NATURE AND THE CITY. 309 



Most city people seem to be diametrically opposite. 

 They do not know what the natural life is. Theirs is 

 the artificial, conventional manner, and one who is 

 unskillful enough to be ingenuous is not seldom con- 

 sidered a numskull. Yet the men of cities are much 

 more effeminate and altogether less stalwart than their 

 countrymen of the fields. Almost all the unhealthful 

 life of cities is entirely lost out in the open, where life 

 is pure and sweet, and the mind uncontaminated and 

 natural. The farmer notices the wind and the signs of 

 the weather. He is closer to Nature than most men, 

 more dependent upon Nature. What city people, except 

 the weather observer, ever know the direction of the 

 wind, or can tell whether it is likely to rain or not? 



There is a dignity in tilling God's soil which no 

 other avocation in life possesses. Adam's original oc- 

 cupation was to care for the trees in the garden, "to 

 dress it and to keep it;" but, after the fall, the first 

 work that was given him, that which the Lord decided 

 was then most fit, was the tilling of the ground and 

 the tending of sheep, as if by these (even though in 

 the sweat of his face he should eat bread, and should 

 labor under the disadvantages of thorns and thistles 

 to gain the herb of the field) so to keep his mind, as 

 far as possible, from the baser and more ignoble sides 

 of man's life, as it has now come to be. Little they 

 knew in those days of the modern meaning of civil- 

 ization. The Lord God, who placed him in the gar- 

 den, is wise in His selections. Shall we not live like- 

 wise as He wished our forefather? 



Farming and shepherding these have been the 

 life work of some of the noblest of mankind from the 



