A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY:-In a recent book on the future of the United States an Englishman prophesies that we shall all be living in apartment-houses before long. There will be no servants, he says, and a house in the city will therefore be impracticable-and what American could be persuaded to live in the country? The answer, of course, is almost any American who has lived in the city. At least, an increasing number of us who earn our living in town want to spend a good part of the year on the soil, and on soil which is our own. We did leave the farms and move to the great centers, at one stage of our economic development. Now he knows little about us who overlooks our buying up of deserted farms and converting them into a refuge from something or other from the city heat in summer, from city rents all year round, or from spiritual discomfort and loss, more serious than high temperature or monthly bills. We find it no longer desirable to live in an unrooted condition. As soon as we have bought the farm, the small piece of land for the children. in vacation, we begin to think of it as home. The city apartment becomes frankly what it always was, a high shelf to rest on between working-days.

The American return to the land is not a return to farm life; it is not a reversion to former economic systems; in fact, economic considerations have little to do with it. More often than not, when we balance our books we discover that the simple months close to nature are quite a luxury. But we always tell ourselves the money is well spent; we have recovered something beyond money. In a dim way we know what

we mean.

We may be rather feeble in the philosophy of man's place in nature, but we have got back the feel of the soil, the smell of earth and rain, the dramatic contact with the seasons, the companionship of the elements. After too many miles of city pavements, after too many hours of city dirt, a mere stain to be washed off, we have learned again to be conscious of wisdom and beauty through our feet and our hands. To walk on grass, to cross the meadow through all the grades of softness between May and September, to know you are near a spring or a brook, when the ground feels spongy; or to plant a garden and weed it, and to learn from your fingers whether the earth is thirsty or satisfied-is to get back what is perhaps man's oldest sense, the sense of the soil. Our predecessors who made our

farm out of the wilderness had a richer and more varied sense. They must have had the feel of rocks and stones by the time they collected and lifted these walls, miles of them between the fields, and sometimes a yard thick. Their fingers must have known wood-not only the bark on the tree, but the grain of the boards they cut and framed for their houses -our houses now. But we doubt if they could be more sensitive than we are to the smell of earth and the smell of rain. With little or no practice we know the difference between a night in June and a night in October, such rich change of perfume follows the months; and in early June the rain is cold, yet not like the chilly rain in early November, and in July the showers meet the earth-warmth half-way. In the city all these distinctions can be wiped out with one umbrella.

The very seasons are annihilated in town. There we make an even temperature stretch the year round, except for the two awkward joints when the steam heat is turned off or on. The electric lights hide the stars, and what is more important, the moon; coal-dust sometimes hides the sun. But when we go to our farm for the week-end, we are suddenly interested in the fact that the moon is full, we discover a remarkable sympathy between the temperature outside the house and the comfort within, and we are grateful for the sun. To be sure, we may install an automatic oil-heater, which, as we assure our visitors, maintains a city evenness of temperature, at the cost of a curious noise in the cellar every once in so often. The visitor, putting to

gether the noise and his idea of oil, asks if we are not afraid the thing will blow up. We say it hasn't blown up yet. But with all our confidence in the oil-heater, we still are thankful when spring arrives to stay, and we understand why the ancient world, closer to nature than we care to be, used to dance and sing when the sun got high, and poetry was invented, to welcome the sweet season. We understand air and earth now, and fire and water become personal and friendly-the flame on our own hearth, the rain from the clouds for our vegetables, our flowers, our lawns, the water we boast of, for us, from our own well. The farmer who sold us the house had probably closed the fireplace and put in a stove, but that was only because his soul was on the way to the city. We know what we need; we restore the hearth and feast our eyes on fire. Even the farmer who first closes his hearth, and then wants to sell it, knows the worth of a clear spring.

To recover all this, to have again our place in nature, we buy a house in the country.

2

THE PAGAN VIRTUES:-In the first paragraph of "Marius," his great romance of the sensitive spirit, Walter Pater reminds us that the word pagan means countryman, and that the pagan religion is simply the religion of the country. After Rome became Christian the worship of the old gods lingered on the farms. But when the old gods were still worshiped in Rome, there had been another pagan religion, an earlier faith. The country keeps its habits

longer than the town, and even within the same church the landworker is of an older theology than the merchant. There is always a pagan religion.

And a pagan system of ethics. We are glad to reënter it when we establish our house in the country. If we should examine all the religions which the countrymen in Italy or elsewhere have held for thousands of years, we should find a quiet evolution in theology but little change in ethics, for pagan ethics is learned as much from nature as from tradition. Life close to the soil teaches certain virtues peculiar to no religion, but necessary to them all.

In the first place, man's needs do not correspond to the seasons. Nature supplies food and heat, but only during a limited period, yet we must eat and keep warm all the year round. Industry is a city virtue as well as a pagan, but in the country it must be industry at the right moment, and coupled with foresight. Nature forces us to have ideas larger than our experience, since everything here is for a season, but eternity is in our hearts. This is the fire from heaven, which Prometheus, or Foresight, brings in the hour when nature is cold. It is not less divine, though we city folk ridicule it in the humble form of thrift. The shortsighted countryman, we say, has little courage; he won't take a bold chance with life. We forget that in the prime matter of food no one can take a chance; we can eat only what we provide.

