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 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 The Nursery Lesson Book. A guide for mothers 
 in teaching young children. By PHILIP G. HUBERT, 
 Jr. Fifty easy lessons, each lesson combining 
 simple and progressive instruction in reading, 
 writing, arithmetic, drawing, and singing. Octavo, 
 boards, 75 cents. 
 
 " It is hard to decide which will learn most from this book 
 the mother or the child. The author has the kindergarten idea, 
 but applies it without a mass of formulae. A subject is introduced 
 by name and picture, and a few questions are given ; with these 
 and such others as the child is sure to ask the mother is expected 
 to develop the faculty of inquiry, which in ordinary schools is 
 severely let alone. The pictures are drawing lessons, and as all 
 are in outline the child will have no difficulty in following them. 
 The book is admirably adapted to its purpose." A'. Y. Herald.
 
 LIBERTY AND A LIVING 
 
 THE RECORD OF AN ATTEMPT TO SECURE 
 BREAD AND BUTTER, SUNSHINE AND 
 CONTENT, BY GARDENING, FISH- 
 ING, AND HUNTING 
 
 BY 
 
 PHILIP G. HUBERT, JR. 
 
 " That I may accomplish some petty, particular affair well, 
 I live my whole life coarsely. Yet the man who does not 
 betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called 
 a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven 
 all the while, which shall surely be opened to him. I can see 
 nothing so holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower 
 God has built for us." H. D. THOREAU. 
 
 " The royal peace of a rural home." W. S. WARD. 
 
 NEW YORK & LONDON 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 {jr finuktrboclur fjrtsg 
 1889
 
 COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 1889 
 
 ttbe fmfcfeerbocfecr press, flew J?orft 
 
 ElcctrotypeJ and Printed by 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION : THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED, i 
 
 II. A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE . 6 
 III. SOME EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING ON NEXT TO 
 
 NOTHING A YEAR 16 
 
 IV. THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD .... 26 
 
 V. WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY .... 40 
 
 VI. HOME 50 
 
 VII. DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN . . 65 
 
 VIII. WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS .... 90 
 
 IX. WE GO A-FlSHING 105 
 
 X. MY BEES 127 
 
 XL " DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE " . . . 145 
 XII. THE LIFE WORTH LIVING HENRY DAVID 
 
 THOREAU 163 
 
 XIII. WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN . . 191 
 XIV. THE DANGERS OF CUTTING LOOSE FROM 
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY 229
 
 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED. 
 
 IT may be well to say at the outset that by 
 * the word liberty I do not mean idleness, the 
 two having no connection in my mind. By 
 liberty and a living, as contrasted with work 
 and a living, I mean the getting of bread and 
 butter, clothes and shelter for my little ones 
 and myself by the exercise of common skill in 
 gardening, fishing, shooting, and other out-door 
 sports. This entails no anxious work, no tedi- 
 ous grind of routine in dusty towns and musty 
 offices. It is life in the sunshine. It gives 
 bread and butter, and contentment, if not for- 
 tune. It offers health and opportunities for in- 
 tellectual recreation beyond the reach of most 
 men under our present system. Life, to the 
 average man, means hard, anxious work, with 
 disappointment at the end, whereas it ought to
 
 2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 mean pleasant work, with plenty of time for 
 books and talk. There is something wrong 
 about a system which condemns ninety-nine 
 hundredths of the race to an existence as bare 
 of intellectual activity and enjoyment as that 
 ^ a norse an d with the added anxiety concern- 
 ing the next month's rent. Is there no escape? 
 Throughout years of hard toil I suspected that 
 there might be such an escape. Now, having 
 escaped, I am sure of it. So long as I can get 
 a house and garden for three dollars a week, 
 so long as oatmeal is less than three cents a 
 pound, so long as the fish bite and the cabbages 
 grow, I shall keep out of the slavery of modern 
 city existence, I shall live in God's sunshine and 
 enjoy my children's prattle, my books and papers. 
 For a good many years I worked hard at 
 newspaper correspondence and miscellaneous 
 writing without doing more than keep my fam- 
 ily in the most modest way of life. I went to 
 my desk early and remained late. Year after 
 year I dreamed of the day when my bank ac- 
 count should be large enough to allow me at 
 least a few months for that out-door work and 
 sport I love so well ; yet the day of rest seemed 
 to grow more distant rather than nearer. Grad-
 
 THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED. 3 
 
 ually this idea took possession of me : Why is 
 it not possible for a healthy man, yet strong 
 and in the enjoyment of youth, to make bread 
 and butter for his little ones and himself with- 
 out chaining himself down to a life of drud- 
 gery, without passing most of his time away 
 from those he loves, without devoting his life to 
 work which is drudgery, which is hard, which 
 tells upon a man's vitality day by day ? What 
 am I good for? At what work which does not 
 require a daily routine in a city office can I 
 make enough money for our simple life ? By 
 degrees these questions began to assume a per- 
 sonal importance. Was it possible that I, with 
 my horror of the city, its bustling monotony, 
 its petty concern for inanities, could find work 
 which would offer me freedom and bread and 
 butter? I wanted no work which would keep 
 me in-doors from the beginning of April to the 
 end of December, no work which would every 
 day compel me to say good-bye to my children 
 in the early morning. Of course such a life 
 must be found in the country, if anywhere, and 
 in country occupations. To some people this 
 might mean in itself misery. To me, with 
 my love of sunshine, it is otherwise. During
 
 4 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the years when I was tied to a desk from morn- 
 ing till night, the very sight of the agricultural 
 papers among my exchanges, even in the dead 
 of winter, was sufficient to make me feel like 
 throwing business overboard and getting into 
 country life, even if nothing better than potato 
 raising presented itself. At the same time that 
 I thought and talked about the miseries of city 
 life I was by no means blind to the dangers of 
 the country. 
 
 Any attempt to cut loose from city life in 
 summer might result in the city cutting loose 
 from me in winter. Where, then, would be my 
 music, my opera, my theatres, my lectures? 
 As a newspaper man I had become accustomed 
 to all these things as a part of existence. As I 
 had lived for years in the heart of the conti- 
 nent's life, the quiet of a country winter might 
 pall upon me, and when the papers brought me 
 news of great events in the world of art I might 
 feel that I was losing more than I had gained. 
 And my friends and acquaintances were not 
 slow in pointing out to me that even if I worked 
 hard and intelligently as a farmer I could not 
 be sure of making a comfortable living; and 
 their picture of a farmer's life made much of 
 early rising, long hours of work, bodily exhaus-
 
 THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED. 5 
 
 tion, an unceasing battle with Nature, and a 
 gradual relapse, intellectually, to the level of 
 other farmers good men, perhaps, but dull- 
 witted in all matters not connected with crops 
 and stock. My friends predicted that a year or 
 two of farming would result either in the loss 
 of all interest in literature, science, and art, or 
 I would become heartily sick of country life and 
 eager to get back to town at any cost. I would 
 find, they said, that books and magazines lost 
 their interest after a day's work in the fields ; 
 that gradually there would be less talk about 
 art and music, and more about corn and calves. 
 The life of hard physical labor would end in 
 blunting the intellectual perceptions. I recog- 
 nize perfectly the existence of such dangers, 
 and that is one reason why I should no more 
 think of ordinary farm life for myself than I 
 should undertake to compete with an Irish la- 
 borer in the raising of potatoes for market. The 
 question resolved itself into this: Is there an 
 occupation, or are there occupations, in which 
 a fairly intelligent man, willing to work, can 
 make a living in the country without resorting 
 to the exhausting labor of the farm, for which 
 he is physically unfitted? I determined to 
 make experiments.
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. 
 
