& Cure for Winter 
blind instincts. The human soul, that thing whose 
satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates and a silk 
petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of 
a mouse, may be a different thing indeed; but origi- 
nally it, too, had simple, healthful instincts; and 
among them, atrophied now, but not wholly gone, 
may still be found the desire for a life that is more 
than something to eat and something to put on. 
To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his 
potatoes, his corn, his beans and squashes before the 
long, lean winter comes to an end. But if squashes 
to eat were all, then he could buy squashes, bigger, 
fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the 
grocery store. He may need to eat the squash, but 
what he needs more, and cannot buy, is the raising 
of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering of it. He needs 
to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his 
neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic 
and look at it. He almost hates to eat it. 
A man may live in the city and buy a squash and 
eat it. That is all he can do with a boughten squash ; 
for a squash that he cannot raise, he cannot store, 
nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man 
live where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a 
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