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On board a western train the other day I held in my bosom for over seventy-five miles the elbow of a large man whose name I do not know. He was not a railroad hog or I would have resented it. He was built wide and he couldn"t help it, so I forgave him.
He had a large, gentle, kindly eye, and when he desired to spit, he went to the car door, opened it and decorated the entire outside of the train, forgetting that our speed would help to give scope to his remarks.
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Naturally as he sat there by my side, holding on tightly to his ticket and evidently afraid that the conductor would forget to come and get it, I began to figure out in my mind what might be his business. He had pounded one thumb so that the nail was black where the blood had settled under it. This might happen to a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith or most anyone else. So it didn"t help me out much, though it looked to me as though it might have been done by trying to drive a fence-nail through a leather hinge with the back of an axe, and n.o.body but a farmer would try to do that. Following up the clue, I discovered that he had milked on his boots and then I knew I was right. The man who milks before daylight, in a dark barn, when the thermometer is down to 28 degrees below and who hits his boot and misses the pail, by reason of the cold and the uncertain light and the prudishness of the cow, is a marked man. He cannot conceal the fact that he is a farmer unless he removes that badge. So I started out on that theory and remarked that this would pa.s.s for a pretty hard winter on stock.
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The thought was not original with me, for I have heard it expressed by others either in this country or Europe. He said it would.
"My cattle has gone through a whole mowful o" hay sence October and eleven ton o" brand. Hay don"t seem to have the goodness to it thet it hed last year, and with their new _pro_-cess griss mills they jerk all the juice out o" brand, so"s you might as well feed cows with excelsior and upholster your horses with hemlock bark as to buy brand."
"Well, why do you run so much to stock? Why don"t you try diversified farming, and rotation of crops?"
"Well, probably you got that idee in the papers. A man that earns big wages writing Farm Hints for agricultural papers can make more money with a soft lead pencil and two or three season-cracked idees like that"n I can carrying of "em out on the farm. We used to have a feller in the drugstore in our town that wrote such good pieces for the _Rural Vermonter_ and made up such a good condition powder out of his own head, that two years ago we asked him to write a nessay for the annual meeting of the Buckwheat Trust, and to use his own judgment about choice of subject. And what do you s"pose he had selected for a nessay that took the whole forenoon to read?"
"What subject, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Give it up!"
"Well, he"d wrote out that whole blamed intellectual wad on the subject of "The Inhumanity of Dehorning Hydraulic Rams." How"s that?"
"That"s pretty fair."
"Well, farmin" is like runnin" a paper in regards to some things. Every feller in the world will take and turn in and tell you how to do it, even if he don"t know a blame thing about it. There ain"t a man in the United States to-day that don"t secretly think he could run airy one if his other business busted on him, whether he knows the difference between a new milch cow and a horse hayrake or not. We had one of these embroidered night-shirt farmers come from town better"n three years ago.
Been a toilet soap man and done well, and so he came out and bought a farm that had nothing to it but a fancy house and barn, a lot of medder in the front yard and a southern aspect. The farm was no good. You couldn"t raise a disturbance on it. Well, what does he do? Goes and gits a pa.s.sle of slim-tailed, yeller cows from New Jersey and aims to handle cream and diversified farming. Last year the cuss sent a load of cream over and tried to sell it at the new creamatory while the funeral and hollercost was goin" on. I may be a sort of a chump myself, but I read my paper and don"t get left like that."
"What are the prospects for farmers in your State?"
"Well, they are pore. Never was so pore, in fact, sence I"ve ben there.
Folks wonder why boys leaves the farm. My boys left so as to get protected, they said, and so they went into a clothing-store, one of "em, and one went into hardward and one is talking protection in the Legislature this winter. They said that farmin" was gittin" to be like fishin" and huntin", well enough for a man that has means and leisure, but they couldn"t make a livin at it, they said. Another boy is in a drug store, and the man that hires him says he is a royal feller."
"Kind of a castor royal feller," I said, with a shriek of laughter.