 "V^ESTERDAY one of my neighbors died, 
 killed by an accident. A rich man who, 
 in the eyes of the world, or of that little bit of 
 it in which we move, had attained every thing 
 that man could wish for. Beginning life a poor 
 boy, he made a large fortune by dealing in lard. 
 He was looked up to in the lard trade ; his 
 judgment upon lard was final. A religious man 
 in the hackneyed sense of the word, he had 
 done much for the sect to which he belonged, 
 and was cited as a model layman. He gave 
 large sums to churches and church colleges, and 
 contributed to the fund for sending missionaries 
 to foreign parts. As a family man, as a hus- 
 band and father, he was, for all that I know, an 
 exemplary person. I never knew him to smile; 
 but severity of expression may have been con- 
 stitutional. With his large wealth he built 
 himself a pleasant though commonplace home, 
 the house surrounded by large grounds, in 
 6
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. J 
 
 which a dozen gardeners were kept busy. When 
 not too tired, it was his practice to stroll through 
 his grounds and garden in the cool of the even- 
 ing. But his attachment to his country home 
 in New Jersey was not such as to keep him 
 from going to the city every day in the year 
 except Sundays and legal holidays ; it was his 
 boast that he never took a vacation, poor man. 
 At half-past seven in the morning his carriage 
 took him to the station, and at six o'clock in 
 the evening it took him home again. He was 
 a bank director never known to miss a board 
 meeting ; and when he died the directors of his 
 bank had resolutions printed in several news- 
 papers deploring the loss which the institution 
 had suffered. " He died in harness," said one 
 of his fellow-directors to the reporter of a news- 
 paper, "a representative American business 
 man. His knowledge of the lard market was 
 wonderful ; he could give you off-hand the 
 day's quotations in lard for Chicago, Buenos 
 Ayres, London, Paris, and Timbuctoo." A 
 man without an idea beyond lard and discounts, 
 he was an important figure in the community. 
 Books, art, music, were nothing to him ; and if 
 a man's name was not a good one to have upon
 
 8 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the back of a note, that man was not much to 
 him either. The other day his coachman 
 allowed the reins to slip > the horses ran away, 
 and the rich man, in trying to get out, was 
 killed. 
 
 My personal acquaintance with my rich 
 neighbor was but slight, and of a business char- 
 acter. One June morning, when all Nature 
 was rejoicing, it became my duty to look into 
 some complaints made by citizens as to stenches 
 supposed to come from the neighborhood of 
 the Hudson River at a point where several 
 slaughter- and rendering-houses were situated 
 in violation of public health and decency. I 
 remember particularly that it had been hard 
 work for me, young and strong, fond of out- 
 door work in the sunlight, to leave my pretty 
 Jersey home that morning, to tear myself away 
 from my garden, with its strawberries in bloom, 
 from the river, upon which my little boat nod- 
 ded an invitation to sail ; to leave my children, 
 clamorous for a day in the woods or on the 
 water. But duty in the shape of an investiga- 
 tion into these evil smells took me to the sta- 
 tion, confined me for nearly an hour in a hot 
 railroad car along with some hundreds of other
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. 9 
 
 unfortunates, and sent me to an unpleasant 
 part of the city. It happened that my rich 
 neighbor was interested in property in that 
 neighborhood ; his firm bought the refuse of 
 the slaughter-houses, in order to transform it 
 into good lard. Naturally, I asked him as to 
 the origin of the complaints. He knew noth- 
 ing of their origin, but he was quite sure that 
 certain rendering-establishments with which he 
 did business were not to blame ; and to prove 
 it, he proposed to take me over them and show 
 me what nice places they were. I agreed. 
 When within a block of the accused establish- 
 ments, the stench borne on the wind was sick- 
 ening. My neighbor thought nothing of it ; he 
 went there every morning, and was accustomed 
 to it. Having reached some rendering-cellars 
 beneath the slaughter-houses, my neighbor 
 pointed out how cleanly every thing was man- 
 aged : the fat and refuse, fresh and nice, was 
 dropped directly from the abattoir into great 
 steam vats, in which it was melted. My neigh- 
 bor assured me that such was the care taken 
 with every thing that he himself never missed 
 making a morning visit there. Standing in 
 half an inch of fatty mud and water, he sur-
 
 IO LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 veyed the scene with a pleased air, and asked 
 me whether I smelt any thing except the natu- 
 ral odors of a rendering-house. 
 
 Many times since then, when fortunate 
 enough to steal away from business for a few 
 days, and able to sail about in my boat and 
 teach the children how to fish, I have thought of 
 my highly respected neighbor, and wondered 
 whether he still paid his daily visits to that 
 horrible place. From what I know of his do- 
 ings I am pretty sure that he did. " He died 
 in harness, like a true American," said his fel- 
 low bank directors. Very often, as I trudged 
 home from the river in the bright September 
 and October evenings, my little ones strong 
 with a whole day's water sport, and all of us 
 full of the day's joy, my rich neighbor would 
 be driven quickly by on his way from the rail- 
 road station. Probably he had made hundreds 
 of dollars that day, while I had made what ? 
 Had he paid too much for his money ? 
 
 I have another neighbor, by no means a rich 
 man, and by no means looked up to in the 
 community, in fact, scarcely known, except to 
 the few who meet him out fishing, or who buy 
 crabs and oysters from him. He is a jolly old
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. 1 1 
 
 negro, a man of sixty years of age, some- 
 thing of a philosopher, with the resources of a 
 Yankee, and the irresponsibility of a tramp. 
 With his wife and children he leads the life of 
 fisherman and gardener. His nets give him all 
 the fish he needs and to sell ; his garden patch 
 supplies him with vegetables for the year ; in 
 summer he is his own master, refusing persist- 
 ently to work for others ; in winter he works 
 for others if work presents itself, but as the 
 pork barrel is deep and vegetables plenty, his 
 actual need of money is small. Oysters he can 
 have for the getting. This man has a genuine 
 love of the sunlight and of untainted air. 
 When I sail him a race for home, and we ar- 
 rive wet with the spray which the breeze has 
 thrown at us, he is the first to proclaim his 
 keen enjoyment. He has never known what 
 the heat and dust of a city mean ; nevertheless, 
 he values his life almost as much as I did my 
 brief vacations. Something also of a natural- 
 ist in his way, he does not disdain to carry 
 home with him such queer sea products as may 
 interest him or his grandchildren. Spending al- 
 most no money, his income is actually larger 
 than his expenses, and he is able to pay a small
 
 12 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 life insurance, and to put by something for the 
 day when oysters may be scarce or rheumatism 
 may get the best of him. For forty years he 
 has been following this life. He is not a pop- 
 ular man with his fellow-watermen, because 
 absolutely indifferent to the attractions of the 
 village grog-shop, and more fond of his family 
 than of gossip. His days are given to his gar- 
 den and his fishing ; his evenings to the study 
 of our county agricultural journal, which gives 
 him, in condensed form, the news of the world 
 as well as the latest directions as to planting 
 onions. 
 
