amlet,
where each house yard has its garden patch, but the inhabitants of the
village depend on other means than agriculture for a living. On the
farms dairy and poultry products share with agriculture in rural
importance, and no one crop constitutes an agricultural staple. In New
England the villages are comparatively near together, and social life
needs only prodding to produce a healthy development.

105. =Characteristics of Population.=--Rural life feels in each region
the reactions of nature. The narrow life of the hills, the open life
of the plains, the peaceful life of the comfortable plantation with
its lazy river and its delightful climate, each has its peculiar
characteristics that are due in part at least to nature. But these
features are complicated by social elements of population. The
American rural community of to-day is composed of individuals who
differ in age and fortune and kinship, and who vary in qualities and
resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and
women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with
few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and
bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics
that are typical.

In the first place, for example, there is a considerable uniformity of
age in the population of a certain type of community. In those
agricultural districts where individuals own their own homes, the
number of elderly people is larger than it is in the city, and the
young people are comparatively few, for the reason that their
ambitions carry them to the city for its larger opportunities, and in
the older States many a farm becomes abandoned on the death of the old
people. In districts where tenant-farming is largely in vogue, gray
hairs are much fewer. The tendency is for the original farmers who
have been successful to sell or rent their property and move to town
to enjoy its comforts and attractions, leaving the tenants and their
families of children.

In the second place, it is characteristic of long-settled rural
communities that there is an interlocking of family relationship, with
a number of prevailing family names and a great preponderance of
native Americans; but in portions of the West and in rural districts
not very remote from the large cities of the East there is a large
mixture, and in spots a predominance of the foreign element. In the
third place, small means rather than wealth a