FOURTEEN] CULTIVATION 
lack of elbow room. A very lively sort of person 
can occupy the whole of twenty acres. I mean he 
can just about fill twenty acres plumb-full of him- 
self — his whims, his notions, his experiments. 
But most people cannot fill out more than five or 
ten acres. Farms of one hundred acres are, for 
the most part, either left for nature to fill up, or are 
occupied by the fringed-out edges of the owner’s 
purposing — his unfinished work, his untrimmed 
orchards, his half-cultivated corn fields. 
When I began laying out my present home, a 
member of the Hayseed family, driving by, asked 
me if I was staking out arailroad. I told him the 
stakes meant lines of curving hedges. “How long 
will it take you to get all that work done?” “I 
will get the trees set within two years. These 
spruces will not all live; I must fill the vacancies 
next year.” “How much will it all cost?”? “Sev- 
eral hundred dollars, and in the long run thou- 
sands.” “When will you get your money back?” 
“The doing of it is worth all that it will cost, be- 
cause it will grow up a crop of thoughts in my soul. 
But in five years I will get some cash returns — not 
much of it, however, inside of eight or ten years.” 
“Aren’t you a fool?” “Very likely, if judged 
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