Selecting the Farm 69 



touch that makes kinsmen of us all — the love of 

 creating, be it a railroad, a watch, or a fruit-farm. 

 Here is the secret of health, — to create, to enjoy 

 the creation. The personal equation must be 

 figured out by every man. Some men, at ninety, 

 can run a railroad, but the usual age for retiring 

 is not far from sixty. ''The machine,'* after that, 

 as Hamlet would say, "is no longer to him.** The 

 wheels creak and the grist runs low. The railroad 

 president finds pleasure in the system he has built 

 up ; the fruit-grower, in the plantation he has made. 

 And many fruit-farmers are worn out at sixty and 

 fail to reach ninety. It is the man, not the railroad 

 or the farm. 



Innumerable are the books which tell us how to 

 be strong and stay so; how to be well and happy. 

 In a drug store, as one glances about and reads 

 the labels on the bottles and the signed testi- 

 monials, he may well wonder not why any should 

 die, but why any take the trouble to be sick. Or he 

 may have a more painful thought: how take all 

 these potions and live. Yet we live and we die 

 despite the apothecary, despite the fruit-farms. 

 Doctors, in their puzzled moments, are likely to 

 send the patient off on his travels. It is an open 

 secret that the good doctor's purpose is to get the 

 patient thinking about something else than him- 

 self. Fruit-farming is this resource; the farmer 

 always has something to think about and to think 

 hard. His thousands of vines and hundreds of 

 trees keep him busy. Wind and storm, frost, 