He waited until I had laughed all I wanted to and then he said:
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"I"ve always hollered for high terriff in order to hyst the public debt, but now that we"ve got the national debt coopered I wish they"d take a little hack at mine. I"ve put in fifty years farmin". I never drank licker in any form. I"ve worked from ten to eighteen hours a day, been economical in cloze and never went to a show more"n a dozen times in my life, raised a family and learned upward of two hundred calves to drink out of a tin pail without blowing all their vittles up my sleeve. My wife worked alongside o" me sewin" new seats on the boys" pants, skimmin" milk and even helpin" me load hay. For forty years we toiled along to-gether and hardly got time to look into each others" faces or dared to stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health failed. Ketched cold in the spring house, prob"ly skimmin" milk and washin" pans and scaldin" pails and spankin" b.u.t.ter. Any how, she took in a long breath one day while the doctor and me was watchin" her, and she says to me, "Henry," says she, "I"ve got a chance to rest," and she put one tired, wore-out hand on top of the other tired, wore-out hand, and I knew she"d gone where they don"t work all day and do ch.o.r.es all night.
"I took time to kiss her then. I"d been too busy for a good while previous to that, and then I called in the boys. After the funeral it was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin" we had to put up with, and n.o.body spoke up around the house as we used to. The boys quit whistlin" around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves about going to town and gettin" a job.
"They"re all gone now and the snow is four feet deep on mother"s grave up there in the old berryin" ground."
Then both of us looked out of the car window quite a long while without saying anything.
"I don"t blame the boys for going into something else long"s other things paysbetter; but I say--and I say what I know--that the man who holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good, simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at nine o"clock, so that future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the Senate and Congress and the While House--he is the man that gets left at last to run his farm, with n.o.body to help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States--I see by the papers--has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don"t count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain"t two inches high under the snow. That"s what the prospects is for farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else and hollered for the Union and the Republican party and free schools and high terriff and anything else that they was told to, is left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over."
"Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress."
"That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced him and holds his head as high as a holly-hock. He bellers for protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivvers, and he has to wear his own son"s lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the winter in the flannel that was wore at the riggatter before he went to Congress.
"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me. d.a.m.n a farmer, anyhow!"
He then went away.
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Ezra House
Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell, Of the sad fate of one which I knew so pa.s.sing well; He enlisted at McCordsville, to battle in the south, And protect his country"s union; his name was Ezra House.
He was a young school-teacher, and educated high In regards to Ray"s arithmetic, and also Alegbra.
He give good satisfaction, but at his country"s call He dropped his position, his Alegbra and all.
"It"s Oh, I"m going to leave you, kind scholars," he said-- For he wrote a composition the last day and read; And it brought many tears in the eyes of the school, To say nothing of his sweet-heart he was going to leave so soon.
"I have many recollections to take with me away, Of the merry transpirations in the school-room so gay; And of all that"s past and gone I will never regret I went to serve my country at the first of the outset!"
He was a good penman, and the lines that he wrote On that sad occasion was too fine for me to quote,-- For I was there and heard it, and I ever will recall It brought the happy tears to the eyes of us all.
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And when he left, his sweetheart she fainted away, And said she could never forget the sad day When her lover so n.o.ble, and gallant and gay, Said "Fare you well, my true love!" and went marching away.
He hadn"t gone for more than two months When the sad news come--"he was in a skirmish once, And a cruel rebel ball had wounded him full sore In the region of the chin, through the canteen he wore."
But his health recruited up, and his wounds they got well; But while he was in battle at Bull Run or Malvern Hill, The news come again, so sorrowful to hear-- "A sliver from a bombsh.e.l.l cut off his right ear."
But he stuck to the boys, and it"s often he would write, That "he wasn"t afraid for his country to fight."
But oh, had he returned on a furlough, I believe He would not, to-day, have such cause to grieve.
For in another battle--the name I never heard-- He was guarding the wagons when an accident occurred,-- A comrade, who was under the influence of drink, Shot him with a musket through the right cheek, I think.
But his dear life was spared, but it hadn"t been for long Till a cruel rebel colonel came riding along, And struck him with his sword, as many do suppose, For his cap-rim was cut off, and also his nose.
But Providence, who watches o"er the n.o.ble and the brave, s.n.a.t.c.hed him once more from the jaws of the grave; And just a little while before the close of the war, He sent his picture home to his girl away so far.
And she fell into decline, and she wrote in reply, "She had seen his face again and was ready to die"; And she wanted him to promise, when she was in her tomb, He would only visit that by the light of the moon.