A Farmer’s Life 
with the dropping acorns, the steady-rustling 
rains. 
This was what I always felt, although I knew 
it wasn’t just so. In point of faét this little 
stretch of converted marsh, this five hundred 
yards of English charm, kept strong men attive 
and watchful year after year. If ever they relaxed 
it was ready to revert to what it had been before 
England was settled. The spring and autumn, 
the rains, the trees, the grass, the dust, all had 
still to be managed as by resolute colonists. 
One brief episode in this endless effort was 
related by John Smith, himself the chief a€tor in 
it for the time. To understand his part, a certain 
detail in the locality I have described should be 
considered a little more closely. That lovely 
Stretch of road, where it touched Mr. Smith’s 
farm, had, on the opposite side, a piece of ground 
that was reverting to wildness. The owner of 
this piece of ground was no farmer. He seemed 
to have some dim idea of the more modern craze 
for building-estates which has fallen like an 
unsightly disease on all that neighbourhood, and 
he had, in fact, built a sort of villa overlooking 
Mr. Smith’s pasture across the road. The villa 
was less offensive to the eye than might be 
supposed. A few scrubby fir trees half hid it: 
besides, the alders on the intervening bank 
screened it from anyone passing on the road, 
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