308 SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY 



measure if only by the simple aids of shade trees and a little shrub- 

 bery. 



In passing, let me ask, can you imagine anything uglier than some 

 of our California villages, country cities rather, with one straight 

 street, hot, glaring, and unshaded? There is an air of newness, heat, 

 and discomfort over everything, and a residence in it must certainly 

 arise from necessity. This matter of rural charms is one to which 

 we pay a miserable inattention, and it is one preeminently worthy 

 of notice, as probably in no State in the Union are there so many 

 new towns laid out and so many new farm houses built. Every vil- 

 lage, every town in the State ought to have its green, its park, like 

 that of Santa Rosa, as its nucleus or heart, yet how many besides the 

 town mentioned have them? The farm houses and villages of New 

 England, looking at their sylvan charms, are as pretty as any in the 

 world, the architecture of the houses simple and unpretending, sur- 

 rounded by inclosures full of trees and shrubs; there is comfort and 

 peace in every aspect of the picture. Can you remember the charms 

 of the lights and shadows that bedeck the houses in and around 

 such places as Northampton, Springfield, New Haven, Pittsburg, 

 Stockbridge, and Woodbury, and can you not contrast them with the 

 hard, hot glare of the unshaded California towns, of which each of 

 us knows two or three. 



And now go back for a final moment to the question of farm 

 houses. In a lecture delivered elsewhere, I have said that the fledg- 

 lings are too anxious to quit the parent nest, that the country is bigger 

 and better than the towns, etc. I have been thinking over this con- 

 stantly occurring exodus of youth, and I believe it is largely due to 

 the fact that the farmer's son and daughter find less of the agreeable 

 and attractive and more of the hard and sordid at their firesides than 

 in the houses of any other class of equal means. How many of such 

 pictures as this are there to be found in California? A house, white, 

 glaring, and ghastly as a heap of bones on a scorched plain. All the 

 front is shut up. In the rear a piggery. You enter through it and 

 are in the kitchen, made use of as a dining room and parlor as well. 

 Let the front part of the house be thrown open, with a cheerful little 

 bit of a shadowy garden to feast the eyes upon. Let the most con- 

 venient room in the house be used as the family room; let it be con- 

 secrated to neatness, purity, and truth. Let those governing spirits 

 influence all outside as well as in, and it is astonishing in how quick 

 a time a change for the better and to the beautiful occur. Sons and 

 daughters will no more sigh for city life, but will begin to love with 

 intense affection every foot of the ground they tread upon, every tree 

 and every vine and shrub they have planted and trained. Like that 

 vine they will cling to the old farm house, with its memories of 

 flowers outside, and the cosy family room within, and will not be so 

 feverishly anxious to quit that place which they have so long called 

 home. 



