34 NATURE IN A CITY YARD 



of independent living will be appreciated 

 once more. 



Meeting some country people, and not- 

 ing how little they seem to care for nature, 

 how concerned they are with small things, 

 how their ambitions turn toward the city, 

 one feels that he must look for a human 

 balance, like that of the rotation of crops, 

 the town folk returning to the country to 

 restore their exhausted energies, say every 

 fifty years, and the rustics going to town, 

 in exchange, with their high vitality and 

 their practical ways and sense, to run the 

 affairs of society. Yet we mistake when 

 we charge invariable discontent against the 

 farmer. He may have a silly notion, like 

 others of us, that he would like to be 

 President; but he does not consent to stand 

 behind a counter or scribble at a desk in 

 order to do it. Sometimes he really en- 

 joys the health and liberty and landscape 

 to which he is heir, and envies the citizen 

 not a whit. One of the unlikeliest con- 

 verts to rural life that I have met is a ped- 

 dler, fifty-eight years old, who, having lost 

 an arm in a railroad accident, gains a pre- 



