|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.
Naturally, as he sat there by my side, holding on tightly to his ticket
and evidently afraid 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 almost any one 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 ax, and nobody but a farmer
would try to do that. Following up the clew, I discovered that he had
milk on his boots, and then I knew I was right. The man who milks before
daylight in a dark barn when the thermometer is 28° below zero, and who
hits his boots by reason of the uncertain light and 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 pass for a pretty hard winter on stock. 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 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 process 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, prob'ly 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 drug-store 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 nessey 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 regard 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 or a horse hayrake or not. We had one of these
embroidered nightshirt 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 passle 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 crematory 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 hardware, and one is talkin' protection in the
Legislature this winter. They said that farmin' was gettin' 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:
"I've always hollered for high tariff 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 cloz and never went to a show more'n a dozen times in my
life; raised a family and learned upwards of two hundred calves to drink
out of a tin pail without blowing their vittles up my sleeve. My wife
worked alongside o' me sewin' new seats on the boys' pants, skim-min'
milk, and even helpin' me load hay. For forty years we toiled along
together and hardly got time to look into each other's faces or dared to
stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health failed. Ketched
cold in the springhouse, prob'ly skimmin' milk, and wash-in' pans, and
scaldin' pails, and spankin' butter. Anyhow, 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 chores all night.
"I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while
previous to do 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 nobody spoke up around the house as we used to.
The boys quit whistlin' around the barn, and talked kind of low to
themselves about goin' to town and getting a job.
"They're all gone now, and the snow is four feet deep up there on
mother's grave 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 pays better; 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 the money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good,
simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at 9 o'clock so that future
generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the
Senate and Congress and the White House--he is the man that gets left at
last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a
high protective tariff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over
$700,000,000. 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 prospect is for farms now.
The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought
perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injins and potato bugs and
blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else,
and hollored for the Union and the Republican party and high tariff
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
and holds his head as high as a hollyhock. 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 slivers, and he has to wear
his 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 since he
was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the
winter in the flannels that Silas wor at the rigatter before he went to
Congress.
"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me, Damn a farmer,
anyhow!"
He then went away.