28 
House & Garden 
rural aristocracy 
/V DISTINCTION always has to be made between the aristocracy 
of the town and the aristocracy of the country. Clothes and 
motor cars and an appreciation of books and music and paint¬ 
ing have to do with the one, whereas these things have very little co 
do with judging the aristocrat of the countryside. 
The country gentleman, as we understand the term, is not the rural 
aristocrat. In fact, the rural aristocrat is rarely suspected of being 
an aristocrat at all. You may have to know him for years before 
he reveals the nobility of his lineage. 
D OWN the road from me, on the top floor of a huge barn, lives an 
old man. He has always lived in this Connecticut valley, and his 
father before him. He is not especially given to baths, this aris¬ 
tocrat, nor does he often enjoy the ministrations of a barber. 
The neighbors call on him to do odd jobs; he is handy with tools. 
If he sets out to make you a firescreen, he may take two years to com¬ 
plete it. Then, when he has brought it in, wonderfully wrought with 
his own gnarled hands, he will charge you two dollars—a dollar for 
each year that he was tinkering at it. Around his barn are piles of 
stones. If you examine them, you’ll find that each one has a peculiar 
beauty. The old man collects them because, as he puts it, some stones 
is pretty. 
Meet him trudging along the road, and though you’ve known him 
for years, he will not speak to you unless you speak to him first. He 
says he doesn’t like to interrupt folks’ meditations. Which is at once 
a pretty thought and a noble compliment. 
Having had, in his day, a hand in the construction of most of the 
old houses along the valley, he can tell where many of the planks came 
from and where the tree originally grew. If he takes a fancy to you, 
he’ll make a noon-mark on the corner of your house, so that you can 
tell the time of day. 
This hairy and ancient aristocrat is a friend to birds and snakes. 
He holds long conversations with chipmunks. The gray squirrels 
dwell amicably in the elm trees about his barn. 
A T the foot of our hill, just across the brook, dwells another rural 
aristocrat. Ninety-four years—most of it hard labor with the 
unkind New England soil—have bent his back into a question 
mark. His house is only a step back from the road but in that nar¬ 
row strip his wife grows madonna lilies and yuccas and delphiniums 
such as the fancy garddners hereabout cannot approach for size or 
beauty. 
Many years ago this ancient couple took a sudden plunge into 
modernity. They bought a motor car. It was one of the first motor 
cars made—a high affair on hard rubber wheels. Of Sundays you 
could see this ancient pair ride forth in their high-pooped automobile 
with a great fringed umbrella shading them from the sun. They 
never needed to sound a horn, for their car en route made the noise 
of a boiler factory. 
Last year the old man rolled his car into the bam for the last time. 
He was too old for the sportin’ life. Since then he has had to con¬ 
tent himself with the little garden that stretches down the hillside to 
the brook behind his house. It is an abundant garden, with only 
one mistake; and that is one mistake a true gardener cannot afford 
to make to plant a crooked drill. By some strange miscalculation 
he has planted a row of beans off line. It greatly worries him. A 
kindly old man this; last year when one of us was sick he trudged all 
the way up this hill to bring his offering of friendship and sym¬ 
pathy—a bunch of young onions. 
T HE third aristocrat is my gardener. A Swede, with the strange 
ocular attraction of Mr. Turpin in the Sunshine Comedies. Out 
of Stockholm by Connecticut, to use the horsey term; out of Stock¬ 
holm ten years by Connecticut fifty. He still waxes sentimental over his 
native land—and I suffer it in peace, for there are three things about 
which a man may justifiably be sentimental—his love affairs before 
marriage, his love affairs since, and his native land. 
To him the straight furrow is the noblest work of man and the 
dream toward which he constantly labors is to make that furrow bring 
forth its increase before anyone else’s furrows do. 
He promised me the first peas by the 10th of June and on the 
10th of June we had the first peas in this valley. He swore by Calvin 
and the pope of the Seventh Day Adventists that we would have new 
potatoes for the 4th of July, and on the morning of the 4th he climbed 
the hill in his Sunday suit, knelt down on his newly creased trousers 
beside the row and produced the evidence of his oath. When I asked 
him why he had been so sure in making these promises, he answered 
that he knew the soil and could speak as one in authority. 
T HAT is the work of the true rural aristocrat—he knows the soil, 
he knows the things that grow from it and is comrade to the birds 
and beasts that make it their home. The basis of his life is entirely 
different from the basis of life of the man who lives in the city. His kind 
of aristocracy is diametrically different. He measures culture and 
success by other standards. 
This rural aristocracy will never become entirely extinct. So long 
as wisdom dwells with men, some few of the human race will prefer to 
live close to the soil, heedless of material success, neglectful even of 
the great progress being made in agricultural methods. These dear 
old fellows who plow and plant and reap by moon phases, whose lives 
are ruled by rural legends, these men are an authority in their own 
world, and we sorely need that kind of other-worldly authority. 
There is a danger, however, that they will be crowded farther and 
farther out and that newcomers will neglect to appreciate them. The 
suburbs of our country towns grow very fast. Our summer colonies 
make their encroaching way. The country estate swallows up the 
picturesque solitary farmer. Our motor cars whirl past him heed¬ 
lessly. We city folks bring with us our own kind of aristocracy and 
impose it upon the countryside. We build noble country homes and 
lay out magnificent gardens and think that thereby we redeem the 
country from its dark night of hard labor, poverty and difficult living. 
The city man who comes to the country can never quite rid himself 
of his superiority. And yet in the rural scheme of things the city 
man is often of bourgeoise and the lower orders. 
In the country the sons of the soil are the true aristocrats, and we 
should respect their lineage. As a nation we must do all in our power 
to preserve and increase their numbers. Our farm population is not 
growing, if census figures are to be believed. The countryside is in 
transition. Modern machinery is robbing the rural districts of their 
legendary picturesqueness in an effort to make them more efficient and 
productive. In the face of this change the old aristocrats are appar¬ 
ently outshone. And yet, who knows but what they are the real guar¬ 
dians of the soil, the real nobles of the world upon which we must 
depend for the bread that is on our tables and the fresh green com? 
