not lose out of life!

I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its worst.
At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an income
pitifully small. Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and
loneliness. But where is there not drudgery when men are poor--where
life is at its worst? I have never seen drudgery in the country
comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city
tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops. And in recent years
both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing
before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the
gasoline engine. I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one day
as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week. While there is,
indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as
drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only good,
honest, wholesome hard work--the kind of work that makes for fiber in a
man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise provides.

There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who
come face to face with nature itself. You have set out your upper acres
to peach trees: and the deer come down from the hills at night and strip
the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the snow,
girdle and kill them. The season brings too much rain and the potatoes
rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm when no out
is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens' eggs prove infertile,
and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been growing all summer. A
constant warfare with insects and blights and fungi--a real, bitter
warfare, which can cease neither summer nor winter!

It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of the