Norwich bulletin., 1911-04-01
FARMING BROAD AND FARMING cIosE-THE DIFFERENCE

| crops with. Do you, reader? I con fess frankly that don't Of course, there's something mouth filling and magnificent in having and talking about wheat fields of many thousand acres, and of ones private elevators, where he loads, not single cars, but whole trains from his own threshers. And it must be little bit awful to look ou. from ones front door on an apparently limitiess world of corn. horizon--which doesn't rise up to shut your view, because it dips away out of sight towards China and the Philip pines. But I think 1t must get mighty monotonous at times.
 If my modntain-I call it mine, though I haven't any deed of it ex- capt the deed of eyesight which God gave me to it. when He opened my eyes--if my mountain were suddenly removed and cast into tho sea with all its ridges and peaks and buttressing it would add several thousand acres to the area of level and arabic land here abouts. But, say, I should miss old Douglass Knob with it's rounded top catching for me and throwing back into the valley the first rays of the
 
 ful shade it casts in the long, hot summer afternoon, when the same sun sinks behind it and pours radiating glory over the eastern sky from its flaming spokes of light, while am finishing up my days work in the cool shadow. I should miss, too, the arbu- tus and the Hverwort which are all ready preparing to peep out at me from among it's rocks. I should miss the roar of the wind in it's forest-cIad ridges-thcse ridges which thrill me with the majestic sound of the tenn pests, but at the same time save me from their hurricane fury. We could raise a good many more potatoes and pumpkins if it were all level prairie where that rugged mountain looms. But-I don't want to swap Douglass Knob for many hundred acres of prairie-at least not just yet
 There's another side fs our vocation from the mere potato growing, corn cropping, hay-making side. It's a business. I'll admit; but it's something more than a business-it's a life. Furthermore, the life is still more than meat, and the body more than raiment. One charm of it is that it enables us farmers who have souls as well as stomachs to feed both at the same time. My farm is the Gibraltar of my soul, as well as the factory which
 
 retire to its impregnable fastness, whenever the banditti of 'business'' get too rampageous, and defy them. am master here, under nature, and none shall intrude whom we do not invite. What can the mAn with ten thousand acres who does his farming by steam and sells crops by the train load-what can he know about his in dividual acres? What can he care for them-except as money-producers, per- haps? That man must he a bigger sort than I ever met who can make a whole county home" We are so built that we must "snuggle up" more or less. That's just what the small farm CT can do with nature. He can actu- ally become somewhat acquainted with her. He comes to feel her something actual and present. She is a compan- ion-a freaky one. to be sure, but nev- ertheless companion whom he can consort with and enjoy as well as en- dure.s He grows used to her whims and becomes verSed in some of her laws. He gets to know how she acts with the Hatch-lot and in what differ ent way she reacts on the Cold Spring pasture. He learns what she will do for him on that gravelly field back of the barn, if he gives her the right en- couragement, and what she won't do and can't be made to do on the Long lot up under the hill. He discovers where she will grow roses and where she prefers to grow parsnips, and he's just as much interested and absorbed in the one as the other. He comes to know his land, acre by acre and inch by inch. He feels the difference he tween two neighboring fence corners, and finds real enjoyment in pitting his wits against natures inertia or stubbornness.
 Ifs a blessed thing we aren't all nade alike. If we were we should all want the same farm, and the price of surrounding land would drop to zero. But really believe we New England farmers with our little farms, rugged and uneven, dipping from rocky ridges to scdden swamps, with our small fields and our twisting fences, can. if we will, get more real life and more solid satisfaction and more fun out of them than we could from no matter how big and fertile ranches which we must work by steam.
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