When the meadows have gotten a new carpet of tender grass in September, and the cows are free to range in them, a new series of moving pictures greets the eye. The grazing forms have a finer setting now, and contentment and satisfaction are in every movement. How they sweep off the tender herbage, into what artistic groups they naturally fall, what pictures of peace and plenty they present! When they lie down to ruminate, Emerson’s sentence comes to mind: “And the cattle lying on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.” As a matter of fact, I suppose no more vacant mind could be found in the universe than that of the cow when she is reposing in a field, chewing her cud. But she is the cause of tranquil if not of great thoughts in the lookers-on, and that is enough. Tranquillity attends her wherever she goes; it beams from her eyes, and lingers in her footsteps.
I sympathize with Whitman as he expressed himself in these lines:
“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them, long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or happy over the whole earth.”
If one has a bit of the farmer in him, it is a pleasure in the country to have a real farmer for a neighbor--a man whose heart is in his work, who is not longing for the town or the city, who improves his fields, who makes two spears of grass grow where none grew before, whose whole farm has an atmosphere of thrift and well-being. There are so many reluctant, half-hearted farmers in our eastern States nowadays, so many who do only what they have to do in order to survive; who leave the paternal acres to run to weeds or brush; the paternal fences to fall into ruins; the paternal orchards untrimmed and unplowed; the paternal meadows unfertilized, while the fertilizer wastes in the barn-yard; who get but one spear of grass where their fathers or grandfathers got two or three; and whose plaint always is that farming does not pay. What is the matter with our rural population? Has all the good farming blood gone West, and do only the dregs of it remain?