hives, where you got to be

So keerful going by;

An' comp'ny there an' all! An' we-

We et out on the porch!

An'-I ist et p'surves an' things

'At ma don't 'low me to-

An' chickun gizzurds (don't like wings

Like parunts does, do you?)

An' all the time the wind blowed there

An' I could feel it in my hair,

An' ist smell clover ever'where!

An' a old red head flew

Purt' nigh wite over my high chair,

When we et out on the porch!