HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY 



PLACE 



CHAPTER I. 



THE FARM REMODELING THE FARM HOUSE HYGIENE 



WATER SUPPLY SEWAGE FARM LAWN ANIMALS THE 



DAIRY POULTRY BEES STAR GAZING. 



FROM cliff dwelling to tilling the soil was a long leap, but 

 when made enabled me to give full sway to the building mania 

 which asserted itself when I purchased "Our Farm," though we 

 owned it several years before development w r as well under way. 



When farming loomed as an Eldorado, I interviewed Dr. Hexa- 

 mer of the American Agriculturist as to his opinion of the money- 

 making possibilities for the amateur farmer, and he frankly gave 

 his advice. Whether favorable or otherwise the reader shall judge, 

 but I proceeded to farm, as Shakespeare puts it, "in my salad days 

 when I was green." 



Here is the old farm house that queened the seventy-two 

 acres of my first purchase, afterward increased by buying adjacent 

 farms to two hundred and fifty acres of undulating land, rocky knoll 

 and wooded cliffside, bordering a swiftly coursing river. Here, too, 

 are the modernized farm house, the hay, horse and cattle barns, silo, 

 paddocks and gardens, the arboretum and the new entrance. In 

 fact, the photographs show some things that happened to those modest, 

 unassuming acres during the run of the building fever. 



A red letter day was our first day of ownership of Hillcrest 

 Farm. The deed had been recorded by the town clerk; I was a 

 landed proprietor, and seemed to breathe more deeply as the vision 

 of farm ownership became a reality. 



The Fallacious Nightmare Mortgage. 



After the recording of the first paper came the filing of the 

 second, the mortgage, that nightmare of the average farmer, but 

 which, after all, if rightly placed and the interest promptly met, 

 is but a temporary bugbear, and can and should be made a stepping- 

 stone to final independence. If your loan is a safe one the Savings 

 i Bank is generally as anxious to get it as you are to make it. 



