Norwich bulletin., 1911-06-03

SlCTA+ put ne Was BetltCtiS NlliihS his wife's relations should.
 We farmers have to live with our own troubles all day and every day, to say nothing about sitting up nights with them, sometimes. We don't see so much of the ,leighbors' difficulties, because we live rather widely apart. We don't see any of the troubles of people in towr-or a least. not enough to speak of. So we get, from the very nature of things. an idea that the woes which are all the time bouncing tioularly bent on our destruction. l get that sort of feeling on my farm; you get it on yours; Naighhor HoskinS gets it on his; and about seven mill lions of us get it on seven million other farms Or ranches or gardens.
 If you and ], for instance, could trade places for a year, the poSsibili- ties are that should find your big farm was just alive with all sorts of troubles that l had ignorantly sup posed you were free from; and you would ascertain. just as surely. that my little place hadn't yet been an- nexed to Paradise. Then. if we could both change fields and works with men in other vocations we should be just as sure to ind that they had their hothers and their worries and their struggles and their losses, which we, in our rural innocence, had supposed them quite enfranehised from. Why, the cities are chuck full of people who are all the time talking back to the land' because they find existence so full of prickers in town that they want to exchange for the ca sier and less bothersome life which they imagine we farmers lead.
 No; when old Marm Trouhiemaker i9 raIyinp n and Iodlinc- hor a,- broth, she isn't picking you and I. nor farmers as class to be doubled dos ed. She's splashing her bad-tasting stew around with a fine impartiality. The mar who doesn't get more than he wants of it hasn't been uncovered yet, but the distribution will average up fairly even, in the long run and on all sorts.
 Considering, therefore, that We are all born to trouble and that we can neither dodge it nor outrun it, I'm in elined to think that we farmers have at least one cause for a certain grim comfort in our vocation. Our enemies are so many and attack from so many sides and they are so internally fertile in new tactics that they fill our lives with very complicated variety of fighting, They keep us guessing - to use a slang phrase-about all the time
 ''Variety's the very spice of life
 That gives it sll its favor
 It would get mighty monotonous fighting the same enemy all the time Perhaps t can't be considered pleasure, but there is surely a sort of relief in changing hands and weapons. It's po- tato bugs one day and striped beetles the next; it's crows on the corn in tha early morning and woodchucks in the beans at twilight: If it isn't one thing, it's another" which is just where tho saving flavor of variety comes in. It isn't the same one condemned thing every time and all the time.
 There are men who work in shops and factories, each one of whom goes every morning to the same machine and makes all day long exactly the same product His machine has it's kinks and it's contrarinesses but they are about the same. day after day His material has its faults. but they are about the same. day after day. It's the same work and the same bothers, right along all the time. The man does this today and the same thing tomor- row. He has this particular bother t1day and just the same one tomorrow. He knows just where his machine is stubborn and must be forced just where it is wjlful and must be humor- ed. He gets in time to be about as automatic machine as the thing of
 
 Honestly, now, I'm glad my work isn't like that, and that my troubles aren't So deadly monotonous. Since I've got to have them, it sort of keeps up the interest to have them come from the sou -sou'west occasionally and not always from the east. Moreover, as one never knows which one will come next, nor from what quarter, it keeps one on the alert. Also. there's the chance any morning that an entirely new one will appear. One isn't re- stricted to the use of just one set of muscles in his right arm; he will have occasion to do some left handed fight ing before the season closes. He will get exercised and toughened up, ail around. He will have had to use his sinews and h;s think-stuff, too. He will have had to learn something of chemistry ana entomology as well as of vegetable life. He may eventually wear out. but he is in small danger of rusting out.