Morning journal and courier., 1891-09-15
No. 22t

offering farms by the hundred for the dis posal of summer visitors If there is pathos in the Scotch giens and their groups of deserted hearth-stones, so there is pa thos in the sixty abandoned cellars to be found within 6 radius of two miles at one point in the very town where I write. The very views from the hills offer, to one who remembers them dozen years back, distinct increase of forest and diminu- ton of cultivated land; and when we find a state official, in a published report, pointing with pride to a park of twenty live thousand acres now created in New Hampshire, and peopled with deer and buffalo, where once were fifty farms. it is impossible not to see that the same process which has transformed Scotland is now at work among Americans. It makes, of course, a vast difference that the Scottish peasantry were tenants, and were largely evicted and transported by no action of their own. whereas the fifty farmers dis placed by Mir. Corbin sold their lands will Gngly, it is to be presumed, because they thought they could do better elsewhere But the result on the social life of the ru- ral community is the same; the buffaloes cannot vote. the moose cannot belong to a farmers "grange,n and the whole popular life of the township and the county is i'm poverished just the same. Moreover, if one man to-day holds twenty-five thou sand acres for a deer park, why should not another man 6 few years hence hold that number of square miles for the same purposei
 Apart from this remoter solicitude, there is temporary satisfaction in the thought that this shifting of ownership tends, on the whole. to cheapen the summer; that is it gives room for a multitude whose means are scanty to avail themselves of the changes going on in a community thus shifting. The official pamphlet of New Hampshire offers farms of five hundred acres for fifteen hundred dollars, and of one hundred and fifty acres for five hun dred dollars; and this with buildings standing and within few miles of rail road and postoffice. Secure a home in New Hampshire" it says, cheerfully, on the title-page, "where health, comfort and prosperity abound" The scale of prices seems hardly compatible with prosperity, except for the purchaser; but perhaps ii is the purchaser who is meant. And when one considers the number of modest households for which few hundred dol lars may thus furnish a permanent sum mer retreat into purer air and outdoor existence, the suggestion of prosperity for them seems not unreasonable after all. Lowell was right; itis not the summer it.
 
 choose to put with it. If We once adopt Thoreau's motto, Simplify, say, simpli- fy," June is free to tolerably poor corners after all. Why should people be unhappy because they cannot drive four-in-hand at Newport, Rhode Island, when at Newport. New Hampshir-, they can buy for six hundred dollars & farm of one hundred acres, a house with twelve rooms, barn, horse-barn, wood-shed, carriage house and .s three miles of railroad station and post office, and within easy reach of Mount Sunapee and Sunapee Lakes Why cannot a reasonable family spend ''the lavish summer" very cheaPly in such a farm house, provided the household includes girls enough to look after the chickens and boys enough to drive home the cowst They can be guaranteed some visitors which the utmost wealth of the Rhode Is- land Newport cannot secure-as, for in stance, the wood-thrush and the whippoor- will