* Note (1) that the c p is an abbreviation for coffee pot and o is con- 
traction for organ, and note (2) that both c p and o are located at front 
windows. Now that may not be genius, but I am inclined to think it is. 
Whether you are playing on the coffee pot or the organ, you can glance 
out and see the Smith girl with her city beau (sometimes beaux) pass 
and neither interrupt the aroma of the coffee nor the hilarity of the 
organ. With this lucid, brief, and yet comprehensive plan of my 
country house presented, I pass to other parts of my farm. 
You will do well to come and take a drink out of my spring. | am 
always glad to get thirsty so as to take a drink at this fountain. It 
never has run dry. I keep the thicket growing here above the spring 
with neither weed, nor vine, nor sapling, nor any tree cut; all the under- 
growth and uppergrowth untouched, because I want dense shade for the 
spring to enjoy. This soggy damp is fitted for the growth of ferns (I 
have brought sandstone, and fern, and moss, and planted here), and the 
spring wells up quietly, no sputtering, as of a hen announcing that she 
has just laid an egg; but the water comes, not cold like mountain 
springs, to be sure, but cold enough to need no iceman, and requires no 
paying of ice bills. It is cold enough; and there, in plain sight, with 
the foliage reflected, leaf for leaf and spray for spray; and drinking 
water from a chalice like this is thirst-producing as well as thirst-sat- 
isfying; and | will come here to drink, whether | am thirsty or not. 
The birds drink here in welcome as the water drowses from the spring 
down a little ravine and into my neighbor’s woods. | let it. I am not 
stingy. What I can’t keep I give away, which is the true art of gener- 
osity. Come and drink from this spring. What a farm this is! 
In every play there is a villain. There is one on my farm. In ye 
olden tyme a villain was a man who belonged to the soil—a digger in 
the ground—a vocation very honorable to this day and to all days. But 
this is not the sort of a villain I allude to. This is a live and vicious 
villain—a bold, bad man, who carries a gun and a kodak. When these 
two peculiarities combine in a man | set him down as the consumma- 
tion of villainies. Which wickedness—the kodak wickedness or the 
gun wickedness—is the wickeder, | am not prepared to say. I do not 
here give my mind though I have settled opinions on the subject. This 
man has never shot me with his gun, but has often done so with his 
kodak, which is a breech-loader and always full of shells. This instru- 
ment of death has been turned on me when I have been playing base- 
ball, when I made a base-hit, when I was making a home run, when I 
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