The Abandoned Farmers

s the time has now come to recant and to make explanation, touching on our change of heart and resolution. For at this writing I am an abandoned farmer of the most pronounced t

s in good standing of the Westcheste

has a large and steadily growing membership. Any citybred person who moves up here among the rolling hills of our section with intent to get back to Nature, and who, in pursuance of

red help all quit on him in the busy season; if the spring freshets flood his cellar; if his springs go dry in August; if his horses succumb to one of those fatal diseases that are so popular among expensive horses; if his prize Jersey cow chokes on a turnip; if his blooded hens are so busy dyi

ied the city, then the suburb, then the city again; and the final upshot was, we decided that neither city nor suburb would do for us. In the suburb there was the daily commuting to be considered

group from which is recruited the confirmed and incurable New Yorker. After you move to New York it takes several months to rid you of homesickness for the place

eating tired-business-man's lunch in a lobsteria on the Great White Way from eleven-thirty p. m. until closing time; of having his toes trodden upon by other tired business men at the afternoon-da

he main trouble about New York is not that it contains six million people, but that practically all of them are constantly engaged in going somewhere in such a hurry. Nearly always th

ross currents-these are the things that, in due time, turn the thoughts of the sojourner to mental pictures of peaceful fields and burdene

heir guests. We heard them babble of the excitement of raising things on the land. We thought they meant garden truck. How were we to know they also meant mortgages? At the time it did

fresh vegetables; the new-laid eggs-after eating the other kind so long we knew they were new-laid without being told; the flower beds outside and th

p at daybreak, they said, especially on account of the berry picking and the beauties of the sunrise. Having formerly been city dwellers, they had someti

ss you are a remarkably sound sleeper. When it comes to rousing the owner, from slumber before the sun shows, the big red rooster and the little brown hen are more dependable than any alarm clock ever assembled. You might forget to wind the alarm clock. The big red roost

ng there was a rooster suffering from hay fever or a touch of catarrh, or something that made him quite hoarse; and he strolled up from the chicken house to a point di

wn to find that, in our absence, the flat had somehow grown more stuffy and more crowded; that the streets had become more noisy and more congested. And the ou

ew Jersey, mainly because, to get from New Jersey over to New York and back again, you must take either the ferry or the tube; and if there was one t