_CHAPTER I_

WHY LIVE IN THE COUNTRY?


The urge to live in the country besets most of us sooner or later.
Spring with grass vividly green, buds bursting and every pond a bedlam
of the shrill, rhythmic whistle of frogs, is the most dangerous
season. Some take a walk in the park. Others write for Strout's farm
catalogues, read them hungrily and are well. But there are the
incurables. Their fever is fed for months and years by the discomforts
and amenities of city life. Eventually they escape and contentedly
become box numbers along rural postal routes.

Why do city-bred people betake themselves to the country? The surface
reasons are as many as why they are Republicans or Democrats, but the
basic one is escape from congestion and confusion. For themselves or
their children their goal is the open country beyond the suburban
fringe. Here the children, like young colts, can be turned out to run
and race, kick up their heels and enjoy life, free of warnings to be
quiet lest they annoy the elderly couple in the apartment below or the
nervous wreck the other side of that suburban privet hedge.

The day and night rattle and bang of the city may go unnoticed for
years but eventually it takes its toll. Then comes a great longing to
get away from it all. If family income is independent of salary earned
by a city job, there is nothing to the problem. Free from a desk in
some skyscraper that father must tend from nine to five, such a family
can select its country home hours away from the city. Ideal! But few
are so fortunate. Most of us consider ourselves lucky to have that