"Countrified" is not the word to apply to American farmers and their
families. One might as aptly employ it when describing the people of
England who live on their "landed estates." Ignorance and dullness and
awkwardness we shall not often find among country children. The boys and
girls on the farms are as well informed, as mentally alert, and as
attractive as children in any other good homes in America.

We all know Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Little Cousin Jasper." The
country boy in it, we recall, concluded his reflections upon the happier
fortune of the boy from the "city" of Rensselaer with these words:

"Wishst our town ain't like it is!--
Wishst it's ist as big as his!
Wishst 'at _his_ folks they'd move _here_,
An' _we'd_ move to Rensselaer!"

Only last summer I repeated this poem to a little girl whose home was a
farm not far from a house at which I was stopping.

"But," she said, in a puzzled tone of voice, "no place is as big as the
country! Look!" she exclaimed, pointing to the distant horizon; "it's so
big it touches the edge of the sky! No city is _that_ big, is it?"




IV