528 
<Ph • RURAL NEW-YORKER 
March 22, 1!)1!) 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
The Sunny Side of the Barn 
1 During “Farmers’ Week” at Cornell 
the Hope Farm Man spoke on this sub¬ 
ject. A number of readers have asket] 
us to print this speech or talk. And so, 
without further remarks or apologies, 
here it is :.| ***** 
It seems to me a desirable thing tit 
take one hour of this busy and practical 
week to consider a message from the past. 
Modern education and modern thought are 
being trained to run at a full gallop. We 
are forgetting the happy old plan, belore 
the days of cars and good roads, when 
the whole family, on Sunday afternoon, 
conld walk slowly and happily over the 
pastures and hills' without, much caring 
when they got hack or where they went. 
In our chasing after .science, among the 
hills of life, we are forgetting this happy 
old practice, and the world has begun to 
show the results of this forgetting. 
So I am going to take my text from a 
little incident of childhood. I tind that 
most men are rather ashamed of their 
childhood. Finally, (hey come to middle 
years, and in spite of till their efforts to 
prevent it. they realize it. They know that 
they are slipping down on the other side 
of the root Then it suddenly comes to 
them that childhood and youth are the 
finest, wisest and most useful part ol 
life. 1 for every comedy and tragedy of 
adult life is originally lived over in the 
thought and imagination of the child. 
You rich men and you great scientists 
will, no doubt, question my judgment, 
when I say that, with all your money, 
your power and your wisdom, you are 
not as useful a citizen as a happy and 
hopeful little child. Too often the so- 
called wisdom and power of old age is 
only the faith and the hope of the child, 
with all the poetry and imagination 
squeezed out of it This great gift of 
childhood dries up and blows away. 
if if * * ijs 
The child is a crude iron of life, lie 
is made into finely tempered steel only 
through the struggle to carry some of 
childhood's ideals through the fire of false¬ 
hood and ridicule and evil. If lie can go 
through if and rememlier his childhood 
kindly, he will carry a weapon of steel. 
Should he he taught to he ashamed of 
his childhood, lie will turn up a little 
sour, a little hopeless, a. little cynical, 
and he will lie obliged to tight with a 
weapon of cast iron, which will break in 
his hands before the gates of desire. I 
think, perhaps, that, is why so many men 
and women live tbeii lives of toil and 
study and are unhappy because they can¬ 
not, with their tool of cast iron, carve 
their names upon the rocks. Thus it 
has come home t.0 me slowly and with 
irresistible force that, the great aim of 
living, the great aim of all education, is 
to keep alive in tin* hearts of men and 
women something" of the faith and the 
hope of childhood. 
• $ * * e * 
As a hoy on a little Yankee farm 1 
had a “stent.” set out for me every day. 
During the Winter it was sawing and 
splitting wood. Our ham stood so that 
somehow on a VI inter’s day one side or 
it faced the road, and it always seemed 
to be warm and sunny. The other was 
turned so it was always cold and frosty, 
with little if any sun. The hens and the 
cow and the sheep always made for the 
sunny side of the burn, which represented 
the comfortable and the bright side of 
life. The old gentleman who brought me 
up always put the woodpile tin the frosty 
side of the barn. lit argued that if the 
boy worked too much on the sunny side, 
he would stop to look at the passers-by, 
feel something of the joy of living, and 
stop his work to absorb a little of it. 
We wert* brought up to believe that labor 
was a curse, put upon us for our sins, 
a serious matter, a discipline and never 
a joy. When the boy worked ou the 
frosty side, he must move fast in order 
to keep warm. He would not stop to 
loaf in the sun. In* could not throw 
stones or practice baseball so long as lie 
had to keep his mittens on to keep his 
fingers warm. Thus the argument was 
that the hoy would accomplish more on 
the frosty side, and realize that labor rep¬ 
resented the primal curse which some¬ 
how seemed to rest particularly hard 
upon the farmer. And so as a child I 
did my work and passed much of my life 
bn the frosty side of the barn, silent and 
thoughtful, while the liens cackled and 
sang on the sunny side. It seemed strange 
to me that people could not see that the 
thing which made tin* hens lay would 
surely make the hoy work. 
if if if if if 
There will always lie a dispute as to 
whether a boy or a man does his best 
work under the spur of necessity, or out 
of a full bag of tile oats of life. And 
they do it with greater or less cruelty 
as more or less of their life has been 
spent on the frosty side. I never yet 
saw a self-made man who did anything 
like a perfect job on himself. ’I hey 
usually spoil their own sons by giving 
them too easy a time, while work is a 
necessity in building character. Work 
without play of some sort, is labor with¬ 
out soul, anil that is one of the most cruel 
and dangerous things in the world. 1 
have noticed that most men who pass 
their childhood on tin* frosty side of the 
barn have what I call a squint-eyed view 
of youth. They spend a large part of 
their time telling bow they laid to work 
as a boy, and how much inferior their 
own sons arc since they do not have 
chores to do. That man’s boys will pry 
no attention except when his eye is upon 
them, and rightly so, l think. The man 
looks across the table at mother, with a 
shake of his head, for is not the Smith 
family responsible for the fact that those 
hoys <lo not equal their wonderful sire? 
