he earth, but persistent
nature soon hides the scars with vines and grasses. The soil is
wastefully strong. In New England and in parts of the South, the feeble
corn is a constant care, but here it grows with the rankness of a jungle
weed. And yet, moved by our national disease, nervousness, the farmer
sells his pastoral dales to buy a wind-swept space of prairie in the far
West. A strange shiftlessness, almost unaccountable in a climate so
stimulating, has suffered many a farm to lie idle, with fences slowly
moldering under flowering vines--a reproach to husbandry, but a
contribution to sentiment. Amid these scenes many an astonished muser
has asked himself this question: "Where are the poets of this land,
where the bluebell nods in metre to the gentle breeze?" Not a poem, not
a story has he seen reflecting the life of this rude England in America.
In the summer the Sunday newspaper prints the names of persons who,
escaping from Chicago, have "sardined" themselves in cottages or
suffered heat and indigestion at a farm-house; the maker of the bicycle
map has marked the roads and dotted the villages; the pen and ink worker
for the daily press has drawn sketches of a lily pad, a tree and a fish
much larger than the truth; the reporter has caught a bit of color here
and there, but the contemplative writer has been silent and the American
painter has shut his eyes to open them upon a wood-shod family group in
Germany.

This region was settled by Yankees. They brought with them a tireless
industry and a shrewd humor. But to be wholly himself the Yankee must
live on thin soil. Necessity must extract the full operation of his
energy. Under his stern demand, the conquered ground yields more than
enough. Vanquished poverty stuffs his purse. He sets up schools and
establishes libraries. But on a soil that yields with cheerful
readiness, he becomes careless and loses the shrewd essence of his
energy. His humor, though, remains the same. Nervous and whimsical, he
sees things with a hollow eye, and his laugh is harsh. Unlike his
brother of the South, he does not hook arms with a joke, walk with it
over the hill and loll with it in the shade of the valley; it is not his
companion, but his instrument, and he makes it work for him.

One afternoon in early summer a man got off a train at Rollins, a milk
station, and stood looking at a number of farmers loading into wagons
the empty milk cans that had been returned from the city. He was