24 
House 
Garden 
& 
THE SMOKE ON THE HORIZON 
T HESE thoughts were aroused by the perfidy of a certain small boy. 
He is the son of a neighboring farmer, and he positively lusted 
for the rural life. He vowed to me that his life ambition was to follow 
in father’s footsteps. He even asked if he could borrow literature on 
up-to-date farm methods, because he was going to study and be a 
progressive farmer. 
With the callow innocence of the city-born I loaned him the books 
and hired him into bondage to cut the lawn during my absence. His 
price, quite high, I thought, for sixteen, was thirty-five cents an hour. 
Yet, as he seemed enthusiastic for the work, we didn’t quibble over it. 
I went away on my business trip gaily confident. 
When finally I reached that hilltop again and looked upon the lawn 
that had been left shaven and rolled, it seemed as though my eyes 
were deceiving me. All through those ten long days I had dreamed of 
it as a vast table of green, cropped with meticulous care, stretching 
from the trim roadside to the infinity of 
the orchard. Instead, it looked like a 
meadow ready for haying. Dandelions in 
full bloom scattered seeds on every side. 
The grass was long and matted. In the 
border the weeds were winning over the 
flower seedlings. ... I assigned that lad 
to ultimate perdition. 
The next afternoon I met him trudging 
up the road. A dinner pail swung on his 
arm. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed. 
His broken word troubled him not the 
least. When I demanded why the blan¬ 
kety-blank he hadn’t come to work, he 
blandly replied that he had gone to work, 
and he pointed over his shoulder toward 
town, where a column of smoke from a 
factory chimney corrupted the skyline. He 
had given up his ambition to be a pro¬ 
gressive farmer when he discovered that 
hands were being paid amazing wages 
down at a nearby mill. 
Most of the boys in that neighborhood 
have done the same. Big pay and short 
hours constitute the Lorelei that calls them 
off the course of their naturally ordered 
lives. The smoke on the horizon is a 
constant menace to all of us in that neigh¬ 
borhood who need help in our gardens. 
It has become one of the great menaces to 
America’s future. 
T HERE was a time when the factory 
drew the farm boys to the city. To¬ 
day the factory is making its attraction 
more plausible and its temptation more 
alluring because it has moved to the coun¬ 
try. The boys can now live on the farm, 
having the benefits of home life, and still 
work close at hand, drawing the city wage. 
There is all the material advantage of 
working in the city with none of its incon¬ 
veniences. Meantime the harrow rests 
against the wall and beetles gnaw the 
vines. 
Travel along any trunk line of our rail¬ 
roads and notice what the factory is doing. 
Where farms once rolled gently down to 
the trackside are now line on line of fac¬ 
tory buildings — modern buildings, but 
ostensibly what they are. 
The machine that once created the city 
and cursed it as a place to live in has 
turned about, and may curse the country 
town. Industrialism is becoming ruralized 
and the rural sections, in turn, becoming 
industrialized. 
N O one can quarrel with the desire of 
the factor}' to move to the country. 
There its workers can find homes or have 
homes built for them, they can work in 
pleasant surroundings and breathe fresh and life-giving air—elements 
that, theoretically, make for industrial contentment and greater pro¬ 
duction. 
It is a fine thing, indeed, for a man at the lathe to raise his eyes and 
see a field of daisies swaying with the winds. It is refreshing for him 
to drink deep the clean air as he ceases a moment from work. It is his 
due to come home to his own house and scratch in his garden patch after 
supper. These conditions are veritable Heaven compared with the Hell 
of a blank wall outlook, fetid workshop air and a crowded tenement. 
Labor must have them. 
On the other hand, if the factory continues to draw the young men 
off the farm and keep them off it permanently, where is the worker in 
the mill going to get his food? Where are the rest of us going to 
get our food ? 
It is all very well for economists to say that the factories will eventu¬ 
ally overproduce and then be obliged to 
shut down, driving the men back to the 
farm. This would only be a temporary 
solution, however. In a few years we 
would feel the pinch again, when the 
present stores of factory products have 
run low and the mills open again to re¬ 
plenish them. 
Whether it is labor or capital that is to 
blame, the solemn fact is that too much 
emphasis has been placed on the nobility 
and rights of the skilled man who works 
with a machine, too little on the nobility 
and rights of those skilled with the hands 
in the arts of husbandry. The farm hand 
is just as deserving of high praise and 
justice as the factory hand; his demands 
are as pressing, his labor often harder and 
his hours certainly longer—for Nature 
punches no time clock. If the mill hand 
waxes fat at the price of injustice and 
neglect to the farm hand, no amount of 
material prosperity will stay by him. 
T HE smoke on the horizon, we may 
hope, is not alone from a factory but 
from a gigantic crucible in which is being 
fused some form of justice to those who 
work on the farm. At present it is a men¬ 
ace; it may eventually prove a blessing. 
What will come out of it no one can say 
for a certainty. We who have gardens, 
who love the country life and know what 
is at stake, must do our share in preparing 
the countryside to receive this new justice. 
First, we must stop associating the 
farmers with all that is dumb and slow 
and mentally thick. We must not expect 
low prices of him w'hen his own costs are 
high. We must enter into his work by 
working ourselves. We must insist on bet¬ 
ter schools for his children, better roads 
to his markets, and above all we must lend 
a hand in freeing him from the grip of 
unprincipled middlemen who snatch his 
profits. 
T HERE is no use pleading with young 
men to leave their paying jobs in fac¬ 
tories that surround country towns when 
we can offer them nothing but sentimental 
phrases about the beauties of farm life. 
Not until we get a better adjustment be¬ 
tween farmer and consumer will we have 
anything that is worth listening to. Not 
until Labor—the big, thinking men in 
Labor circles—quit valuing the farmers 
of America as a mere vote club to swing 
for their own particular advantage can 
we hope to have men stay on the farm 
contented. Only then will the menace of 
the smoke on the horizon be dispelled. 
The Italian Garden 
i. 
Some years ago, when first my hand unskilled, 
Assisted by my bride’s unerring taste, 
Sketched out the home we hoped some day to build, 
I used to think our mansion should be placed 
Within a garden, Villa d’Este style, 
Italian, formal, classic to the core, 
With geometric planting, and an aisle 
Of poplars, for a mile or maybe more. 
II. 
A column here, a snowy fountain there, 
A seat, an urn, a curving balustrade; 
A satyr smiling at a wood nymph fair, 
A dial peeping coyly from the shade. 
A pool, a grotto, and a little vale, 
Gouged-out in case the natural grades were wrong, 
Wherein at dusk a punctual nightingale 
Should serenade us with her even-song. 
III. 
We have our mansion now, though 1 confess, 
It is not quite the sort of thing we planned. 
’Twas built in 1890, at a guess, 
When architects, with one accord, Queen-Anned. 
A garden, likewise, glads us with its green, 
Informal space which, though not over-large, 
Creates a rather neat effect between 
Our clothes yard and the portable garage. 
IV. 
A barrel here, an old express cart there, 
A clothes-post leaning drunkenly awry; 
A sand-box full of dead leaves, and a pair 
Of blue dish-towels hanging out to dry, 
A bird-house, where the Sun’s last arrow gleams, 
And Tony, bless his gnarled and knotted face! 
Who cuts the grass and resurrects our dreams, 
The only thing Italian on the place! 
—George S. Chappell 
