THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_) 319

THE HILL ROCKS 330

ASSEMBLY OF PARTS 339

CHILD AND COUNTRY

CHILD AND COUNTRY

1

BEES AND BLOOMS

In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the
country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good
district, but there was no peace there. I felt _forgotten_. I had not
the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then
to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it
was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that
fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and
shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of
necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which
a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the
early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned
the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little
plot. There was no inner order in my heart--on the contrary, chaos in
and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and
gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the
Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
healing of Nature.

So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the
country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always
felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.
I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live,
for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental
activity would sink into a bovine rumination.

Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true
that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more
subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the
roads of the many--the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A
sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the
devil is the voice of the crowd.

Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at
our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a
time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest