492 
RURAL NEW-YORKER 
March 31, 1917. 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
Damp Days. —St. Patrick’s Day came 
this year with dripping skies and mean 
mnd. All mud is mean except when 
some long drought is broken by a deluge 
of rain, but the meanest of all is the mud 
which forms in March before the frost 
is out of the ground. You have a few 
inches of soft mush on top and a frozen 
layer below. The water cannot sink 
away into the soil, so it turns the face 
of nature into a great mud pie. It makes 
a fine situation for sowing clover seed, 
but it also sows the seed of discontent 
in the farm family. That crop of dis¬ 
content is worse than quack grass unless 
you can root it out at once. So as it 
grew dark the little girls and I built a 
roaring open fire. A cout)le of dry old 
peach roots which did their duty in prov¬ 
ing the Striugfellow system of planting 
made a solid backing for this fire, and 
the lighter stuff roared and snapped as the 
blaze took hold of them. A couple of 
big baked apples put us in a cheerful 
mood as we pulled the big chair up as 
near to the fire as the heat would per¬ 
mit. There I sat, not quite filling the 
big chair—but with a small girl, each 
with hair that matched the blaze, sitting 
on either chair arm. 
Ueauing Habits. —I do not know how 
you read—I presume we all have per¬ 
sonal habits or methods of shovelling 
books into the brain. Some people dash 
through a book as if in a race against 
time to reach the end. They stick to 
one book until they finish it all. I can¬ 
not read that way. I have to read slow¬ 
ly and absorb the book instead of trying 
to “eat it alive.” Then I have fallen 
into the habit of “reading in layers” as 
I call it. So I loaded up with a big 
volume of Knglish history, a story en¬ 
titled “The Bent Twig,” a copy of Whit¬ 
tier’s poems, a book on fertilizers and a 
report by a professor who undertakes to 
show that the farmer receives a 55-cent 
dollar. I do not know how it is with 
you, but I get more out of reading by 
turning from one book to another, so as 
to cook the message they bring like a pot 
of Boston baked beans—the fat thor¬ 
oughly mixed into a balanced ration. It 
seems to me that most so-called “learned” 
men are one-sided. Their knowledge is 
strong rather than useful because they 
have not mixed the fat with the beaus. 
What the restaurants call “New York 
beans” are cooked without this blending 
and perhaps that well typifies the differ¬ 
ence between the two cities. But before 
I can settle down to reading the little 
girls remind me that the_ third Cherry- 
top is upstairs in bed with a bad sore 
throat. So we put the screen before 
the fire and go up to cheer him up a 
little, only to find him fast asleep. He 
grew weary of waiting for us, so he 
turned over and found dreamland a 
country where throats are never sore and 
where muskrats abound. Dor unhappily 
his fur farming has gone glimmering 
with the death of the first muskrat. 
Book (TmmKEN.—So back we came to 
the big chair befoi'e the fire. I picked up 
“The Bent Twig,” one little girl took a 
copy of nursery rhymes and the other 
tried to read the daily paper. 1 had 
come to the j)oint in the story where the 
rich little boy went to play with country 
children, and his first desire was to pull 
off elegant shoes and stockings and go 
barefooted. I looked up to glauc(; at 
the little girl’s paper and read this head¬ 
ing : 
$75 a Day to Care 
For Col. AstoFs Son 
The article went on to state that the 
mother of this three-year-old boy had 
rendered an account of the money spent 
' in raising him. Between Aug. 14, 1912, 
and Dec. 31, 1915. she spent .$86,0.34 on 
I this little boy. This makes an average 
of over $75 a day and the special guard¬ 
ian compliments the mother on her ex¬ 
cellent care! I concluded it was about 
time for me to put down the story and 
take up the history or the professor’s re¬ 
port ! Think of it for a moment—$75 a 
day for a baby when the original Astor 
started the great family wealth by sav¬ 
ing the greater part of an income of 75 
cents a day! 
Not To Be Envied. —My sturdy little 
girls sat there dressed in 69-ceut dresses 
and plain shoes and stockings with no 
thought of envy for that unfortunate 
baby. You could not have found, in all 
the world, a power strong enough to pull 
them away from my chair and put them 
in the soft bed of this $75 victim of great 
wealth. They are both doing their little 
work and playing their little useful part 
—happy to be useful, happy to be loved 
in this plain family life and this quiet 
place. For me, it is the best part of 
life to feel that our children can find 
more pride and pleasure in their 69-cent 
dre.sses than this unfortunate baby can 
ever take in his .$7.5 per day. Dong, 
'ong ago I gave up all envy of the very 
rich or any desire to live their life. I 
have seen hundreds of them who put on 
a fine mask of happiness as they adver¬ 
tise their w’ealth, but there always comes 
a moment of confidence when they take 
their mask off and you may see that their 
gold has cut great lines of care and vain 
longing on their faces. That unfortunate 
little rich pauper will some day look out 
from his gilded prison and see sturdy, 
ragged little fellows playing in the dirt. 
