4 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



chicken-house which was on the verge of collapse, 

 and a little over seven acres of land. There was a little 

 fruit in the orchard some apples, cherries, and 

 plums, but of the apples at least there were plenty. 

 An idea of the modesty of the first Borsodi home- 

 stead can be secured from the picture on page 64, 

 though the picture shows it after we had spent nearly 

 two years repainting and remodeling the tiny little 

 building. Yet "Sevenacres," as we called the place, 

 was large enough for our initial experiment. Four 

 years later we were able to select a more suitable site 

 and begin the building of the sort of home we really 

 wanted. 



We began the experiment with three principal 

 assets, courage foolhardiness, our city friends called 

 it; a vision of what modern methods and modern 

 domestic machinery might be made to do in the way 

 of eliminating drudgery, and the fact that my wife 

 had been born and had lived up to her twelfth year 

 on a ranch in the West. She at least had had child- 

 hood experience of life in the country. 



But we had plenty of liabilities. We had little 

 capital and only a modest salary. We knew nothing 

 about raising vegetables, fruit, and poultry. All these 

 things we had to learn. While I was a handy man, I 

 had hardly ever had occasion to use a hammer and 

 saw (a man working in an office rarely does), and 

 yet if our experiment was to succeed it required that 

 I should make myself a master of all trades. We cut 

 ourselves off from the city comforts to which we had 



