Adopting An Abandoned Farm, Kate Sanborn [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗

seldom opened - only a glimpse here and there of a sad, haggard creature, peering out for curosity. Strange would it be to hear peals of merry laughter; stranger still to see a family enjoying a meal on the piazza or a game on the grass. As for flowers, they are valued no more than weeds; the names of the most common are unknown. I asked in vain a dozen people last summer, what that flower was called, pointing to the ubiquitous Joe Rye weed or pink motherwort. At last I asked one man, who affected to know everything -

"Oh, yes, I know it."

"What is it?" I persisted.

"Well, I know it just as well, but can't just now get the name out." A pause, then, with great superiority: "I'd rather see a potato field in full bloom, than all the flowers in the world."

Perhaps some of Tolstoi's disciples may yet solve the problem of New England's abandoned farms. He believes that every able-bodied man should labor with his own hands and in "the sweat of his brow" to produce his own living direct from the soil. He dignifies agriculture above all other means of earning a living, and would have artificial employments given up. "Back to the land," he cries; and back he really goes, daily working with the peasants. But 'tis a solemn, almost tragical experience, not much better than the fate of the Siberian exile. Rise at dawn; work till dark; eat - go to bed too tired to read a paper; - and no money in it.

Let these once prosperous farms be given up to Swedish colonies, hard working and industrious, who can do better here than in their own country and have plenty of social life among themselves, or let wealthy men purchase half a dozen of these places to make a park, or two score for a hunting ground - or let unattached women of middle age occupy them and support themselves by raising poultry. Men are making handsome incomes from this business - women can do the same. The language of the poultry magazines, by the way, is equally sentimental and efflorescent with that of the speeches at agricultural fairs, sufficiently so to sicken one who has once accepted it as reliable, as for instance: "The individual must be very abnormal in his tastes if they can not be catered to by our feathered tribe." "To their owner they are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Their ways are interesting, their language fascinating, and their lives from the egg to the mature fowl replete with constant surprises."[1]

[Footnote 1: This clause is true.]

"To simply watch them as they pass from stage to stage of development fills the mind of every sane person with pleasure." One poultry crank insists that each hen must be so carefully studied that she can be understood and managed as an individual, and speaks of his hens having at times an "anxious nervous expression!"

"Yes, it is where the hens sing all the day long in the barn-yard that throws off the stiff ways of our modern civilization and makes us feel that we are home and can rest and play and grow young once more. How many men and women have regained lost health and spirits in keeping hens, in the excitement of finding and gathering eggs!"

"It is not the natural laying season when snows lie deep on field and hill, when the frost tingles in sparkling beads from every twig, when the clear streams bear up groups of merry skaters," etc.

After my pathetic experience with chickens, who after a few days of downy content grew ill, and gasped until they gave up the ghost; ducklings, who progressed finely for several weeks, then turned over on their backs and flopped helplessly unto the end; or, surviving that critical period, were found in the drinking trough, "drowned, dead, because they couldn't keep their heads above water"; turkeys who flourished to a certain age, then grew feeble and phantom-like and faded out of life, I weary of gallinaceous rhodomontade, and crave "pointers" for my actual needs.

I still read "Crankin's" circulars with a thrill of enthusiasm because his facts are so cheering. For instance, from his latest: "We have some six thousand ducklings out now, confined in yards with wire netting eighteen inches high. The first lot went to market May 10th and netted forty cents per pound. These ducklings were ten weeks old and dressed on an average eleven pounds per pair. One pair dressed fourteen pounds." Isn't that better than selling milk at two and a half cents per quart? And no money can be made on vegetables unless they are raised under glass in advance of the season. I know, for did I not begin with "pie plant," with which every market was glutted, at one cent per pound, and try the entire list, with disgustingly low prices, exposed to depressing comparison and criticism? When endeavoring to sell, one of the visiting butchers, in reply to my petition that he would buy some of my vegetables, said: "Well now, Marm, you see just how it is; I've got more'n I can sell now, and women keep offering more all the way along. I tell 'em I can't buy 'em, but I'll <i>haul 'em off for ye if ye want to get rid of 'em!" So much for market gardening at a distance from city demands.

But ducks! Sydney Smith, at the close of his life, said he "had but one illusion left, and that was the Archbishop of Canterbury." I still believe in Crankin and duck raising. Let me see: "One pair dressed fourteen pounds, netted forty cents per pound." I'll order one of Crankin's "Monarch" incubators and begin a poultry farm anew.

