Norwich bulletin., 1910-06-18

Cwritten Specially for The Bulletin.)
 ''Take time to Iive-you will be q long time dead" AS I read that old sentiment revamped in a recent news paper article 1 began to wonder whether it hadn't a bearing on some farm problems.
 Life is good deal of a eonundrum, anyway. Whats it all about2 Whats 1t for? Whats its object? Whats the best thing to do with it?
 There are several thousand answers to these questions-but there isn't one answer to any one of the questions which will meet the full approval Of everybody. So far as the abstract prob lem is concerned, we might as well give it up at the start It's like the wonder whether Mars is inhabited or whether the sun is going some time to burn out or to blow up. We may know these things, some day, when the Central Knowledge sees that time ,e and we are ripe for knowing. Till then we can speculate-and wait.
 But, individually, we don't have to guess the big conundrum- Instead, each has the little puzzle of his own life to meet and that he must solve, in some fashion or other. The big one he can let alone for the slow unravel- ings of eternity, but the little one he has to live with and must master it or be mastered by it. And it makes no difference whether we sit down to it with pen and paper and seek to work it out by the rules of logic, or whether we Stubbornly turn our backs on it and go out to hoe corn-it is with us as our shadows are. ever-present. un- escapable.
 We farmers, as rule, don't 'ao much on metaphysics" There's too much dirt to dig and toe many weeds to kill We have to cultivate cab bages first, and our own souls second O. think we do. What to plant and and how to scare up help enough to take care of it while growing; how to keep our roofs from leaking and shoes on the children's feet-these and kin dred topics engross us. We're little apt, in truth. to regard people who theorize and speculate about life as useless critters not earning their salt. When a mans hands have hardened and the hoe handle, he's apt to thinF the penholder too small a tool to be orth working with. When he spends his strenuous days grcppling with hard who waste" their energies speculat- ing over theories.
 if am pressed to it, and must an s~er candidy, ''cross my heart and tell the truth. honest Injun, now I heard a small boy conjuring companion recently-I shall have t. admit a good deal of sympathy with this feeling. own up to tremendou: admiration for people who DO THINGS. I feel a real reverence for such men as Edison and Bell and Col oneI Goethals and Teddy" Roosevelt. When, the other day, I saw the huge Mauretania drive maj jestically up New York harbor, I experienced a sense of hero worship toward her captain. l should. if had met him. have taken off my hat in token of my respect for the wonderful plishment of that bi-m onthly but no less marvellous deed of his, in hurling those thousands of tons of heavier -than-water" steel across the painless ocean, straight and true as an arrow, to an invisible port But, after all, while it was he who did it. he never could have done it but for the previous dreamings and the orizings and speculations of numerous star gazing astronomers who had spent their lives in staring at the heavens and plotting out hypothetical orbits and figuring the attitudes and declina- tions of wheeling planets and twinlling suns. far-sown in the undreamable depths of infinite space. From their silent dark. quiet observatories came the knowledge which made his mas teEy of his clattering, screw threshing leviathan possible.
 Life isn't all doing: a part of 1t is being While 1t isn't common sense to set the thinker heavens high above the worker, it is not modest for us pragmatists to assume a greater vir- tue fors4 ourselves than just our fair share. Accomplishment is more than mere existence; granted; but exist ence must come first. We must live before we can do the work of live men. Right there comes in the trouble with tQo many of us plain farmer folks. were so busy doing things that we can't and won't stop to be ourselves. know some farmers to whom fife is nothing more than a chance 10 wait on their horses and their COWS, their corn and their cabba ges, their hay-nl,,r,s and their manure heaps. They abhcr an idle moment as natL-e IS said to aehor vacuum. They sean tn chase thetelves across the days aTlo years re- !ertleSsly; Cl er'S so nlu !A u dc and so little time to do it; when cne row is hood there's another l., begin arc they can't stop till that is done and then the next, and so on and on till, at fa St he hna ao lJo Fx1. -t...