on, the rumble of
trucks and blare of neighboring radios turned a formerly quiet street
on Brooklyn Heights into a bedlam and brought matters to a head. Great
Aunt Laura's place was still too far away but explorers returning from
ventures into the far reaches of Westchester County, and western
Connecticut, had brought back tales of pleasantly isolated farmhouses
with rolling acres well dotted with trees and stone fences. Here,
thanks to the automobile and commuting trains, was the solution. A
country place near enough to the city, so that the owner could have
his cake and eat it, too.

After some months of searching and several wild goose chases, a modest
little place was found. The original plan was to live there just a few
weeks in the summer, possibly from June into September, but the period
stretched a bit each year. Now it is the year around. We are but one
of many families that have traded the noise and congestion of city
life for the quiet and isolation of the open country. Nor do all such
cling to the commuting fringe of the larger cities. A good proportion
have their country homes some hours' distant, and the city is only
visited at infrequent intervals.

Wherever his country place is located, however, there are certain
problems confronting the city dweller who takes to rural life. They
are the more baffling because they are not problems at all to his
country-bred neighbors. The latter assume that any adult with a grain
of common sense must know all about such trifles as rotten sills, damp
cellars, hornets that nest in the attic, frozen pipes in winter, and
wells that fail in dry seasons.

Of course, no one treatise can hope to serve as a guide for every
problem that comes with life in the open country. This book is no
compendium. It concerns itself only with the most obvious pitfalls
that lie ahead of one inured to well-serviced city life.

WHY LIVE IN THE COUNTRY?

[Illustration]

_CHAPTER I_

WHY LIVE IN THE COUNTRY?

The urge to live in the country besets most of us sooner or later.
Spring with grass vividly green, buds bursting and every pond a bedlam
of the shrill, rhythmic whistle of frogs, is the most dangerous
season. Some take a walk in the park. Others write for Strout's farm
catalogues, read them hungrily and are well. But there are the
incurables. Their fever is fed for months and years by the discomforts
and amenities of city life. Eventually they escape and contentedly