The Folk Of The Old Rock, The Dwellers In The Older Houses, Born And
Raised Hereabouts, Would Not Live Out
Of the town for any consideration,
and there are insane people from the South - men and women from Boston
and
The like - who actually build houses out in the open country, two,
and even three miles from Main Street which is nearly 400 yards long,
and the centre of life and population. With the strangers, more
particularly if they do not buy their groceries 'in the street,' which
means, and is, the town, the town has little to do; but it knows
everything, and much more also, that goes on among them. Their dresses,
their cattle, their views, the manners of their children, their manner
towards their servants, and every other conceivable thing, is reported,
digested, discussed, and rediscussed up and down Main Street. Now, the
wisdom of Vermont, not being at all times equal to grasping all the
problems of everybody else's life with delicacy, sometimes makes
pathetic mistakes, and the town is set by the ears. You will see,
therefore, that towns of a certain size do not differ materially all the
world over. The talk of the men of the farms is of their
farms - purchase, mortgage, and sale, recorded rights, boundary lines,
and road tax. It was in the middle of New Zealand, on the edge of the
Wild horse plains, that I heard this talk last, when a man and his wife,
twenty miles from the nearest neighbour, sat up half the night
discussing just the same things that the men talked of in Main Street,
Vermont, U.S.A.
There is one man in the State who is much exercised over this place. He
is a farm-hand, raised in a hamlet fifteen or twenty miles from the
nearest railway, and, greatly daring, he has wandered here. The bustle
and turmoil of Main Street, the new glare of the electric lights and the
five-storeyed brick business block, frighten and distress him much. He
has taken service on a farm well away from these delirious delights,
and, says he, 'I've been offered $25 a month to work in a bakery at New
York. But you don't get me to no New York, I've seen this place an' it
just scares me,' His strength is in the drawing of hay and the feeding
of cattle. Winter life on a farm does not mean the comparative idleness
that is so much written of. Each hour seems to have its sixty minutes of
work; for the cattle are housed and eat eternally; the colts must be
turned out for their drink, and the ice broken for them if necessary;
then ice must be stored for the summer use, and then the real work of
hauling logs for firewood begins. New England depends for its fuel on
the woods. The trees are 'blazed' in the autumn just before the fall of
the leaf, felled later, cut into four-foot lengths, and, as soon as the
friendly snow makes sledging possible, drawn down to the woodhouse.
Afterwards the needs of the farm can be attended to, and a farm, like an
arch, is never at rest.
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