them, mulched them, pruned them, trellised them, and helped every year
to pick the berries. How could they be otherwise than full of
associations! They bear a fruit more beautiful than can be found in any
catalogue: and stranger and wilder than in any learned botany book!

Why, one who comes thus to love a bit of countryside may enjoy it all
the year round. When he awakens in the middle of a long winter night he
may send his mind out to the snowy fields--I've done it a thousand
times!--and visit each part in turn, stroll through the orchard and pay
his respects to each tree--in a small orchard one comes to know
familiarly every tree as he knows his friends--stop at the strawberry
bed, consider the grape trellises, feel himself opening the door of the
warm, dark stable and listening to the welcoming whicker of his horses,
or visiting his cows, his pigs, his sheep, his hens, or so many of them
as he may have.

So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of
fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master Poet
come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories were so
often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and illustrations so
often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the fields. "Consider
the lilies how they grow." It was on a hillside that he preached his
greatest Sermon, and when in the last agony he sought a place to meet
his God, where did he go but to a garden? A carpenter you say? Yes, but
of this one may be sure: there were gardens and fields all about: he
knew gardens, and cattle, and the simple processes of the land: he must
have worked in a garden and loved it well.

A country life rather spoils one for the so-called luxuries. A farmer or
gardener may indeed have a small cash income, but at least he eats at