4 My Little Farm 



the scientific and technical conduct of the farm 

 itself. In this way, I hope to find a double 

 answer to the question above submitted, illustrat- 

 ing the larger problem through the medium of 

 agricultural criticism. 



Friends outside often wonder how I can " stick 

 it " for long periods in Mayo, surrounded by a 

 painfully sordid life, a high native intelligence 

 drilled against intelligent living, and a collective 

 will deprived of even those primitive impulses 

 which work upward from the lowest levels of 

 normal existence. Well, I have never been able 

 to accept the misfortune of the neighbour as good 

 ground for avoiding him, but there are reasons 

 more personal and more imperative. One of these 

 is certainly in reverence for the character of my 

 father, who lived and worked where I am here, 

 and who, I believe, was never in the course of his 

 life accused of a falsehood. A straight man in a 

 triumphantly crooked environment, he brought 

 up a big family as well as it could be done, if 

 short of his own moral stature, and he transmitted 

 to me as much of his most inconvenient virtues 

 as a minor capacity could well assimilate. I think 

 I am doing as he would like to have done, and in 

 doing it, I am often forced to reflect whether, 

 from the enlarged consciousness of another world, 

 he may not be watching the attempt. Disabled 

 during the last three of his eighty-four years, he 

 got into debt, for the benefit of other people, and 

 then left the land for him that could discharge the 

 obligation. That was how I found myself a 



