68 An American Fruit-Farm 



a vocation. A fruit-farm is not a sanitarium, 

 though sometimes put to such a use. 



Back to the earth and the open, actively induced 

 by interest in the vocation of fruit-raising, a man, 

 not too old to get welly may regain health. But to 

 use a farm as a medicine, "one drop in a pail of 

 water,*' is merely a change of doctors. Even the 

 rival schools of medicine do not pretend to change 

 the pharmacopoeia. Cherry trees sometimes grow 

 elastic arteries; so too, ranching, or hoeing corn 

 or taking the grand tour by Kamak, Egypt, and 

 the Holy Land; for only healthy people survive 

 Jerusalem. No one comes to the fruit-farm too 

 young, but it is easy to come too old. Happy the 

 man who inherits not merely acres but the love 

 of cultivating them. 



The true fruit-man would rather raise fruit 

 than eat it, which is not an instance either of 

 commercialism or surfeit, — only of a pleasant part- 

 nership with Nature. Every sane man yearns to be 

 a creator. Man is the maker as he is the thinker, 

 and his cherries are never finer than his thoughts. 

 He who has not experienced the joys of growing 

 things knows no more than the pleasure of seeing 

 fruit for sale in the market. First the leaf, then 

 the bud, then the fruit, — ^but always the man. 

 The sacred books record that the Creator was 

 pleased with His handiwork, and in this men re- 

 semble their Creator. The poet is poet because 

 he is a maker, and we call him of low degree still 

 a versifier, or maker of verse. It is then a divine 



