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the country is all and more than the poets say, — if 

 it is poetry that you come out into the country for to 

 feel. 



Take my meadow, for instance, all aglow in June 

 with buttercups, as if spread with a sheet of beaten 

 gold ! But now, if it is only hay that I am after (alas, 

 too often it is), then my gold turns all to brass, and 

 worse than brass, for buttercups, as my dairyman 

 neighbor tells me, make the poorest kind of hay. I 

 should keep no cow, perhaps. She gives nice milk, to 

 be sure, but she eats up my beaten gold, she kills my 

 buttercup poetry. Maybe I am too rich, I own too 

 much : one cow, one horse, two pigs, thirty hens, 

 fourteen acres of hills and trees. For it is the truth 

 that I do not enjoy the foxes now as I did before I 

 kept hens, nor the buttercups as I did before I got the 

 cow. Suppose, now, besides all of this, I had money, 

 — a lot of it ! — several thousand dollars ! You never 

 get money along with a farm, and that is one reason 

 why a farm is such a safe and sure investment for the 

 soul. It is not the cow nor the chores, but money in 

 or out of the bank, that robs life of its June. 



Nor is owning 07ie cow like having a dairy farm. 

 The average man had better keep his money in the 



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