Then the boy within him will realize that 
one penny will buy more happiness for 
these natural children than all of the 
7500 cents spent daily on him for “bare 
necessities.” Can you wonder I hugged 
those two little redheads up tight when 
bedtime cam<?—and went after another 
baked apple? 
Prejudice. —That is one of the things 
which usually come to me on a bad 
night before an open fire. As a fellow 
gets along in years he finds himself try¬ 
ing to understand why the world is so 
slow to move ahead, and why history 
seems to run around in circles—ever 
widening, it is true—but always moving 
in curves rather than in straight lines. 
One reason is that too many people, in 
spite of aU that common sen.se and his¬ 
tory teach them, envy and ape the rich. 
One generation seems to teach it to an¬ 
other until we have a false standard of 
behavior and ideals which puts boodle 
above brains, money above morality, lazi- 
ne.ss above labor. The be.st wish I can 
give to my little girls is that they may 
alw’ays prefer the independence and love 
which may be stitched into a 69-cent 
dress to the ball and chain carried by the 
$75 baby. 
Cheap Children. —Mother is a wom¬ 
an who thinks well of her own children 
(when they are not present) but she 
wants a monopoly of mentioning their 
good and bad qualities. So when I got 
started on this subject she handed me a 
little volume called “Heart Throbs,” or 
extracts from old scrap books. She found 
a certain page and pointed it to me. It 
was a little story of a clergyman who 
wished to introduce new hymn books. 
He told the clerk to give out the notice. 
The clerk, however, gave out another no¬ 
tice first and this was: “All those who 
have children they wish baptised please 
sernd in their names at once.” The 
clergyman was deaf and thought this no¬ 
tice was about his hymn books. So he 
got up and said: “And I want to say for 
the benefit of those who haven’t any that 
they may be obtained from me any day 
between three and four o’clock; the or¬ 
dinary little ones at 15 cents and special 
ones with red backs at 25 cents each!” 
Well, I can appreciate all of that. I 
wouldn’t mind taking one of the 1.5-cent 
babies end entering him in the great life 
race for useful qualities against the $75 
child! 
Hard Heads. —But I laid aside the 
story and picked up the big histoi-y. I 
am studying the time of Cromwell and 
its influence upon the people of England. 
Here is one thing which struck me and 
struck the book out of my hand for a 
time. It refers to William Harvey, the 
first man to announce and demonstrate 
the theory of the circulation of the blood: 
“It teas remarked that no yhysieian in 
Europe who had reached J/O years of age 
when Harvey’s diseovery u'as^ made puh- 
lic was known to adopt if. If is inaintaln- 
ing it is even said to have diminished his 
own practice and eelehrity. So general 
is the force of prejudice even on mat¬ 
ters of the most practical nature, and so 
liahlc is it to become fired beyond all 
hope of removal after a certain period of 
Ufe4” 
Harvey’s discovery changed the entire 
system of medical treatment—^just^ aa 
later discoveries have upset all previous 
theories and practices. Ah! But how 
much has human nature gained in liber¬ 
ality in the three centuries since Harvey 
delivered his worldmoving lectures? 
We see that all the doctors who were 
over 40 years old failed to understand 
that the world really had started climb¬ 
ing on Harvey’s words. Having had some 
little experience' with the “35-eent dol¬ 
lar” and other things, I can appreciate 
all that. Most men of middle years be¬ 
gin to build a shell around their mind— 
pretty much like the clam or oyster 
shelling himself in. Aping the rich and 
strong starts the children away from in¬ 
dependent thought, and the prejudice of 
middle years completes the job. 
A Hot Ending. —I would like to tell 
what I found in the other books, but I 
have already talked too long. The world 
looked gloomy outside and glowing with¬ 
in when I went to bed. Just after mid¬ 
night the children came rousing me out. 
There was a great light all around, for 
my neighbor’s barn was afire—belching 
out great tongues of flame. It was the 
home of that great Holstein calf \ve told 
of a few’ weeks ago. They got him out 
safely with the cows but the barn burned 
to the ground. The house and sheds 
Avere saved by hard work. I have seen 
fires in the country where the home folks 
and a few neighbors were left alone to 
fight with buckets of water. In this 
case, shortly after the blaze burst out 
great eyes of fire were seen coming over 
the hills and along the roads as cars 
came rushing to the rescue. Take it all 
through we had an eventful night. 
H. W. O. 
Y OU know where the 
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MYSTIC, CONN. 
MY 1917 SPLIT HICKORY 
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Columbus. Ohio . 
Station 290 
WTED 
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