"<i>Dido et dux," and so do Boston epicures. I'll sell at private sales, not for hotels! I used to imagine myself supplying one of the large hotels and saw on the <i>menu:

"Tame duck and apple sauce (from the famous 'Breezy Meadows' farm)." But I inquired of one of the proprietors what he would give, and "fifteen cents per pound for poultry dressed and delivered" gave me a combined attack of chills and hysterics.

Think of <i>my chickens, from those prize hens (three dollars each) - <i>my
chickens, fed on eggs hard boiled, milk, Indian meal, cracked corn, sun-flower seed, oats, buckwheat, the best of bread, selling at fifteen cents per pound, and I to pay express charges! Is there, is there any "money in hens?"

To show how a child would revel in a little rational enjoyment on a farm, read this dear little poem of James Whitcomb Riley's:

AT AUNTY'S HOUSE.

One time when we's at aunty's house -
'Way in the country - where
They's ist but woods and pigs and cows,
An' all's outdoors and air!
An orchurd swing; an' churry trees,
An' <i>churries in 'em! Yes, an' these
Here red-head birds steal all they please
An' tech 'em if you dare!
W'y wunst, one time when we wuz there,
<i>We et out on the porch!

Wite where the cellar door wuz shut
The table wuz; an' I
Let aunty set by me an' cut
My wittles up - an' pie.
Tuz awful funny! I could see
The red heads in the churry tree;
An' bee-hives, where you got to be
So keerful going by;
An' comp'ny there an' all! An' we -
<i>We et out on the porch!

An' - I ist et <i>p'surves an' things
'At ma don't 'low me to -
An' chickun gizzurds (don't like wings
Like parunts does, do you?)
An' all the time the wind blowed there
An' I could feel it in my hair,
An' ist smell clover ever'where!
An' a old red head flew
Purt' nigh wite over my high chair,
<i>When we et out on the porch!


CHAPTER IX.

THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCKS.


I would rather look at a peacock than eat him. The feathers of an
angel and the voice of a devil.

The story of this farm would not be complete without a brief rehearsal of my experiences, exciting, varied, and tragic, resulting from the purchase of a magnificent pair of peacocks.

My honest intention on leasing my forty-dollars-a-year paradise was simply to occupy the quaint old house for a season or two as a relief from the usual summer wanderings. I would plant nothing but a few hardy flowers of the old-fashioned kind - an economical and prolonged picnic. In this way I could easily save in three years sufficient funds to make a grand <i>tour du monde.

<i>That was my plan!

For some weeks I carried out this resolution, until an event occurred, which changed the entire current of thought, and transformed a quiet, rural retreat into a scene of frantic activity and gigantic undertaking.

In the early summer I attended a poultry show at Rooster, Mass., and, in a moment of impulsive enthusiasm, was so foolish as to pause and admire and long for a prize peacock, until I was fairly and hopelessly hypnotized by its brilliant plumage.

I reasoned: Anybody can keep hens, "me and Crankin" can raise ducks, geese thrive naturally with me, but a peacock is a rare and glorious possession. The proud scenes he is associated with in mythology, history, and art rushed through my mind with whirlwind rapidity as I stood debating the question. The favorite bird of Juno - she called the metallic spots on its tail the eyes of Argus - imported by Solomon to Palestine, essentially regal. Kings have used peacocks as their crests, have worn crowns of their feathers. Queens and princesses have flirted gorgeous peacock fans; the pavan, a favorite dance in the days of Louis le Grand, imitated its stately step. In the days of chivalry the most solemn oath was taken on the peacock's body, roasted whole and adorned with its gay feathers, as Shallow swore "by cock and pie." I saw the fairest of all the fair dames at a grand mediaeval banquet proudly bearing the bird to the table. The woman who hesitates is lost. I bought the pair, and ordered them boxed for "Breezy Meadows."

On the arrival of the royal pair at my 'umble home, all its surroundings began to lose the charm of rustic simplicity, and appear shabby, inappropriate, and unendurable. It became evident that the entire place must be raised, and at once, to the level of those peacocks.

The house and barn were painted (colonial yellow) without a moment's delay. An ornamental piazza was added, all the paths were broadened and graveled, and even terraces were dreamed of, as I recalled the terraces where Lord Beaconsfield's peacocks used to sun themselves and display their beauties - Queen Victoria now has a screen made of their feathers.

My expensive pets felt their degradation in spite of my best efforts and determined to sever their connection with such a plebeian place.

Beauty (I ought to have called him Absalom or Alcibiades), as soon as let out of his traveling box, displayed to an admiring