The Bay of He Band 
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 oze cow like having a dairy farm. 
The average man had better keep his money in the 
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