"7 emphatically deny the common notion that the farm boy's life is 

 drudgery. Much of the work is laborious, and this it shares with all work 

 that is prodtictive; for the easier the job the less it is worth doing. But 

 every piece of farm, work is also an attempt to solve a problem, and there- 

 fore it should have its intellectual interest; and the problems are as many 

 as the hours of the day and as varied as the face of nature. It needs but 

 the informing of the mind and the quickening of the imagination to raise 

 any constructive work above the level of drudgery. It is not mere dtdl 

 work to follow the plow — / have followed it day after day — if one is con- 

 scious of all the myriad forces that are set at work by the breaking of the 

 furrow; and there is always the landscape, the free fields, the clean soil, 

 the rain, the promise of the crops. Of all men's labor, the farmer's is the 

 most creative. I cannot help wondering why it is that men will eagerly 

 seek work in the grease and grime of a noisy factory, but will recoil at what 

 they call the dirty work of the farm. So much are we yet bound by 

 tradition! " — L- H. Bailey. 



" Weather and wind and waning moon, 



Plain and hilltop under the sky, 

 Ev'ning, morning and blazing noon, 



Brother of all the world am I. 

 The pine-tree, linden and the maize, 



The insect, squirrel and the kine. 

 All — ^nativelv they live their days — 



As they live theirs, so I live mine. 

 I know not where, I know not what : — 



Believing none and doubting none 

 What'er befalls it counteth not, — 



Nature and Time and I are one." 



II66 



— L. H. Bailey. 



