62 City Homes on Country Lanes 



player, too), but when the War came on it suddenly 

 occurred to him that he might discover a form of 

 exercise of more creative character possibly a more 

 valuable contribution to his country's need than pok- 

 ing little white balls across a field. 



He bought an abandoned farm in the hills of West- 

 ern Connecticut and proceeded to raise food for his 

 family and the public. He tells us that his entire in- 

 vestment was not much in excess of the entrance fee 

 required by one of the exclusive golf clubs near New 

 York; yet the abandoned farm turned out to be a 

 paying investment. That, however, was the smallest 

 of his satisfactions. He turned over a new page in 

 his experience. He was like the colored girl, who, 

 speaking of the dinners provided by her young man, 

 said: "He found an appetite on me I didn't know I 

 had." 



The successful man of large affairs became an en- 

 thusiastic farmer. He went after the record as to 

 quality and quantity of his crops, and returned from 

 the county fair bedecked with blue ribbons. He found, 

 moreover, better exercise and more mental diversion in 

 reclaiming these abandoned acres than he had ever 

 known on the golf field. He discovered that there was 

 no such food as the food of his own raising; and while 

 he spends many months of the year in his city home, 

 even there he is followed by a stream of fresh eggs, 

 milk and fat chickens, vegetables, fruit and preserves, 

 from the farm. Listening to him as he talks, one would 

 think the home in the Connecticut hills the main object 

 of his existence, and the great business over which he 