 Thinking about my neighbor who died the 
 other day, and my other neighbor who still 
 lives to catch fish and enjoy the sea breezes, I 
 can scarcely repress the desire to sympathize 
 deeply with the one who got so little out of 
 life. I know that such sympathy would be re- 
 ceived by his friends and fellow bank directors 
 with amazement. Was he not rich and respect- 
 ed ? Did he not die in harness ? What more 
 can a man want ? And if I timidly suggest 
 that there is a joy about lobster catching in an 
 October breeze, or even in oystering in Decem- 
 ber, far beyond the pleasure of making money
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. 1 3 
 
 out of lard, some eminently respectable people 
 I know will doubt my sanity. Take two men, 
 one of whom follows the life of my late re- 
 spected and rich neighbor, making existence 
 one long strain for money, and finally dying in 
 ignorance of every thing but the price of lard 
 in Chicago, Buenos Ayres, London, Paris, and 
 Timbuctoo ; on the other hand, take my poor 
 neighbor, who, when he comes to die, will not 
 even be mentioned by the newspapers, whose 
 name no bank director ever saw on the back of 
 a note, who knew nothing about the price of 
 lard except at the corner grocery, but who en- 
 joyed fifty years of sport, of gardening, of fish- 
 ing, and of out-door happiness. Which of these 
 two men got the most out of life ? Does the 
 knowledge of the price of lard, or an obituary 
 notice in the newspapers, or the esteem of 
 Tom, Dick, and Harry atone for the loss of all 
 sport ? Does the man who makes a fortune 
 accomplish so much for the world that his 
 own happiness or ease should not be allowed to 
 weigh in the balance ? Civilization tends to 
 the importance of the individual. The middle 
 ages saw thousands compelled to labor for one 
 lord and master ; to-day each man is considered
 
 14 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 as entitled to some share of the good things in 
 the world, and even women and children are 
 coming forward. In the distant future each 
 man will consider that the day is made for him, 
 and that he who fails to enjoy himself that is, 
 to use the gifts of nature rationally is a fool. 
 Civilization should mean emancipation from 
 drudgery, and unquestionably man will some 
 day cease to labor in the present meaning of 
 the word. When machinery attains to such 
 perfection that the ground is ploughed, the 
 seed is sown, the crops are tended, watered, 
 gathered without the work of man ; when 
 power, light, heat are so cheap as to be as free 
 as air to every one, actual labor to provide 
 food, raiment, and shelter need be but slight. 
 At present we put a fictitious value upon labor 
 as a moral exercise apart from results. One 
 hundred years ago our Puritan ancestors doomed 
 here and hereafter the man who held to any 
 but the most dreary and dreadful beliefs ; sun- 
 light, moral as well as physical, to them partook 
 more or less of the nature of sin. To-day we 
 are in danger of erring similarly with regard to 
 work. One fetish is taking the place of an- 
 other. I deny that the man who prefers his
 
 A RICH POOR MAN AND A POOR RICH ONE. I $ 
 
 lobster boat to the banker's desk, who would 
 rather know the habits of the clam than the 
 price of lard in Chicago, New York, and those 
 other places, is in danger of deterioration, or 
 that his example is vicious. Let all the world 
 follow your advice, say the wiseacres, and we 
 should drift back to savagery. 
 
 That eminent financier, Mr. Jay Gould, is 
 said to have remarked, in a fit of depression, or 
 perhaps in an attempt to discourage envy of 
 his millions, that his money gave him nothing 
 more than some clothes to wear, a house to 
 live in, and some little luxuries. Some of my 
 critics will undoubtedly exclaim : " Look at 
 Gould. Does he not enjoy the sea breeze in 
 his yacht, and all the pleasures of nature ? " 
 Perhaps he does, in a difficult sort of way, fil- 
 tered through flunkeys, so to speak. But of 
 the young men who are tempted to keep 
 their noses at the gilded grindstone, how many 
 will attain to the dignity of a yacht ? How 
 many will die in harness long before they think 
 it possible to stop work and begin to play ? 
 How many will lose all capacity for the enjoy- 
 ment of life before their pile of gold is big 
 enough ?
 
 SOME EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING ON NEXT TO 
 NOTHING A YEAR. 
 
 of the great features of most of the 
 books in favor of living upon nothing in 
 the country consists in the table of expenses, 
 showing at the end of the month, or quarter, 
 or year, where every penny has gone. I have 
 quite a collection of such books, beginning 
 with " Ten Acres Enough," and ending with a 
 little volume, issued within the last year, de- 
 scribing how a lady managed to live in comfort 
 and even pay rent upon an income of $150 a 
 year. After much consideration and the prepa- 
 ration of many tables of the kind, showing the 
 expenditure from day to day, from week to 
 week, and month to month, I confess that I 
 do not see how such tables as I can give will 
 help any person who wishes to make the ex- 
 periment. It is too much a matter of what 
 people consider the necessaries of life. Mr. 
 Roosevelt, in criticising " Ten Acres Enough," 
 16
 
 LIVING ON NEXT TO NOTHING A YEAR. I/ 
 
 says that Mr. Morris, the author of that famous 
 book, must have allowed his wife and daugh- 
 ters to go naked for more than five years, be- 
 cause, in his account of expenditure at the end 
 of the book, not a word is said as to the cost 
 of clothes ; which leads me to say that while I 
 might consider myself perfectly happy with 
 $20 worth of clothes a year, another man might 
 think it necessary to spend $100, and his wife 
 three times that amount. I like to wear a flan- 
 nel shirt of a rough kind nearly all the year 
 round, and although the fashion is growing, 
 some excellent people still consider the flan- 
 nel shirt a badge of social degradation. My 
 children are dressed in the coarsest and plain- 
 est fashion, far too coarse and too plain for 
 most city people to think proper. I work 
 my own garden ; I sail my own boat ; I rake 
 my own oysters ; all of which work many men 
 I know would consider beneath them. They 
 have no more taste for such work than for the 
 class of books with which I occupy my even- 
 ings. My house is plain, and the living plainer. 
 I infinitely prefer that the dinner shall be of 
 one course, and the talk of music, books, and 
 art, than that there should be ten courses to-
 
 1 8 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 gether with inane twaddle. I once knew a 
 family in which there were many children, 
 where the cardinal rule at meals was that noth- 
 ing must be said about the food upon the table, 
 about the petty concerns of the house and gar- 
 den, or of the people in the neighborhood. So 
 far as possible the conversation was to be di- 
 rected to some book in hand at the time, or 
 some matter of public interest of the day. If 
 the children were too young to take part in 
 such talk, they were to say nothing. Of course 
 there is a ridiculous side to any such scheme, 
 and reminiscences of Doctor Blimber, with his 
 maddening " The Romans, Mr. Feeder," will 
 occur to most people. Nevertheless, there are 
 good points about such a practice, even if it 
 now and then leads to absurdity. If we adults 
 are talking of woman suffrage, when Arthur, 
 aged six years, interrupts with the remark that 
 his goat swallowed a tennis-ball that morn- 
 ing, the conversation may not be so consecu- 
 tive as it might be ; nevertheless, it is far better 
 to have woman suffrage up for debate than the 
 quality of the corned-beef or the potatoes, or 
 
 the cut of Mrs. 's new dress. I have found 
 
 by experience that systematic effort is essential
 
 LIVING ON NEXT TO NOTHING A YEAR. 19 
 
 in order to begin any such reform as this. As 
 I shall have occasion to say elsewhere, without 
 some effort, the evening, after a long day out- 
 doors in the wind and on the water or in the 
 woods, will prove a drowsy and unprofitable one. 
 A few weeks' earnest determination not to let 
 one evening pass without the reading aloud of 
 some magazine article, or of a certain number of 
 pages of some book worth reading, will result 
 in permanent enjoyment ; the sense of exertion 
 will disappear. There is a good deal to be said 
 in favor of the life of routine in which every 
 hour is laid out. 
 
 To return to the tables of expense again, 
 some people might think that our bill of fare 
 for breakfast, lunch, and dinner meant semi- 
 starvation. We have been educated to like 
 oatmeal, for instance, and breakfast seldom 
 varies from oatmeal, bread and butter, coffee, 
 and eggs. For lunch there is sometimes fish 
 or oysters, or fruit, or a bit of cold meat. And 
 for dinner we have fish or meat, plenty of 
 vegetables, and, almost invariably, fruit or the 
 simplest kind of pudding. I know that such a 
 bill of fare would not please many people. It 
 is low living, at all events, if not high thinking.
 
