ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM.




CHAPTER I.

FROM GOTHAM TO GOOSEVILLE.


I have now come to the farmer's life, with which I am exceedingly
delighted, and which seems to me to belong especially to the life of
a wise man.

CICERO.

Weary of boarding at seashore and mountain, tired of traveling in search
of comfort, hating hotel life, I visited a country friend at Gooseville,
Conn. (an assumed name for Foxboro, Mass.), and passed three happy weeks
in her peaceful home.

Far away at last from the garish horrors of dress, formal dinners,
visits, and drives, the inevitable and demoralizing gossip and scandal;
far away from hotel piazzas, with their tedious accompaniments of
corpulent dowagers, exclusive or inquisitive, slowly dying from too much
food and too little exercise; ennuied spinsters; gushing buds; athletic
collegians, cigarettes in mouths and hands in pockets; languid, drawling