Perhaps it is in this primitive discipline that we learn first to appreciate the beasts, the birds, and the trees. It is odd that the farmer

who rejects the idea of evolution, because it seems to contradict his pagan theology as to our physical origin, will at the same time accept with satisfaction all that his infallible book says about the moral superiority of the animal world. He is akin spiritually to these companions of his toil, and when he has observed their sagacity, he does not feel they are beneath him. "Go to the ant,' he tells his children; he reminds them that "the ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer"; and he says a word, too, for the conies, the locusts, and the spider. But in the country we learn a deeper lesson than mere prudence: we come to value animals, birds, and trees as friends. The horse, the dog, the cow, the appletree, the great elm or the oak, our favorite malicious squirrel, even that pest the old woodchuck, touch our hearts subtly; should we lose one, we should feel the loss-though the passing of the woodchuck could be born with patience.

With the sense of the precarious terms on which we are here, comes a just vision of the dignity of life and death. In the presence of death the country seems to pause. Perhaps we should not learn our destiny in advance, or be able to frame any clear picture of human life in all its stages, if we had not the animals around us, the arc of whose life is so much shorter than ours. They dramatize for us in a few years birth, youth, age, and death, and they play their parts with enviable dignity-probably because they are not encumbered with speech. If they have any theories about themselves, at least they don't tell them, and

they are able to offer for our study what could hardly be found among men, a wise life without comment.

Some deep wisdom of the pagan world we are not likely to acquire; we have still the city in us, even though we return to the soil, and we probably do not intend to support life exclusively by the product of our land. We shall therefore miss the point of view toward money for which the countryman is often blamed. Looking at him from the town, we say he is stingy. But as a matter of fact, he has reason to know, what we have forgotten, that every piece of silver represents so much life. If he gives it, he knows what he is giving as we often do not. And for that very reason his hospitality is a direct sharing of life, in a sense we city men hardly understand, though our own etiquette of hospitality derives from ancestors who were close to the soil. The stranger who comes to the door must have food. He may not deserve it, he may be a lazy vagabond, but give him the food first and ask after his morals later. In very ancient times they would not have asked his name until he was fed, for fear he might be an enemy, and the sacrament of hospitality would be difficult. Even if the stranger is already fed, you offer food-in the city called refreshments. The habit goes back to man's first knowledge that in the food he stored up he had life; and who could refuse to share life, if it were asked or needed? The bread and wine, or their parallels, are the symbols of divine hospitality in many religions, exalted emblems of fruitful labor and generous love, yet still akin to the fare set out for

family and guests in every country home.

But hospitality covers more than this central gift. I ask my neighbor in the country to let me use his saw or his mower; he never refuses, nor should I think of saying no to anything he wanted. Least of all do we keep back the desired article until the need for it is greater. If he asked me to lend him some butter, and I explained that my butter was on ice, to be delivered in the off season when he would have to pay high for it, my moral reputation with him and the other neighbors would be low. In the city cold storage does not offend us; we even explain the benefits of the system. Perhaps there are benefits--but not to human character. An economic theory enables us to do things which in the presence of nature seem a little mean.

There is an old doctrine that our moral strength comes from the country. Not that all farmers are angels, but that the pagan virtues are the basis of any social goodness in us. Where the countryman is dulled to the deep wisdom of his fields, his weather, his cattle, his seasons, his sun and moon and stars, you may be sure he has heard that civilization is found in cities. There is no one to tell him he already has the secret of sound culture, and the thing he is beginning to long for may be a disease. But those of us who have lived in the midst of civilization, and find it a spiritual anemia, are grateful for the farm he leaves behind as he goes to his bright danger.

are common to the race everywhere, but they are emphasized in cities. We sometimes explain the comparative peace of family life near the soil by saying that the poor woman is too tired even to criticize her husband, or that she does criticize him in her heart, but lacks the opportunity to free herself. Most novels dealing with the soil-written of course by city people-make the point that the wife has had the soul crushed out of her, and the children are just waiting for a chance to run away. So far as I know, this picture may be true, on the whole. I have met it in so many books that when I first saw the homes of farmers in my neighborhood, and discovered that the families were affectionate and cheerful, I feared that the district was not quite genuine.

But though I cannot say dogmatically that marriage is happier near to the soil than in the city, I think it ought to be, and I suspect it is. If you cite instances of domestic tragedy, such as have occurred in many an old farm-house, I will shift my ground and say that city folk who fall deep in love, and have a noble vision of comradeship between men and women, can realize that dream best in the country. Nothing, not even even the church's blessing, so sanctifies marriage as continuity of the hearth, from generation to generation. To be born in the same house as your fathers, to see your children playing in the fields of your own boyhood, to enjoy the shade of trees planted by men now long dead, to set out young saplings with some confidence that they will benefit those of your blood after you

love-affair to a dignity above city romance; it makes your wedding of some importance to the stream of human fate; it helps you to guess that you and your beloved are less original than you supposed, and your passion less personal-nature having included you in her program.

We must blame the city, and the modern civilization which the city begot, for the exaggerated importance we attach to falling in love, and for the desperate attempt we have made to invent a kind of marriage which would be to the end of life a youthful love-affair. If you object that the importance of falling in love could not possibly be exaggerated, you probably disagree with Francis Bacon, when he says that the stage owes more to love than life does, since love furnishes the dramatist with a plot, but while you are in love you are of no use to general society. You probably dislike the way Walter Scott, wise man, portrays love-affairs in his novels, letting us feel that they are in the air, so to speak, but never devoting to them more than a quarter or a third of his pages. You cannot approve, it would seem, of the ancient world, as you read of it in the Greek writers or the Hebrew; they put love-making, with all respect, somewhat in the background, incidental to more important business. It is we who have created for ourselves insoluble problems by trying to prolong indefinitely the psychology and the sensations proper to youth, making them an end in themselves, and consequently forgetting the great purposes they are fitted to serve.

Close to the soil man learns an