Adopting an Abandoned Farm

I have now come to the farmer's life, with which I am exceedingly delighted, and which seems to me to belong especially to the life of a wise man.

CICERO.

Weary of boarding at seashore and mountain, tired of traveling in search of comfort, hating hotel life, I visited a country friend at Gooseville, Conn. (an assumed name for Foxboro, Mass.), and passed three happy weeks in her peaceful home.

Far away at last from the garish horrors of dress, formal dinners, visits, and drives, the inevitable and demoralizing gossip and scandal; far away from hotel piazzas, with their tedious accompaniments of corpulent dowagers, exclusive or inquisitive, slowly dying from too much food and too little exercise; ennuied spinsters; gushing buds; athletic collegians, cigarettes in mouths and hands in pockets; languid, drawling dudes; old bachelors, fluttering around the fair human flower like September butterflies; fancy work, fancy work, like Penelope's web, never finished; pug dogs of the aged and asthmatic variety. Everything there but MEN-they are wise enough to keep far away.

Before leaving this haven of rest, I heard that the old-fashioned farm-house just opposite was for sale. And, as purchasers of real estate were infrequent at Gooseville, it would be rented for forty dollars a year to any responsible tenant who would "keep it up."

After examining the house from garret to cellar and looking over the fields with a critical eye, I telegraphed to the owner, fearful of losing such a prize, that I would take it for three years. For it captivated me. The cosy "settin'-room," with a "pie closet" and an upper tiny cupboard known as a "rum closet" and its pretty fire place-bricked up, but capable of being rescued from such prosaic "desuetude"; a large sunny dining-room, with a brick oven, an oven suggestive of brown bread and baked beans-yes, the baked beans of my childhood, that adorned the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, cooked with just a little molasses and a square piece of crisp salt pork in center, a dish to tempt a dying anchorite.

There wore two broad landings on the stairs, the lower one just the place for an old clock to tick out its impressive "Forever-Never-Never-Forever" à la Longfellow. Then the long "shed chamber" with a wide swinging door opening to the west, framing a sunset gorgeous enough to inspire a mummy. And the attic, with its possible treasures.

There was also a queer little room, dark and mysterious, in the center of house on the ground floor, without even one window, convenient to retire to during severe thunder storms or to evade a personal interview with a burglar; just the place, too, for a restless ghost to revisit.

Best of all, every room was blessed with two closets.

Outside, what rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry farm.

The situation, too, was exceptional, since the station from which I could take trains direct to Boston and New York almost touched the northern corner of the farm, and nothing makes one so willing to stay in a secluded spot as the certainty that he or she can leave it at any time and plunge directly into the excitements and pleasures which only a large city gives.

What charmed me most of all was a tiny but fascinating lakelet in the pasture near the house; a "spring-hole" it was called by the natives, but a lakelet it was to me, full of the most entrancing possibilities. It could be easily enlarged at once, and by putting a wind-mill on the hill, by the deep pool in "Chicken Brook" where the pickerel loved to sport, and damming something, somewhere, I could create or evolve a miniature pond, transplant water lilies, pink and white, set willow shoots around the well-turfed, graveled edge, with roots of the forget-me-not hiding under the banks their blue blossoms; just the flower for happy lovers to gather as they lingered in their rambles to feed my trout. And there should be an arbor, vine-clad and sheltered from the curious gaze of the passers-by, and a little boat, moored at a little wharf, and a plank walk leading up to the house. And-and oh, the idealism possible when an enthusiastic woman first rents a farm-an "abandoned" farm!

It may be more exact to say that my farm was not exactly "abandoned," as its owner desired a tenant and paid the taxes; say rather depressed, full of evil from long neglect, suffering from lack of food and general debility.

As "abandoned farms" are now a subject of general interest, let me say that my find was nothing unusual. The number of farms without occupants in New Hampshire in August, 1889, was 1,342 and in Maine 3,318; and I saw lately a farm of twenty acres advertised "free rent and a present of fifty dollars."

But it is my farm I want you to care about. I could hardly wait until winter was over to begin my new avocation. By the last of March I was assured by practical agriculturists (who regarded me with amusement tempered with pity) that it was high time to prune the lazy fruit trees and arouse, if possible, the debilitated soil-in short, begin to "keep it up."

So I left New York for the scene of my future labors and novel lessons in life, accompanied by a German girl who proved to be merely an animated onion in matters of cooking, a half-breed hired man, and a full-bred setter pup who suffered severely from nostalgia and strongly objected to the baggage car and separation from his playmates.

If wit is, as has been averred, the "juxtaposition of dissimilar ideas," then from "Gotham to Gooseville" is the most scintillating epigram ever achieved. Nothing was going on at Gooseville except time and the milk wagon collecting for the creamery. The latter came rumbling along every morning at 4.30 precisely, with a clatter of cans that never failed to arouse the soundest sleeper.

The general dreariness of the landscape was depressing. Nature herself seemed in a lethargic trance, and her name was mud.

But with a house to furnish and twenty-five enfeebled acres to resuscitate, one must not mind. Advanced scientists assure us of life, motion, even intelligence, appetite, and affection in the most primitive primordial atoms. So, after a little study, I found that the inhabitants of Gooseville and its outlying hamlets were neither dead nor sleeping. It was only by contrast that they appeared comatose and moribund.

Indeed, the degree of gayety was quite startling. I was at once invited to "gatherings" which rejoiced in the paradoxical title of "Mum Sociables," where a penalty of five cents was imposed on each person for speaking (the revenue to go toward buying a new hearse, a cheerful object of benevolence), and the occasions were most enjoyable. There was also a "crazy party" at Way-back, the next village. This special form of lunacy I did not indulge in-farming was enough for me-but the painter who was enlivening my dining-room with a coating of vivid red and green, kindly told me all about it, how much I missed, and how the couple looked who took the first prize. The lady wore tin plates, tin cans, tin spoons, etc., sewed on to skirt and waist in fantastic patterns, making music as she walked, and on her head a battered old coffee pot, with artificial flowers which had outlived their usefulness sticking out of the spout; and her winning partner was arrayed in rag patchwork of the most demented variety.

"Youdorter gone" said he; "'twas a great show. But I bet youder beaten the hull lot on 'em if you'd set your mind on't!"

My walls were now covered with old-fashioned papers, five and ten cents a roll, and cheap matting improved the floors. But how to furnish eleven rooms? This brings me to-