58 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



we knew in a fairly satisfactory if amateurish way fruit, milk, 

 trees, flowers, farm stock and utensils, in fact, almost everything per- 

 taining to farming, except how to manage that unknown and exasper- 

 ating quantity, farm help. 



Farm Help. 



Why farm help or the keeping of it proves a bugbear is a 

 question that will not down even with the up-from-the-cradle-farmer 

 and the amateur is generally nonplussed. 



Birthright Sold for Pottage of the Fields. 



The death-dealing triumvirate of drouth, disease and insect 

 life can be circumvented and controlled if not entirely vanquished, 

 but the farm help problem is rarely satisfactorily solved. If you let 

 the farm on shares to avoid the cares of husbandry, you'll pocket 

 your pride and be merely a tenant on your own domain, possibly 

 dictatorially told which fields you may enter and those in which you 

 must not trespass; have the privilege of paying for new machinery 

 and helplessly seeing it broken up, and when the three years' lease 

 has expired, seven to ten chances your soil has been impoverished, 

 your cattle made non-producing, and tools and buildings left in poor 

 condition. No! Be a prince, living in your own castle on your own 

 estate if it's only a bungalow and two acres, rather than a vassal on a 

 thousand acres. But if you own a large farm, pasture most of it, 

 and in part with horse boarders as long as horse boarders exist. Let 

 the trees grow, trimming when necessary, keeping down grass, weeds 

 and underbrush with a flock of sheep or Angora goats. Farm lightly ; 

 take annoyances philosophically, and enjoy Arcadia to the utmost. A 

 farm run in this way without expensive buildings to keep up, with 

 large road frontage, and near a growing town, rapidly increases in 

 value, and the carrying charges are simply nominal and more than 

 offset by your summer rent. 



Marauder Versus Marauder. 



As in California especially they are using insect to fight insect and 

 stamping out disease by letting loose some bitter enemy to feed upon 

 it, so in time the microbiologist will discover the insect or fungus that 

 will overcome the chestnut disease, as well as the hickory blight which 

 is slowly sapping the life of another of our prolific nut trees and 

 destroy the gypsy moth, elm beetle and other enemies to vegetation 

 that swarm in mighty hosts in field, orchard and forest. 



Scattered over the farm were nut trees by the hundred, monarched 

 notably by a big five-trunked chestnut that we christened "The 

 Emperor," after which was named the chestnut lot. 



There were hickories, pig nuts and shellbarks, butternuts, pungent 

 black walnuts, and copses of hazel or filberts. To this list was added 

 the little chinquepin, also the large Japanese chestnut that, low- 



