fenced farm of a hundred-acres-or-so.
You remember Wilson's Emporium at the Corners where you went for the
mail--the place where the overalled legs of the whole community drummed
idly against the cracker boxes and where dried prunes, acquired with
due caution, furnished the juvenile substitute for a chew of tobacco!

Or perhaps you did not know even this much about country life--you of
the Big Cities. To you, it may be, the Farmer has been little more
than the caricatures of the theatres. You have seen him wearing blue
jeans or a long linen duster in "The Old Homestead," wiping his eyes
with a big red bandana from his hip pocket. You have seen him dance
eccentric steps in wrinkled cowhide boots, his hands beneath flapping
coat-tails, his chewing jaws constantly moving "the little bunch of
spinach on his chin!" You have heard him fiddle away like two-sixty at
"Pop Goes the Weasel!" You have grinned while he sang through his nose
about the great big hat with the great big brim, "All Ba-ound Ra-ound
With a Woolen String!"

Yes, and you used to read about the Farmer, too--Will Carleton's farm
ballads and legends; Riley's fine verses about the frost on the pumpkin
and "Little Orphant Annie" and "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse!" And
when Cousin Letty took you to the Harvest Home Supper and Grand
Entertainment in the Town Hall you may have heard the village choir
wail: "Oh, _Shall_ We Mortgage the Farm?"

Perhaps even yet, now that you are man grown--business or professional
man of the great cities--perhaps even yet, although you long have
studied the market reports and faithfully have read the papers every
day--perhaps that first impression of what a farmer was like still
lingers in a more or less modified way. So that to you pretty much of
an "Old Hayseed" he remains. Thus, while you have been busy with other
things, the New Farmer has come striding along until he has "arrived in
our midst" and to you he is a stranger.

Remember the old shiny black mohair sofa and the wheezy, yellow-keyed
melodeon or the little roller hand-organ that used to play "Old
Hundred"? They have given place to new styles of furniture, upright
pianos and cabinet gramophones. Coffin-handles and wax flowers are not
framed in walnut and hung in the Farmer's front parlor any more; you
will find the grotesque crayon portrait superseded by photo
enlargements and the up-to-date kodak. The automobile has widened the
circle of the Farmer's neig