Note (1) that the c p is an abbreviation for coffee pot and o is con- 

 traction for organ, and note (2) that both c p and o are located at front 

 windows. Now that may not be genius, but I am inclined to think it is. 

 Whether you are playing on the coffee pot or the organ, you can glance 

 out and see the Smith girl with her city beau (sometimes beaux) pass 

 and neither interrupt the aroma of the coffee nor the hilarity of the 

 organ. With this lucid, brief, and yet comprehensive plan of my 

 country house presented, I pass to other parts of my farm. 



You will do well to come and take a drink out of my spring. I am 

 always glad to get thirsty so as to take a drink at this fountain. It 

 never has run dry. I keep the thicket growing here above the spring, 

 with neither weed, nor vine, nor sapling, nor any tree cut; all the under- 

 growth and uppergrowth untouched, because I want dense shade for the 

 spring to enjoy. This soggy damp is fitted for the growth of ferns (I 

 have brought sandstone, and fern, and moss, and planted here), and the 

 spring wells up quietly, no sputtering, as of a hen announcing that she 

 has just laid an egg; but the water comes, not cold like mountain 

 springs, to be sure, but cold enough to need no iceman, and requires no 

 paying of ice bills. It is cold enough ; and there, in plain sight, with 

 the foliage reflected, leaf for leaf and spray for spray; and drinking 

 water from a chalice like this is thirst-producing as well as thirst-sat- 

 isfying; and I will come here to drink, whether I am thirsty or not. 

 The birds drink here in welcome as the water drowses from the spring 

 down a little ravine and into my neighbor's woods. I let it. I am not 

 stingy. What I can't keep I give away, which is the true art of gener- 

 osity. Come and drink from this spring. What a farm this is! 



In every play there is a villain. There is one on my farm. In y e 

 olden tyme a villain was a man who belonged to the soil a digger in 

 the ground a vocation very honorable to this day and to all days. But 

 this is not the sort of a villain I allude to. This is a live and vicious 

 villain a bold, bad man, who carries a gun and a kodak. When these 

 two peculiarities combine in a man I set him down as the consumma- 

 tion of villainies. Which wickedness the kodak wickedness or the 

 gun wickedness is the wickeder, I am not prepared to say. I do not 

 here give my mind though I have settled opinions on the subject. This 

 man has never shot me with his gun, but has often done so with his 

 kodak, which is a breech-loader and always full of shells. This instru- 

 ment of death has been turned on me when I have been playing base- 

 ball, when I made a base-hit, when I was making a home run, when I 



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