The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1903-11-17
The Enrichment Of Country Lie.

country life is enriching as never before. I
am not now saying that farmers are growing
flcher. 1 hope they are, though appearances
sometimes point the other way. Be that as it
may, we are now concerned with the enrichment
OF the farmers life and not the filling of the
farmers purse.
II. Comfort. It is to be noted, in the first
place, that country life is at last beginning to
share in the bene6cent revolution which science
has lately wrought in the means and modes of
life. The standard of comfortable living is
spreading into the country and, what is import
ant, 1t is found to be practically applicable there.
We have observedy for example, that a given lot
OF materials for a house can be put together in
a comfortable and convenient dwelling at no
additional cost for the comfort and convenience.
We have a series of practical books on Home
Building and Furnishing, How to Plan Home
Grounds, How to Make a Flower Garden, etc.
We are making another discovery-making it in
spots, but the spots will multiply and meet-the
discovery, namely, that we are too poor to endure
the expense of ungraded roads with mud bot
toms, or no bottoms. And for the Frightening of
country life the good road will
lie like a shaft of light across the land,
Through all the circle of the golden year.
and the work of the farm is already greatly
lghtened by the introduction of machinery into
w~ell-nigh all its departments, as well as by the
control of the fertility of the soil by scientific
treatment. In the past fifty years the number of
farm-workers has not only doubled, but the value
of their work has been increased twenty fold. Are
we warranted in expecting the time when the
experience of Thoreau will be realized by the
average country dweller? He says, you may
recall, that for more than five years he maintained
himself solely by the labor of his hands, and
found that he could meet the expenses of living
by working about six weeks a year, which left
him the whole of his winters and most of his
summers free and clear for study.
so. Variety of interests. The monotony of
country life is relieved now by a greatly In
creased variety of interests. Transportation
opens markets and makes profitable many more
crops than formerly. Experimentation on the
physical and chemical character of soils, upon
the plants and animals upon the farms, offers an
unending means of amusement, But more efec-
tive than experiments and varied products for
importing interest and zest to country life is
the new sympathy with the manifold phases of
nature, which is one of the pictureque features
of our period. This feeling and attitude occurs,
indeed, in individual cases from early times in
literary history, as in Horace and Lucretius and
Theocritus, and in some of the early English
poets, but in our day it is getting to be almost
universal, as is shown by the popularity and vol
ume of outdoor literature with its invitation
Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your teacher
This later phase of it may be treated back to the
eighteenth century to such sympathetic abser-
vers as Gilbert White and DeSaussure on the
scientific side and on the poetic side to Cowper
and Wordsworth. In the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century it grew rapidly under the