City Fools in the Country
Kecause a man is wise in some places, we are not to conclude that he is wise everywhere. You find men grandly successful in the counting-room and at the board of trade, whose common-sense forsakes them as they cross the city limits.
During the last few years, a multitude of men have left town for country life, with the idea that twenty thousand dollars, and a few books on agriculture, would make them successful farmers. They will take the prizes at the county fair. They will have the finest cattle, the most afuent hens, the most reasonable ducks, and the most cleanly swine. Their receipts will far outrun their expenses. The
22* first year they are disappointed. The second year they collapse. The third year they tack to a post the sign, ‘’For Sale!’’ They knew not that agriculture Is a science and a trade, and that a farmer miofht as well come In with his carpet-bag, set It down In the engineer’s room of a Liverpool steamer, expecting In ten minutes to start the machinery, and successfully guide the vessel across the Atlantic, as one, knowing nothing of country life, to undertake to engineer the intricate and outbranching affairs of a large farm. As well set the milkmaid to write a disquisition on metaphysics, a rag-picker to lecturing on aesthetics.
The city fool hastens out at the first beck of pleasant weather. He wishes to sit in what poets call “the lap of spring.” We have ourselves sat, several times, in her lap, and pronounce her the roughest nurse that ever had anything to do with us. Through March, April, and May, for the last few years, the maiden seems to have been out of patience, and she blows, and frets, and spits In your face with storm, till, seemingly exhausted with worriment, she lies down at the feet of June.
The family of the city fool are, for the first ten days after going into the country, kept in the house by bad weather. It is the Paradise of mud. The soft ground, enraptured with the dainty feet of the city belle, takes their photograph all up and down the lane, and secures its pay by abstracting one of her overshoes up by the barn, and the other by the woods. Mud on the dress. Mud on the carriage -wheels. Mud on the door-step. A very carnival of mud!
The city fool has great contempt for ordinary stock, and talks only of “high bloods.” His cattle are all Ayrshires, or Shorthorns, or Devons. But for some reason, they do not give half as much milk as the awkward, unheraldic, mongrel breed that stand at nightfall looking through the neighbor’s bars.
The poultry of our hero are Golden Hamburgs, and Buff Dorkings, and Bengaliers, and Cropple-crowns, and Black Polands and Chittaprats. But they are stingy of laying, and notwithstanding all the inducements of expensive coop, and ingenious nests, and handsome sursoundings, are averse to any practical or useful expression. They eat, and drink, and cackle, and do everything but lay. You feed them hot mush, and throw lime out of which they are to make the shell, and strew ashes to kill the lice, and call on them by all the glorious memory of a distinguished ancestry to do something worthy of their name, but all in vain. Here and there an ^g%, dropped in the mud in preference to the appointed place, gives you a specimen of what they might do if they only willed. We owned such a hen. We had given an outrageous price for her. We lavished on that creature every possible kindness. Though useless, she made more noise than all the other denizens of the barn -yard, and, as some faithful hen came from her nest, would join in the cackle, as much as to say, “Ain’t we doinor well?” We came to hate the sifjht of that hen. She knew it well, and as she saw us coming, would clear the fence with wild squawk, as if her conscience troubled her. We would not give one of our unpretending Dominies for three full-blooded Chittaprats.
The city fool expects, with small outlay, to have bewitching shrubbery, and a very Fontainebleau of shade -trees, and pagodas, and summer-houses, and universal arborescence. He will be covered up widi clematis and weigelia. The paths, white-gravelled, innocent of weeds or grass, and round - banked, shall wind about the house, and twist themselves into all unexpectedness of beauty. If he cannot have a Chatsworth Park, nine miles in circumference, he will have something that will make you think of it. And all this will be kept in order with a few strokes of scythe, hoe, and trimming-knife.
The city fool selects his country place without reference to socialities. He will bring a pocket-full of papers from the store, which will be all his family will want to know of society and the world; and then a healthy library, from which shall look down all the historians and poets, will give them a surfeit of intellectualities. He does not know why his wife and daughters want to go back to town. What could be more gay? Market- wagons passing the door, and farmers going with grist to the mill, and an occasional thunder-storm to keep things lively, and the bawling of the cow recently bereft of her calf. Coming home besweated from the store, at night, the father finds the females crying on the piazza. What better concert do they want than the robins? What livelier beaux than the hedges of syringa? With a very wail of wo they cry out to the exasperating husband and father:
“We want to see something!”
“Good gracious!” he shouts, “go forth and look at the clouds, and the grass, and the Southdowns! one breath of this evening air is worth all the perfumes of fashionable society!”
There is apt to be disappointment in crops. Even a stupid turnip knows a city fool as soon as it sees him. Marrow -fat peas fairly rattle in their pods with derision as he passes. The fields are glad to impose upon the novice. Wandering too near the beehive with a book on honey-making, he got stung in three places. His cauliflowers turn out to be cabbages. The thunder spoils his milk. The grass-butter, that he dreamed of, is rancid. The taxes eat up his profits. The drought consumes his corn. The rust gets in his wheat. The peaches drop off before they ripen. The rot strikes the potatoes. Expecting to surprise his benighted cityfriends with a present of a few early vegetables,’ he accidentally hears that they have had new potatoes, and green peas, and sweet corn for a fortnight. The bay mare runs away with the box-wagon. His rustic gate gets out of order. His shrubbery is perpetually needing the shears. It seems almost impossible to keep the grass out of the serpentine walks. A cow gets in and upsets the vase of flowers. The hogs destroy the watermelons, and the gardener runs off with the chamber-maid. Everything goes wrong, and farming is a failure. It always is 3. failure when a man knows nothing about it. If a man can afford to make a large outlay for his own amusement, and the health of his family, let him hasten to his country purchase. But no one, save a city fool, will think to keep a business in town, and make a farm financially profitable.
There are only two conditions in which farming pays. The first, when a man makes agriculture a lifetime business, not yielding to the fatal itch for town which is depopulating the country, and crowding the city with a multitude of men standing Idle widi dieir hands in their own or their neighbors’ pockets. The other condition, is when a citizen with surplus of means, and weary of the excitements and confinements of city life, goes to the country, not expecting a return of dollars equal to the amount disbursed, but expects. In health, and recreation, and communion with nature, to find a wealth compared with which all bundles of scrip and packages of Government securities are worthless as the shreds of paper under the counting- room desk in the waste-basket. Only those who come out of the heats of the town, know the full enchantment of country life. Three years ago, on the prongs of a long fork, with which we tossed the hay Into the mow, we pitched away our last attack of “the blues.” We can beat back any despondency we ever knew with a hoe -handle. Born and brought up in the country, we have, ever since we left it, been loneine to o back, though doomed for most of the time to stay In town. The most rapturous lay of poet about country life has never come up to our own experiences. Amonor the orrandest attractions about the
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Heavenly City are the trees, and the rivers, and the white horses. When we had a place in the country, the banquet lasted all summer, beginning with cups of crocus, and ending with glowing tankards of autumnal leaf. At Belshazzar’s feast the knees trembled for the finger that wrote doom, but the hand-writing on our wall was that of honeysuckle and trumpet-creeper.