 2O LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 Probably books and magazines cost us as much 
 as our dinners throughout the summer. Never- 
 theless, I have made out this little table, com- 
 piled from the expense accounts kept with 
 scrupulous care for the eight months beginning 
 with the first of May and ending with the first 
 of January : 
 
 Rent (for the whole year) ..... $160 oo 
 
 Wages 100 oo 
 
 Grocer's and butcher's bill . . . . . 128 oo 
 Expenses upon garden, boat, house, including 
 
 tools, paint, repairs, seeds, etc. ... 35 oo 
 
 Coal and wood 25 oo 
 
 Total $448 oo 
 
 This shows a total of $448, or an average of 
 per month. To offset this sum, I have 
 only to show as coming from the place the in- 
 significant sum of $43, made up by sending 
 surplus eggs to the grocer's, and giving what 
 vegetables and hay I did not need to a neigh- 
 bor. There is also a small sum to be credited 
 to my bees. Taking the expenses of the sum- 
 mer, therefore, and counting the summer at 
 eight months of the year, and leaving out the 
 money which went for clothes, books, etc., and 
 small extras, we have an outgo of $50 a month.
 
 LIVING ON NEXT TO NOTHING A YEAR. 21 
 
 To me the life is delightful. Having $50 a 
 month from sources outside, there is no anx- 
 iety. I am not at all sure that even were my 
 $50 a month income suddenly cut off I should 
 not attempt to make that amount by doubling 
 or quadrupling the size of my garden and go- 
 ing into raising small fruits, chickens for market, 
 etc., perhaps living a little more simply than 
 we do now, simple as this life is. 
 
 Here I can see that my sympathetic reade^ 
 the man or woman tired of paying out to the 
 landlord, the butcher, and the grocer, every 
 penny that comes in, tired of seeing the children 
 weak and puny, and anxious for a more whole- 
 some life than the city affords, is still dissatis- 
 fied. " Where," he exclaims, " even if I have 
 enough capital to realize an income of $600 a 
 year necessary for this country life, am I to get 
 amusement ? I must go to the city for a few 
 months in winter in order to hear a little music, 
 to see a few good plays, to see the world, to 
 hear the buzz of life ; my children must go to 
 school ; they cannot grow up fishermen or mar- 
 ket gardeners." This is a serious part of the 
 problem and cannot be ignored. In my own 
 case it happens that I can go to the city for a
 
 22 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 few months in the depth of winter and make 
 enough money to pay my way during those 
 months, going back to my country life when 
 the spring opens. Nevertheless, after a fair 
 trial of several years of this kind of life, much 
 country, and little city, had I to choose to- 
 morrow between giving up one or the other 
 entirely, between devoting myself wholly to 
 making every penny out of my garden and my 
 poultry-yard, never going to New York at all, 
 except for a day or two once or twice a year, 
 or beginning again the city life of incessant 
 work, of anxiety, of late hours, and bad air, 
 with its compensations in the way of more 
 money, better clothes, amusements between 
 these two lives I should not hesitate for a mo- 
 ment. The country life, as I make my life, 
 gives me out-door work, which is now a physi- 
 cal necessity, gives me more light and air, gives 
 me my long evenings before a wood fire, and 
 entire freedom from worry or business anxiety. 
 My friends may say, and do say, that without 
 my few weeks or months in the city there would 
 occur inevitably a rapid deterioration, mentally. 
 They are kind enough to hint that at present I 
 am better than I might be. At all events, they
 
 LIVING ON NEXT TO NOTHING A YEAR. 23 
 
 say, if I do not lose all interest in the higher 
 things of life, gradually being absorbed in the 
 details of vegetable-raising, poultry-keeping, 
 oyster-raking, and duck-shooting, my children 
 will suffer and sink to the level of the country 
 people around them. This is a serious matter. 
 It would be a matter of sincere sorrow to me 
 if my boys and girls grew up without the tastes 
 of educated men and women. But I do not 
 believe that any thing of the kind will occur. 
 I do not believe, as I have already said else- 
 where, that a boy or girl brought up among 
 people who read and talk about things beyond 
 the village world will fail to absorb something 
 of the spirit of their elders. After all, are the 
 people of the town, taking the average merchant 
 and shop-keeper, so much superior to the people 
 of the country, taking the average fisherman or 
 farmer as a type ? I very much doubt whether 
 they are any happier because they spend ten 
 times as much money. Certainly they are not 
 half so healthy, and they die earlier. It did 
 not need Matthew Arnold to convince many of 
 us that American life is often sadly uninterest- 
 ing, commonplace, even inane. We all know 
 how sadly vapid is the talk of ninety-nine
 
 24 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 people out of a hundred we meet. Most of us 
 can count upon our fingers the men and women 
 we know whose talk is worth listening to. I 
 am not sure that the effect of city life as seen 
 in our large cities is any thing to be proud of. 
 In the old days, before railroads and post-offices 
 and cheap newspapers and books, country life 
 meant intellectual isolation. To-day it means 
 nothing of the kind ; no matter how far you are 
 from the centres of civilization the mails bring 
 you all the thought of the great world worth 
 recording. The conditions have changed. 
 
 People talk of the inspiration of the crowd, 
 the electrical influence of great numbers, the 
 brilliant minds reflecting light upon the dull 
 ones. I confess that I can see but little of this 
 in our American cities. The danger is rather 
 that the individual will be colored by his sur- 
 roundings and reduced to that level. Our great 
 public schools tend to turn out boys and girls 
 all knowing the same things, all thinking the 
 same way, all intellectually fashioned upon the 
 same model, and that a poor one. Unless 
 I am able to provide for my boys and girls 
 teachers of exceptional merit, I should rather 
 trust to home influence and the district school
 
 LIVING ON NEXT TO NOTHING A YEAR. 2$ 
 
 of the country village than to the great public 
 schools of large cities, always with the idea that 
 the boy would find it possible to work his way 
 through college some day, and that the girl 
 would not grow up without some idea of 'litera- 
 ture and music. The question with me is not 
 whether the influence of the crowds of cities is 
 for good, but whether it is not for evil.
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 
 
 DERHAPS I cannot do better, in order to tell 
 the sort of life that I have found possible 
 
 and profitable upon an income of less than 
 a month, than to take from my diary the 
 following record of a week. I will say nothing 
 of Sunday, as that day is always given up by us 
 to church-going, walking, and sometimes, in hot 
 weather, to sailing and bathing, in the morning 
 at least. 
 
 Monday, Sept. Pouring in torrents ; took up 
 a bushel of beets and a bushel of carrots and put 
 by for winter use in the cellar. After breakfast 
 went off in a drizzle of rain sailing with the 
 children to Duck Island for a load of salt grass 
 wherewith to cover the strawberry bed next 
 December. Got enough in an hour, the chil- 
 dren helping, to load up. The rain in the 
 meantime cleared off, the wind coming from 
 the southwest and cooler ; wheeled up the 
 meadow grass from the boat and stacked it up 
 near the strawberry bed ready for use by the 
 26
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 2/ 
 
 time the ground is well frozen. Wrote after 
 luncheon from one to three o'clock. Started 
 out at three for the woods with the children, 
 and went two miles to chop down some pines 
 that we can have for almost nothing for fire- 
 wood. Cut up enough to make a quarter of a 
 cord, I should think, and got back at sundown 
 with enough twigs to make kindling for a week. 
 When my neighbor B. gets ready next month 
 to haul our wood-pile home, he will find that 
 my axe has been kept sharp. The day ended 
 with a splendid break of sunshine, the pink of 
 the whole west presaging the coming autumn. 
 Every blow of the axe seems to bring up pic- 
 tures of what glorious good fires these pine 
 logs will make for us. On the way home 
 stopped for the mail, a bundle of books 
 coming from the library. After dinner read 
 some sketches of Henry James, published in 
 the old Galaxy years ago, which E. sends us as 
 worth reading. They have all James* present 
 subtlety with the picturesque quality that he 
 appears to have lost in some degree, judging 
 from his recent French studies. 
 
