No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 655 



ADVANTAGES OF COUNTRY LIFE. 



Bv MISS ADDA HAYMAN, Salona, Pa. 



It has been said that at the present day the boy who lives in the 

 country longs for the time when he may escape from the drudgery 

 of farm work and enter a great city to join the mad competition 

 for wealth and fame. Then, when this ambition is gratified and, 

 after he has endured years of worse drudgery than he had ever known 

 in his boyhood, the man wearied by hard strife with the world, per- 

 haps broken in health, thinks that he would be supremely happy 

 if he could return to the home farm and spend the days of his old 

 age in quite and contentment. 



In earlier times country life seems to have been appreciated more 

 than it is now. History gives us accounts of many famous men who 

 preferred its quiet pursuits to political fame. In the early days of 

 Rome, Cincinnatus, the noted senator and consul, twice was called 

 from the plow to serve his people, and each time returned to his 

 little farm near the Tiber. George Washington, having faithfully 

 served his country, returned to his estates at Mount Vernon, where 

 he personally oversaw the field work, and could never afterward 

 be induced to leave its interests for the more popular pursuits of 

 political life. 



Through all ages the delights of country life have inspired great 

 poets to some of their best productions. Virgil, the greatest poet 

 Rome ever produced, was born on a farm. It was he who said that 

 the state of the farmer is the happiest allotted to man, and most 

 conducive to virtue and piety. Years of study and thoughful leisure 

 in his father's country home, where he worked undisturbed by the 

 hatred and fierce jealousies that kept Rome in a turmoil, prepared 

 him to give to the w^orld some of its richest gifts of literature. Only 

 such a life could have enabled him to write his beautiful articles, 

 in which he transforms rivers and pastures, bees and flowers into 

 living poems. 



Burns, Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, have set us all 

 to singing of "The Mountain Daisy," "The Brook," "The Pumpkin," 

 "The Flowers," "The Forest," and have given us beautiful pictures 

 of almost every conceivable side of rural life, from a snow-bound 

 evening to Maud Muller in her meadow of fragrant hay, from the 

 sturdy lumbermen in the pine forests to the gay buskers in a country 

 barn. 



In the earlier days of our country's history, the farmer and his 

 • family considered themselves the most prosperous and favored of 

 free-born Americans. Yet, now, in this hurrying twentieth century, 

 the tendency is to leave the farm as quickly as possible. Its occu- 

 pations are considered too slow. It is not a business in which a man 

 can make — or lose — a million dollars in a day. Sometimes the farm 

 is sold to secure means to start a faster business. If we were to 

 look up statistics we would be surprised to find how many of these 

 farms throughout the United States pass into the hands of the intelli- 



