Norwich bulletin., 1914-08-29
THE FARMER AS A SPORT-HOW HE LAYS
 HIS WAGES

it loves to fight Perhaps these are bad traits. Perhaps God made mis- take when he built them into the mas masculine blood. Let His critics set- tie that with Him, if they will. After sixty odd years experience with His world I. personally. am coming to think that He knows His business better than I do. and does His work better than I could:
 Anyway. it makes mighty little diff ference what either you or I think, when we plump up against the solid facts Our thinking that a potato is a pineapple won't make it one. think we never so hard and never so dog matically.
 We'll, starting out with those two facts, that most real men like to gamble and are instinctively fond of fight, you come straight to the ex- planation which the Kansas editor right stuff in them almost always banker for a farm. Farming is a com bination of hard work, fighting. and gambling. Even the man who doesn't really like hard work finds the fas- cination of the other two factors toe strong for him.
 Farming is fight from April showers time to Novennber-ice time, every season, and from sun-up to night-fall, every day. It's a fight against seven kinds of blight and nine kinds of bugs and eleven kinds of worms and thirteen kinds of weeds and three hundred and sixty five. other kinds of sneaking, skulking, ambush ing; unconquerable enemies who are after his crops and his very life blood. "Unconquerable? ?" Yes: that's 1Jetx xfyI, you, it's. just that one truth, that they are unconquerable, which stirs up the old Berserlxer rage and makes the fight so irresistibly alluring,-to
 the men who have the right stuff in them"
 Wall, ye can't lick me, neither!" The light of battle comes into his eyes. and the blood of his fighting ancestors spurts through his arteries. Biff! And about eleven million potato bugs crop into the beetle hades that morn ing before his Paris green sprayer. And about as many more weeds give up their vegetable souls to make green manuring for his corn that afternoon before his horse-hoe. What? More of ye?'' he cries, next day. "Hain't killed ye all yet? = Biff-biff- bang. goes from day to day and from week to week. He doesn't always come out victor. Indeed, he never scores a com plete victory over the infinite and H. limitable hosts of his enemies. How can he? But-they don't come out victors, either. And he gets the spells. When the glorious ruction is over his barns and his granaries and his cellar bins show that he's saved the comrnisariat they tried to capture. He may not have extinguished the enemy, root and branch, but by gunai fJ1ox1 I1x1 Ta11f ekr, H. either. = Don't you suppose the old man rather enjoyed it? You bet he did. That is. always assuming that "he had the right stuff in him.
 Talk about Sporting events!" There never was a horse-race run yet which had in it so much real gan1b- ling excitement as there is in raising bunkum clover crop or a record corn acre or a prize-winning fruit yield right here in stubborn -soiled Connecticut.
 Whichever the farmer undertakes whatever else he undertakes for that matter. he's just betting all he's got
 and all he hopes to get against the season and the weather and the un- foreseeable strategy of his countless enemies. He doesn't know whether IL Will De a dry year or a wet one. He bets he can raise something worth while, anyway, and puts up his time and his labor and his money as stakes. He doesn't know what the army
 worms and the cut worms and the grasshoppers and the 'steen hundred other kinds of bugs and sIugs may have up their sleeves, but he bets he can beat 'em at their own game, whatever tricks they undertake. He doesn't know whether it's going to rain that day or not, but he looks at the sky and at his barometer and watches whether the swallows are l flying low or high and whether there's a heavy dew or not and squints at l whatever particular goose-bone he pins personal faith to, and bets that | he can cut his clover and get it in l before 1t gets wet.
 l He doesn't know. when he sets out 1 his tender tomato or pepper plants whether there'll be a frost next week
 to kill 'em. But he bets there won't