 Tuesday. Hard work in the garden before 
 breakfast and until ten o'clock. Hoed up all 
 the bean plants and planted late carrots ; doubt- 
 ful if they come to much so late, but worth 
 trying. Had to branch up some of the tomato 
 vines, which were too heavy for the twigs al- 
 ready under them. Yesterday's rain seems to
 
 28 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 have given a new start to the whole garden, which 
 last week seemed to be taking a rest after the 
 summer's exertions, and ready to give up the 
 battle for the year. The late beans, carrots, 
 turnips, lettuce, tomatoes looking superb. 
 Wrote from ten to twelve, intending to go 
 oystering in the afternoon with the children. 
 After lunch it was blowing great guns on the 
 bay, the white caps in every direction. Only 
 half-a-dozen boats out, and those triple-reefed ; 
 too rough for pleasant oystering, and so started 
 off again for the woods, baby and all, the baby 
 going along in his carriage. Went in for tree- 
 cutting as if life depended upon it. Took a new 
 road across country coming back and got lost, 
 but found a deserted orchard and filled the 
 baby-carriage with enough stolen apples to last 
 a week. No letters in the mail, no books, 
 nothing. Finished up the Galaxy sketches of 
 James, and voted them well worth the time 
 spent upon them. 
 
 Wednesday. A touch of frost in the air, al- 
 though September is not half over. After 
 breakfast, filled up some gaps in my new straw- 
 berry bed with runners from the old one. Dug 
 four post-holes in order to get good stout sup- 
 port for the wire fence which must go around 
 the whole garden next year. Went oystering 
 after lunch with A. and L. and the children. 
 Delightful on the water, although towards the 
 ocean every thing seems to be as deserted by
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 29 
 
 the crowd as if it were midwinter. Brought 
 back a bushel of oysters in defiance of the law, 
 which is not yet up. Opened some of them 
 before dinner, and packed the rest in the cellar. 
 For dinner we had the sixth unfortunate chicken 
 of our devoted little band. Cold enough for a 
 fire ; we had the first blaze of the autumn, the 
 great bunches of ferns and moss-covered twigs 
 which have filled the fireplace all summer 
 going first with a crackling roar. Read the 
 last of Kennan's articles on Siberia from the 
 Century and some of the " open letters." 
 Pretty well tired out ; between the effects of 
 the fire and the oystering began to nod over 
 our books by the time the clock struck ten. 
 
 Thursday. Went over more than half of the 
 garden between breakfast and ten o'clock, 
 giving the last hoeing that will be needed this 
 year. Notwithstanding Monday's rain, the 
 weeds already show a disposition to stay in the 
 ground, and it is evident that all vegetation 
 has lost heart. Got through the task at ten 
 o'clock, and as weeding is what I like least 
 about gardening, there is much comfort in find- 
 ing that there is such a thing as getting ahead of 
 the weeds if you keep up the battle persistently 
 enough. Wrote from ten to lunch time. After 
 luncheon went with A. and the children over 
 to the beach, sailing our three miles across the 
 bay with a free wind in less than half an hour. 
 One would scarcely believe that in three weeks
 
 30 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 so great a change had taken place. Three 
 weeks ago the beach was alive with people, the 
 bay was full of boats, sailing back and forth, 
 the little bathing station on the beach had 
 plenty to do, there were dozens of people in 
 the surf and scores walking along the sands. 
 To-day we were one of half-a-dozen sails to be 
 found as far as the eye could reach. On the 
 beach there was complete silence, except for 
 the boom of the surf and the pipe of an occa- 
 sional quail. Tradition says that the quail 
 along this narrow line of sand, which stretches 
 from Fire Island to Quogue, came ashore from 
 an English vessel wrecked off Moriches many 
 years ago. They were intended for some rich 
 man's estate, but escaped here and have done 
 well. The season is so nearly through, so far 
 as bathing is concerned, that we gathered up 
 our bathing suits, camp-chairs, and beach- 
 shades, and put them aboard the Nelly for 
 home. The sail home against a brisk, steady 
 northwest breeze was one of the most delightful 
 we have had this summer, the nose of the boat 
 plowing the water half the way back, and the 
 main-sheet wet half up the mast. As is so 
 often the way on the Great South Bay, the 
 wind died out at sundown, and as we carried 
 our beach traps up to the house the whole west 
 was aflame, the air cooler, but the wind gone. 
 The last of the hotel and boarding-house people 
 seem to be going, so that we shall soon have
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 31 
 
 the bay to ourselves. One storm in early Sep- 
 tember seems to scare the whole crowd off. 
 Had another fire after dinner, and read the last 
 instalment of Howells' novel in Harper s. 
 
 Friday. Opened a lot of oysters before 
 breakfast and dug the other post-holes before 
 lunch, making a long morning's work as I have 
 no digging apparatus fit for the job. Let the 
 chickens out for a tramp over the garden, keep- 
 ing the children to see that they did not get into 
 the tomato vines. The children picked all the 
 tomatoes for the yearly canning more than 
 three bushels. Wrote after lunch until three 
 o'clock, and started out with the whole family 
 to go down along the shore about a mile from 
 here where there are some branches of dead 
 pine overgrown with silvery moss ; took a saw 
 along and brought home a lot with which to 
 decorate ; picked up some wonderful grasses of 
 a kind unknown to me, which we found grow- 
 ing to a height of seven feet in a sort of half 
 swamp, half bog. Growing dark early, but 
 not cold enough for our fire. Looked up and 
 read some chapters on wild grasses, and wrote 
 some private letters. S. gave us some remi- 
 niscences of " Die Meistersinger," on the piano, 
 and A. sang some Schubert songs. 
 
 The talk this evening ran upon the future of 
 music in New York, and while in J. we had a 
 devoted believer in the grandeur and import- 
 ance of our musical future, S. was entirely
 
 32 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 sceptical, and believed that whether or 'not 
 the Wagner wave had a more solid foundation 
 than passing fashion, the real love of music was 
 not deep enough to encourage the hope of a per- 
 manent opera, such as exists in Vienna, Berlin, 
 Munich, and half-a-dozen other German cities. 
 The idea that the love of Wagner's music is, so 
 to speak, fictitious, and the professions of the 
 Wagner enthusiasts merely due to the extrane- 
 ous influence of the moment, I hear a good deal 
 about, but can never take quite seriously. One 
 of my friends insists that the more violent the 
 craze for Wagnerism, the sooner it will be over, 
 and that the very persons who are now decry- 
 ing every thing but Wagner, will soon be hailing 
 the advent of some new light, more abstruse 
 and bizarre than the Bayreuth master perhaps 
 Ching-Chang, with his orchestra playing in half- 
 a-dozen keys at once. I know that this is a 
 common impression among unmusical people. 
 But I see around me so many persons who are 
 perfectly sincere in the pre-eminent position 
 which they gave to this music of the future, 
 so-called for many years, and now so much the 
 music of the present, that I have long ceased to 
 have any misgivings about the matter. The 
 time was when, with the neophyte's ardor, I was 
 ready to ascribe all opposition to Wagner 
 either to ignorance or dishonesty. Since then, 
 I have met persons who know something of 
 music, and yet prefer Mozart, Beethoven, or
 
