worked so hard and so well, may find responsive
companionship and encouraging intercourse with others.

It so happens that the few farm villages to which we can refer--such as
Farmington, Hadley, and Deerfield--have become so attractive by means of
their full-grown beauty, or have been so encroached upon by the wealth
that has come over the district to which they belong, that they are no
longer to be taken as types of pure country villages; nor do I recall a
single village in the land which is precisely what I have now in mind.

Assuming that a farming neighborhood--two miles, or at the utmost three
miles, square--had been so arranged as to have all of its buildings
(with the exception of hay-barracks in the fields, and cattle-shelters
in the pastures) in a village, let us consider what would be the
advantages in the manner of living which it would have to offer.

The social benefits, and the facilities for frequent neighborly and
informal intercourse, are obvious. To say nothing of the companionships
and intimacies among the young people, their fathers and mothers would
be kept from growing old and glum by constant friction with their kind;
and, in so far as a more satisfactory social relation with one's
fellow-men gives cheerfulness and the richness of a wider human
interest, in that proportion would the village life have a wholesome,
mellowing effect that is not to be found in the remote farmhouse, nor
even in the sort of neighborhood we sometimes find in the country where
several farmhouses are within a quarter of a mile of each other. The
habit of "running in" for a moment's chat with a neighbor is a good one,
and it gets but scant development among American farmers. This view of
the case will suggest itself quite naturally on the first consideration
of the subject.

If the first need of the rising generation--the men and women of the
future--is education, then the village beats the farm by long odds. The
country school-district, sparsely settled and chary of its taxes, is apt
to obey the law in the scantiest way possible. Three months school in
winter and three months more in summer, under the supervision--it can
hardly be called the instruction--of a young miss who is by no means
well educated herself, and who is entirely often without training as a
teacher, gathers together all of the school-going children of a wide
neighborhood. Big and little, boys and girls, are huddled together in a
sort of mental jumble