I have learned better than to expect 
much sympathy from m,v hoys for what 
happened 50 years ago. 
:«i * * # * 
The old gentleman would come nmv 
and then and look around the corner of 
the barn to see if I was at work. The 
frosty side of the barn in youth has one 
advantage. It forces the hoy to think 
and reason out the justice of life. Fuele 
Daniel had not ' read enough of history 
to know that Guizot, tin* great French 
historian, says that the only thing which 
those who represent tyranny, injustice or 
evil are afraid of in the human mini!. 
What he means is that whenever you can 
get the plain, common people to think 
clearly and with their own brains, they 
will sooner or later wipe off the slate of 
history and write freedom in big letters, 
tin the sunny side I think I should have 
talked, gotten rid of my thought, before 
it could print, itself upon my little brain, 
but there on the frosty side of the barn 
I know that 1 said little, hut reasoned it. 
out. with tlie clear wisdom of Childhood. 
If T'nelo Daniel had been a student, of 
Shakespeare, he would have gone straight 
to that famous passage in Julius <’a*snr 
which probably expresses the thought of 
DO per cent, of the humans capable of 
thinking, who have ever lived to maturity : 
“Let me have men about me that are fat. 
Sleek-beaded men and such as sleep o’ 
nights; 
Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry 
look; 
lie thinks too much; such men are dan¬ 
gerous.” 
T was thinking out my problem, and 1 
want to tell you younger men that the 
questions which started at the teeth of 
my saw on tin* frosty side of that old 
barn have cut their way through the 
years, and chased and haunted me all 
through life. The injustice of labor and 
social conditions—that is the foundation 
of the trouble in the world. T T pon it till 
helpful education should hi* based. Youths 
ideals will always chase you like that, if 
you give them half a chance, and you 
never can have better mental companions. 
I was trying to reason out one of two 
resolutions. Off in that dim future of 
manhood when I should grow up, my 
time would come, and I might have power 
over some other hoy, or may he a man. 
I could put him on the frosty or on the 
sunny side of t.’ e barn, as I saw lit. 
What, would I do to him to pay for my 
session on the frosty side? Somehow I 
think it is natural for human beings to 
seek reparation and promise themselves 
to take their misfortunes out of someone 
else when their power comes. I think I 
should have grown up with something of 
that determination in mind had it. not 
been for the poet Longfellow. 
if $ ijt * if 
Now you will smile, you successful 
farmers, you tried old analyzers and sol¬ 
emn teachers* and you budding young 
hopes. What has poetrv got to do with 
farming or agricultural education? What 
did the poet. Longfellow ever do for 
farming? Did he ever have a hen in an 
egg-laying contest that laid 1100 eggs in 
a year? Did he ever raise a prize pump¬ 
kin. or a prize crop of potatoes? Did 
he even originate the Longfellow variety 
of flint corn? Do not men need solid 
pith rather than flabby poetry in their 
thought? Is it true that Longfellow 
would have starved to death on a good 
farm? Yet his poetry and the thought 
that went with it were one of the things 
that made New England dominate this 
country in thought. My childhood was 
passed at a time when we had no science 
to study. Bacteria were swimming all 
about us in the air, the food and flu* 
water. I had, no doubt, swallowed mil¬ 
lions of them at every mouthful, and we 
grew fat on them. We had no books on 
science or bulletins, but every farmhouse 
had its copy of Bryant. Whittier. Long¬ 
fellow. Emerson and Holmes. The best 
duck-raiser in our town was a man who 
could recite Bryant’s poem, “To a Water 
Fowl,” with his eyes shut. There are 
some famous poultry men in this room, 
but I think I can safely challenge any one 
of them to come up here and recite even 
one verse of that poem, yet who would 
say that he would not he a better poul¬ 
try man and a better man if he could 
carry in his heart a few verses of that 
poem ? 
“There is a Power whose care 
Teaches thy way along that pathless 
coast.” 
:S it< * * * 
‘‘Hi* who from zone to zone. 
Guides through the boundless sky thy 
certain flight, 
In the long way which T must tread alone. 
Will lead my steps aright.” 
* # *t if if 
I had recited Longfellow’s “Resigna¬ 
tion” in school. I gave it about as a 
parrot would, but on the frosty side of 
the old barn one verse.shoved itself into 
my little brain : 
Let us be patient; 
These severe afflictions 
Not from the ground arise; 
But oftentimes celestial benedictions 
Assume this dark disguise. 
(Continued on page 55.?) 
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