I had come into a land flowing with milk, if not with honey. The maple
syrup may very well take the place of the honey. The sugar maple was the
dominant tree in the woods and the maple sugar the principal sweetening
used in the family. Maple, beech, and birch wood kept us warm in winter,
and pine and hemlock timber made from trees that grew in the deeper
valleys formed the roofs and the walls of the houses. The breath of kine
early mingled with my own breath. From my earliest memory the cow was
the chief factor on the farm and her products the main source of the
family income; around her revolved the haying and the harvesting. It was
for her that we toiled from early July until late August, gathering the
hay into the barns or into the stacks, mowing and raking it by hand.
That was the day of the scythe and the good mower, of the cradle and the
good cradler, of the pitchfork and the good pitcher. With the modern
agricultural machinery the same crops are gathered now with less than
half the outlay of human energy, but the type of farmer seems to have
deteriorated in about the same proportion. The third generation of
farmers in my native town are much like the third steeping of tea, or
the third crop of corn where no fertilizers have been used. The large,
picturesque, and original characters who improved the farms and paid for
them are about all gone, and their descendants have deserted the farms
or are distinctly of an inferior type. The farms keep more stock and
yield better crops, owing to the amount of imported grain consumed upon
them, but the families have dwindled or gone out entirely, and the
social and the neighbourhood spirit is not the same. No more huskings or
quiltings, or apple cuts, or raisings or "bees" of any sort. The
telephone and the rural free delivery have come and the automobile and
the daily newspaper. The roads are better, communication quicker, and
the houses and barns more showy, but the men and the women, and
especially the children, are not there. The towns and the cities are now
colouring and dominating the country which they have depleted of its