 THE SORT OF L/FE WE LEAD. 33 
 
 Brahms, to Wagner, and of their honesty I am 
 as well convinced as of their knowledge and 
 good-taste. Nevertheless such persons are 
 very few, and whereas among musically edu- 
 cated men and women the preference for Wag- 
 ner's music above all other is overwhelming, 
 the chief opposition is really due to simple 
 ignorance. As for argument upon the question, 
 it is very much like arguing as to religion ; we 
 have no scientific data to start from. I may 
 insist that the " Meistersinger " prize-song is 
 better music than " Silver Threads among the 
 Gold," but beyond quoting expert opinions in 
 favor of my opinion, what is there to say? 
 Musical judgment must be more or less empiri- 
 cal. In painting, in sculpture, in literature, there 
 are fixed standards; in music, none. The music 
 which to-day the cultivated world considers 
 admirable in every respect was condemned 
 a generation ago by experts as meaningless, 
 chaotic, and unworthy of serious attention. The 
 future of music in New York interests us here 
 in the wilderness to the extent that it is the 
 chief magnet in drawing us to the city when 
 the snow begins to fly in earnest. Were it not 
 for the German performances at our opera- 
 house, I doubt whether we should consider it 
 worth our while to pack our trunks and suffer 
 the ills of a city boarding-house for even a 
 fortnight. 
 
 For my own part, I look forward to the day
 
 34 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 when the phonograph will come to our rescue. 
 Although this little instrument is yet in its 
 infancy, I do not see how any one who has 
 examined it at all can doubt its future import- 
 ance. It may be a year from now, or ten years 
 from now, but that some day the phonograph 
 will be the reader, singer, and player for the 
 family, is to me beyond doubt. I have heard 
 results so marvellous from the instrument even 
 in its present crude shape, that when scores of 
 inventors have had time to work at it, its per- 
 formances will be nothing short of miraculous. 
 In music, especially, it seems always to have 
 excelled. The first of the Edison phonographs, 
 which were admittedly toys, so far as talking is 
 concerned, reproduced singing, violin playing, 
 whistling, with extraordinary fidelity. The 
 later instrument of to-day gives out a piano 
 piece so that not only all the notes are heard as 
 if the piano was in the next room, but even the 
 overtones and the after-vibrations of the 
 strings are distinct. Inasmuch as it will cost 
 scarcely any thing to make duplicates of the 
 wax cylinders bearing upon them music, it will 
 pay to take great pains and go to heavy ex- 
 pense in order to obtain an original cylinder 
 which gives results as perfect as possible. 
 Rubinstein may well devote himself to playing 
 into huge sounding funnels, if he knows that 
 duplicates of the little wax cylinder at the 
 other end of the funnel are to be distributed
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 35 
 
 all over the civilized world, and that millions of 
 people now, and perhaps a thousand years 
 from now, will listen to an echo of his work. 
 This feature of the certain and almost costless 
 reproduction of these cylinders will cause the 
 search for a sound magnifier to begin again in 
 earnest. Some years ago Mr. Edison exhibited 
 an apparatus whereby the noise made by a fly 
 walking across a sheet of paper was made to 
 sound like the tramp of a horse across the 
 stable floor. Is it too great a stretch of the 
 imagination to predict that some similar means 
 of magnifying sound will be applied to the 
 echo of the phonograph ? 
 
 Some day we may have our operas and our 
 concerts at home. 
 
 Saturday. Delightfully cold again ; and off 
 to the woods with the children right after 
 breakfast, there being no school. Worked 
 hard at the pines, while the young ones picked 
 up twigs and chopped for the kindling pile ; 
 took our luncheon along, and ate it with the 
 music of the countless quail calling for Bob 
 White from all directions ; the breeze was from 
 inland, but full of life, and laden with incense 
 from the miles of pine between here and Long 
 Island Sound. On our way home met S., with 
 a fine deer, which, to my amazement, he told 
 us had been shot not ten miles from us. 
 The idea of wild deer on Long Island would 
 surprise a good many New Yorkers. At the
 
 36 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 store, where we stopped for the mail, there are 
 reports of ducks in plenty. A man with a good 
 gun ought not to starve around here. Two of 
 the children fell asleep at dinner, and, after a 
 little music, we decided to go to bed, omitting 
 the usual literary exercises, and rejecting A.'s 
 proposition to read a chapter on mental lazi- 
 ness. The dinner enlivened by a heated dis- 
 cussion over the " good gray poet," now 
 reported to be very low in health. 
 
 I do not know whether this little extract 
 from my diary gives a picture which impresses 
 the casual reader as pleasant or the reverse. 
 Not once during such a week had I to discuss 
 unpleasant matters, or distressingly common- 
 place matters with unpleasant or commonplace 
 people. I had earned enough money by writ- 
 ing to more than pay the modest cost of this 
 life. Every thing but the groceries and the 
 little meat required we had supplied ourselves 
 the vegetables, the eggs, the chickens, the 
 oysters, the crabs, the honey, and the apples 
 the last stolen. No doubt chopping down 
 wood, although an occupation much affected 
 by a famous Englishman perhaps the most 
 famous Englishman of this age, might appeal 
 to some of us, owing to the idiotic Anglomania
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 3/ 
 
 of the day, but it is not the sort of sport that 
 the average city man yearns for. The utili- 
 tarian part of it a very important part of it to 
 me, and in fact I view all my sports from a 
 utilitarian point of view certainly would not 
 impress the city man who rushes out of town 
 for two weeks of the year in order to get what 
 he calls recreation. Wood means good fires to 
 us, and good big fires are essential in our coun- 
 try home. I should say that we burn a cord of 
 wood in a fortnight, although the big fire is not 
 going all day ; in cold weather a small self- 
 feeding stove hidden by a screen keeps the 
 living-room comfortable. I suppose I might 
 say the same thing in regard to oystering. 
 The poet's friend who found nothing in the 
 primrose would certainly not enjoy oystering. 
 For my part, oystering is one of the pleasures 
 of the year. It is one of my sports that I rank 
 highest. I sail my own boat over to a part of 
 the bay which abounds in oysters, and, allow- 
 ing the sheet to run out, I can " tong away" on 
 deck, thro wing the oysters in their queer growths 
 to the children, who throw away the shell and 
 refuse, cutting the oysters apart, as they grow 
 mainly in bunches, and piling them up in the
 
 38 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 basket, which we carry home. Take an after- 
 noon in October, with a good breeze blowing, 
 not enough to make the water very rough, and, 
 with my young ones as company, I can get as 
 much real pleasure and certainly as much 
 healthy exercise from oystering in the Great 
 South Bay as from any sport I know of. Then 
 there is the money value of the oysters to be 
 thought of. If I could not get a bushel of 
 oysters in an afternoon, I should have to buy 
 meat. 
 
 I have tried by practical lessons to convince 
 several city friends that there is a joy about 
 scraping the bottom of the sea for oysters 
 beyond any thing that they could have ima- 
 gined. I induced a critical friend of mine to 
 take off his coat one fine afternoon and work 
 the " tongs." The water was pretty rough, and 
 he had to jump about a good deal on deck in 
 order to keep his footing. I should say that in 
 the half-hour he played at oystering, he brought 
 up thirty or forty oysters. At the end of that 
 time he said that he would rather write a two- 
 column article than rake a bushel of oysters, 
 and he smoked cigars and threw shells into the 
 water for the rest of the afternoon. When
 
 THE SORT OF LIFE WE LEAD. 39 
 
 I met him a month later in the dusty, miserable 
 city of New York, he said that he attributed 
 queer pains in his back to that oystering expe- 
 rience. Some men are blind to the opportuni- 
 ties of this life.
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. 
 
