FOREWORD 



ONCE in awhile, maybe, twenty-five or thirty years 

 ago, they used to pack you off during the holidays for a 

 visit on Somebody's Farm. Have you forgotten? You 

 went with your little round head close clipped till all 

 the scar places showed white and you came back with 

 a mat of sunbleached hair, your face and hands and 

 legs brown as a nut. 



Probably you treasure recollections of those boyhood 

 days when a raw field turnip, peeled with a " toad- 

 stabber," was mighty good eatin'. You remember the" 

 cows and chickens, the horses, pigs and sheep, the old 

 corn-crib where generally you could scare up a chip- 

 munk, the gnarled old orchard the Eastern rail-fenced 

 farm of a hundred-acres-or-so. You remember Wilson's 

 Emporium at the Corners where you went for the mail 

 the place where the overalled legs of the whole com- 

 munity drummed idly against the cracker boxes and 

 where dried prunes, acquired with due caution, fur- 

 nished the juvenile substitute for a chew of tobacco ! 



Or perhaps you did not know even this much about 

 country life you of the Big Cities. To you, it may be, 

 the Farmer has been little more than the caricatures of 

 the theatres. You have seen him wearing blue jeans or 

 a long linen duster in " The Old Homestead," wiping 

 his eyes with a big red bandana from his hip pocket. 

 You have seen him dance eccentric steps in wrinkled 

 cowhide boots, his hands beneath flapping coat-tails, 

 his chewing jaws constantly moving " the little bunch 



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