The progressive farmer and the cotton plant., 1905-04-04
Getting the Good Out of Life.

Getting the Good Out of Life.
zone of the most fixed and unalterable facts
of life" said the Professor to his class in psy-
chology, "s the essential impermanency of SEN
sation." Put that in plain farmer language,
what does it mean? Sensation is feeling; that
includes pleasure, pain, love, hate, JOY, misery.
lmpermanency means that a thing does not en-
dure. A first mosquito bite is an annoying thing;
men in mosquito countries allow the eager in
sects to fill themselves with blood, undisturbed;
they do not feel them any more. The child loses
its ball or breaks it's doll and life is desolate to
it, but the child laughs at real calamities in later
years. :
Farming is only an incident in life; it is not
life itself. Men farm to live. Pity the man
whose aim is so low that he lives to farm! The
work-horse does that and gets small Joy out of it.
There is so much to farm life besides the growing
of corn and the fattening of beeves and swine.
Dwellers in cities com to the country and are
intoxicated with the joy of the land. To them the
fields tell stories of rest and peace, the woods
whisper of paradise, the brooks tell stories of
sins washed away, the cool evening when only
the birds call confidently to each other bring a
message of forgiveness and hope and the dewy
mornings bring fresh assurance and newborn de-
sires. 1t is a wonder to these half-strangers to
country life that men who dwell always amid
such scenes should be sordid or discontinued or
guilty of low aims. They forget that truth of
"the essential impermanency of sensation" that
country jewellers lose the very best gifts of the
country through overmuch familiarity.
And what is the remedy? 1t is not easy to sug-
gest, yet here is a hint. Once we happened on a
camp where farmers we're assembled, their har-
vests gathered, their corn ripening, no urgent
duties requiring them at home. There was a clus-
ter of a dozen tents pitched in a leafy grove of
NAPLES. Each tent sheltered a family and one
large open canvas sheltered the sitting room, the
assembly. A short distance away the spring
broke out from the messy bank and there a placid
stream reflected the sycamores. These people
camp each year a week or so. They have a tele-
phone at the camp SO they are within call of
home should they be needed. They rest, become
acquainted with each other, read, take morning
dips in the cool water. The whole current of
their thought is changed and rested. And when
they go back to their homes it is to see all things
new, to feel once more a thrill of JOY in the beauty
and goodness of home scenes, to see things that
they had forgot to see at all. And the cost of
this is not more than to live at home. 1t is
travel and adventure with the misery of baking,
cindery railway journeying left out-though that
indeed would make one love his home when he
got back to it.
Country jewellers get too little out of country
life. A saddle horse is cheaply kept. A Western
pony may not have style, but he has go. A canter y
to the village will make the blood circulate better
and the man feel younger. A half day from the
grind of farm work now and then will open a new
perspective and enable the farmer to see his way
more clearly, besides getting him in touch with
the ioy of the world. And the women most of all
need the new outlook, the new sensation, so that
the old ones, most blessed of all, may be again
r~enewed-Chicago Breeders Gazette.
"Every since the Garden of Eden, men have
4aI-o~ oooJ Joo1 mo- p1aacrro IN LAWN the blame