 " TT is fortunate," said one of my friends to 
 whom I described my way of living, " that 
 all people do not think as you do or the world 
 would stand still. If we were all to shun the 
 city, to go off hunting or oystering every day, 
 contenting ourselves with the unambitious life 
 you lead, there would be certain deterioration. 
 Where would be our inventors, our great 
 scholars, who devote their lives to incessant 
 work, and our merchant princes who never 
 miss a day in their counting-rooms, the men 
 who plan vast operations and make the country 
 rich and prosperous?" Of course this is the 
 common argument against any such scheme as 
 mine, and if a man enjoys the management of 
 vast commercial operations, if he likes to tele- 
 graph here and there to buy tons of lard at 
 a low price and telegraph elsewhere to sell them 
 at a high price, I am only too delighted to 
 have him do so and perhaps thereby enable me 
 40
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. 41 
 
 to buy my lard a little cheaper at our country 
 store. By sitting in his counting-room three 
 hundred days out of the year and eight hours 
 of the day he gives me my lard a little cheaper, 
 and he finds pleasure in it. The operation gives 
 him a big stone house to live in, a carriage which 
 his wife rides in, for he never finds any time, an 
 opera box which his wife and daughters may 
 enjoy, for he has no knowledge of music ; he 
 has never had any time to learn any thing be- 
 yond the quotations of lard in different parts of 
 the world. If these noble men devoted to lard 
 and other commercial operations, if they like 
 it, I am only too delighted. If I thought they 
 were breaking themselves down, losing year 
 after year of oystering and wood-cutting in 
 order to give me my lard one eighth of a cent a 
 pound cheaper than I should otherwise have it, 
 it would cast a shadow over my sports ; I should 
 hate to think that I'was reaping while they were 
 laboring. 
 
 Seriously, does any one contend that the life 
 of to-day is any happier, any more rational, any 
 more healthy, than the life in the American colo- 
 nies one hundred years ago ? So far as material 
 prosperity goes, it seems that there was far less
 
 42 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 poverty then than now in the necessaries of 
 life ; the farm-houses were filled to overflowing 
 with good things to eat and drink. There were 
 few books, and if some inventors and workers 
 had not given up country life long enough to 
 invent power-presses we might not have news- 
 papers and books so cheap as they are to-day. 
 But I doubt if any one thinks of colonial life in 
 this country as less worth living than our life of 
 to-day. Certainly in New York City there was 
 not, in proportion to the population, one quar- 
 ter of the poverty, the misery, the vice that we 
 know to-day. There was not that fierce strug- 
 gle for existence which blights the lives of so 
 many hundreds of thousands of our fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 If the world persisted in playing as I do, 
 although few people regard wood-cutting and 
 grubbing in a garden as play, should we not 
 have had any great inventions, should we not 
 have had any steam-engines, or the power-press, 
 or the telephone ? This would imply that the 
 man who devoted a large part of his life to 
 such sports as I do, wholly unfits himself for 
 other kinds of work which I deny. My own 
 work which brings me money happens to be
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. 43 
 
 writing articles for which misguided publishers 
 of newspapers pay me. I devote a certain num- 
 ber of hours in the week to writing, nor in my 
 humble opinion is it the easy writing which is 
 supposed to make such hard reading. There is 
 no reason why other people who choose to cut 
 loose from city life, having found its cost greater 
 than its worth, should not employ a certain 
 number of hours every day at the kind of work 
 for which they happen to have a particular 
 bent. I see already that my eldest boy will 
 probably turn his attention to machinery, and 
 perhaps become an electrician. It is not abso- 
 lutely necessary that he should remain in the 
 machine-shop all his life in order to contribute 
 something to the world's stock of machinery. 
 Some of the greatest inventions and most valu- 
 able suggestions have been made by men far 
 away from the great centres of life. 
 
 Again, if in our bustling New York we saw 
 that most men really do produce valuable worl^ 
 essential to the happiness of mankind, there 
 might be some misgiving as to the policy of 
 isolating one's self from the crowd and endeav- 
 oring to get as much enjoyment upon com- 
 paratively nothing a year as the millionaire.
 
 44 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 may get. Who does not know that hundreds 
 of the rich men of New York City owe their 
 wealth to gambling, pure and simple, the rest 
 of the country furnishing the victims and the 
 money ? Statistics show, for instance, that of all 
 the buying and selling done upon the New 
 York Produce Exchange, ninety-five per cent, 
 represents gambling; five per cent, represents 
 actual buying and selling of grain and produce. 
 In Wall Street it is still worse. These dozens 
 of well-dressed men, the men who own the 
 yachts and the fast horses and the big country 
 places, do no useful work, produce nothing, and 
 if their business could be wiped out of existence 
 to-morrow the world would be no poorer. 
 Under cover of the little legitimate trading or 
 business which has to be done in stocks or 
 bonds, this army of gamblers grow rich upon 
 the passion of human nature to get something 
 without work. Every little town in the country 
 sends its money to the great city to be matched 
 against the money from somewhere else. These 
 precious brokers are the bankers in the game. 
 To pretend that the business is a whit better 
 than gambling with dice and cards has always 
 seemed to me hypocrisy ; the man who deals
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. 45 
 
 in lard, honestly buying lard and selling lard, 
 and not simply betting upon the future price of 
 lard, may be doing useful work in getting lard 
 where it is plenty and carrying it to places 
 where it is scarce, and so throughout the whole 
 range of legitimate mercantile life. The man 
 who keeps a retail shop of any kind is of actual 
 service to the community But the typical 
 broker what does he produce in the course of 
 a year to pay for the large sums of money he 
 receives? This is an old topic, and I have 
 nothing new to say about it. But when people 
 point to me as an idler, wasting my time and 
 neglecting my opportunities, and at the same 
 time point to my neighbor, the successful 
 broker, as an example, I must decline to be 
 impressed. At least, I give something in return 
 for what the world gives me. The articles I 
 write may be poor enough, but some people 
 read them, and live to want to read more, or 
 publishers would not buy them. 
 
 I have a dear friend who is a cotton-broker. 
 He admits candidly that his business is gam- 
 bling, pure and simple, but he contends that if 
 people want to gamble, and want to pay him a 
 comfortable income for registering their bets,
 
 46 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 there is no reason why he should refuse. If 
 people do want to buy actual cotton, he will buy 
 cotton for them, although he would scarcely 
 know a bale of cotton if he saw one. But his 
 customers want to gamble, and pay him well 
 for helping them to do so. He has no taste or 
 love for chopping wood or raking oysters, but 
 enjoys sitting at a big desk for several hours a 
 day receiving checks from customers, paying 
 out the losses and the gains, and dropping into 
 Delmonico's in the middle of the day for 
 luncheon and a quiet talk about the best card in 
 the game to put your money on. When a man's 
 conscience can allow him to do that sort of 
 business day after day, I do not know whether 
 to be glad or sorry for him. Another friend of 
 mine, also a broker, to whom I said one even- 
 ing at dinner, " You have produced nothing, 
 earned nothing of value to-day," replied to me : 
 " Yes, I have. Here is a check for $200, the 
 profits of a turn in wheat; it was done in half 
 an hour. I bought low, and I sold high." 
 " And," I asked, " do you not pity the man who 
 lost that $200, for you gave no equivalent 
 in work for it." This seemed to be so extra- 
 ordinary a view of the matter that every one
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. tf 
 
 laughed ; no one seemed to have the least 
 sympathy for the unfortunate loser in the game. 
 Do not these things show that this speculation 
 disease is blunting the moral sense of the com- 
 munity ? My friend of whom I spoke first is a 
 man to whose friendship I owe much, and for 
 whose character I have the highest esteem. 
 He is kindliness itself. And yet point out to 
 him, or try to point out to him, that the life of 
 a broker, although admittedly gambling, pure 
 and simple, is a vicious one, and he will laugh 
 good-naturedly, and go on with profound con- 
 tent upon his " vicious " course. 
 
