HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 97 



That's all right. But when you begin to 

 consider the farm home, with the farmer and 

 his family living on the land, then you bring in 

 a hundred and one new and elusive factors that 

 simply defy any inflexible system of business 

 reckoning. I'm not talking about purely sen- 

 timental factors, but of those things that will 

 appeal to the most intensely practical of men 

 who hasn't a fiber of sentiment in his make-up. 



During our first summer of actual farm 

 work, we couldn't even guess how long it would 

 take us to get the place built up to the point of 

 yielding satisfactory field crops; but in the 

 meantime we were continually taking stock of 

 conditions, making curious appraisal of our 

 life. 



Naturally enough, we made our first com- 

 parisons with the life we had known before we 

 took to farming. Leaving out enthusiasms 

 and keeping strictly to those items which may 

 be written with the dollar mark, this is the way 

 the matter stood in our understanding: 



The money we were spending on the land in 

 clearing, stone hauling, wall building and in 

 such-like ways, and in the first deep, thorough 

 breaking of our cultivated fields, was money 

 invested; the increase in value that was surely 