 To state briefly my view, to sum up the gist 
 of what I have put into the foregoing pages, 
 what I advance and believe is that the hard- 
 working city man does not get his rights out 
 of life. It may be that ignorance is bliss. He 
 may be swept so far in the wrong direction as 
 to lose all proper estimate of the good things 
 of this life ; his ideas of relative values may be 
 distorted. He may consider that fine clothes 
 and a big house make up for lack of real sport ; 
 he may find more pleasure in counting bills 
 than in sailing or walking. A misguided sense 
 of duty may keep him all his life half-starved
 
 48 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 for rational sport ; he may, like the unfortunate 
 person of whom I spoke at the beginning of 
 this book, " die in harness " as a typical Amer- 
 ican. I believe that there is an escape from 
 the anxiety, the toil, the wear of business in 
 rational pursuits offered to us by the country, 
 and that we can abandon the town without 
 sacrificing culture, education, and intellectual 
 life. I am free to admit that I should not 
 advise any man accustomed to living in the 
 tittle-tattle of the town, accustomed to " pad- 
 dling in social slush," as Thoreau puts it, to go 
 to the country carrying nothing with him. If 
 a man has no resources of his own, if he finds 
 no pleasure in books and literature, I should 
 say beware of the country. Any such scheme 
 as I have outlined would fail ; it may be that 
 very few men are so fond of out-door life that 
 they would consider the loss of New York's 
 advantages as of small account in comparison 
 with the joys of wood-chopping and oyster- 
 dredging. In writing these pages I have had 
 no intention of tempting away the clerk from 
 his yardstick or his ledger, or the broker from 
 his office. I have simply had my say, knowing 
 that I am in an insignificant minority. I think I
 
 WHAT MY CRITICS WILL SAY. 49 
 
 have shown that bankruptcy need not result 
 from such a course, providing there is a small 
 income, so small that most men who reach 
 middle age have it at their disposal. And in 
 such a case there is the possibility of getting 
 also out of the city some of its advantages, 
 for there are several months in the depth of 
 winter when there is nothing to be done, either 
 in the way of sport or work, in the country. I 
 have gone so far as to say that even if country 
 life meant entire isolation from the city, and 
 dependence for a living on the money which 
 may be made in the country, even then there is 
 much to be said in favor of such a move. 
 Nevertheless, money is not plenty in the coun- 
 try, and if a man and his family are not pre- 
 pared to live in the simplest possible fashion, 
 and to undergo some little privations, better by 
 far stick to the ills that they know of.
 
 HOME. 
 
 'T'HREE years ago I made such changes in 
 my business engagements as to begin my 
 series of experiments. I wished to find out 
 how far a small income of less than $500 a 
 year would carry me towards independence of 
 the city, its troubles and anxieties, its landlords 
 and their bills. The question was whether or 
 not I could so supplement such an income by 
 manual out-door labor, as to keep my family in 
 comfort the year round, and even provide fora 
 few weeks of city life in the dead of winter. I 
 resigned my city position and took a small 
 place fifty miles from New York, where rent 
 was cheap, the soil fairly good for gardening^ 
 and within gunshot of the water. I counted 
 upon my garden, my chickens, and my boat for 
 a good deal, and I was not disappointed. As 
 in every village, the vegetables, eggs, chickens, 
 and fish were dear when you had to buy them, 
 partly because people have their own farm 
 50
 
 HOME. 51 
 
 supplies, there being no regular business done 
 in those things, and partly because the prices 
 which obtain in July and August when the 
 summer boarders or cottagers come to be 
 plucked, regulate the prices of the year. In 
 the three years that have gone by since then, 
 the difficulties and advantages of the scheme 
 have defined themselves. I can say that in my 
 own case, at least, this mode of life is infinitely 
 preferable for a poor man to any other that I 
 have discovered. I do not say that if some 
 great-uncle in India should leave me a for- 
 tune, I would not make some changes in the 
 direction of greater sport and less actual labor, 
 for there is labor in the raising of cabbages. 
 And yet I confess that my pleasure over a 
 fortune from the skies would be tempered with 
 the knowledge that I should no longer take 
 satisfaction in raising cabbages for the cabbages' 
 sake. I might go on working my home acre, 
 but it would be with something of the discon- 
 tent with which I used to work a bedroom 
 gymnastic apparatus in the days before I 
 deserted the city. When I get through a hard 
 morning's work of hoeing or planting, there is 
 a decided satisfaction in the thought that by
 
 52 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 this gymnastic exercise in the sunlight I have 
 been cheating the world out of a living. 
 
 But I cannot advise any one who does not 
 love hard physical exercise to attempt any such 
 experiment. It requires good muscles and 
 system, the latter especially, as I shall have 
 occasion to insist upon more than once in 
 chapters upon my garden, my bees, and my 
 chickens. Without system there is as rapid a 
 deterioration in a garden as in a business enter- 
 prise. Experience has taught me that one 
 hour's writing every day, or an hour's garden- 
 ing, accomplished with clock-like regularity, 
 gives valuable results, where spasmodic work 
 ends in comparatively nothing. The same 
 rules which obtain in business life hold good in 
 my country work. The notion that a whole 
 day's work in the garden once a week is as 
 good as two hours' every morning, is all 
 wrong. I should say that two hours' work in 
 the garden once a day, from the middle of 
 April to the end of August, would result in 
 twice the garden produce that might be ex- 
 pected from the same number of hours' work 
 given at odd moments a day here and a day 
 there. And so with every other country pur-
 
 HOME. 53 
 
 suit. So great is my preference for out-door 
 work and sports over writing book reviews and 
 magazine articles, that at first I was constantly 
 tempted to throw down my pen and take to 
 any outdoor work in sight, quieting my con- 
 science with the plea that I would make up 
 time in the evening. When evening came, the 
 distasteful task was put off again until the next 
 morning. Such rules as are necessary to get 
 through a certain amount of work are absolutely 
 essential. If one allots the hours of the day to 
 certain work and allows no interference with 
 the arrangements laid down, it is surprising 
 what can be accomplished on a little country 
 place. This sounds trite enough, and yet needs 
 to be insisted upon. I am a thorough believer 
 in the practice of a certain famous writer who 
 sits at his desk, pen in hand, from nine till 
 twelve every morning, whether ideas come or 
 not. He searches diligently, even if he does 
 not find, and the brain finally begins work with- 
 out painful urging. 
 
 The new life has turned out so well that I 
 have cast my lot for good in with Nature. 
 From the beginning of April until Christmas I 
 find health and enjoyment away from New
 
 54 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 York. For the three months in winter we 
 board in the city, the children counting the 
 weeks in their impatience to get back to the 
 fields, even snow-covered fields. Had I now to 
 choose between giving up the city altogether 
 and returning to the old life of desk-work the 
 year round, I should accept the out-door exist- 
 ence without a moment's hesitation, both for 
 myself and my children. It was found that to 
 build a house such as we required was better 
 than continuing to pay rent, and for a year 
 preparations were made for this country home 
 which should satisfy our aesthetic tastes and at 
 the same time cost but little money. 
 
 The house stands upon a bluff, overlooking a 
 bay, which spreads east and west for many 
 miles, bounded on the south by a long strip of 
 barren sand. The water is not more than two 
 minutes' walk away, and at the foot of the 
 country road which leads down from the garden 
 to the beach, there is a little dock jutting out 
 forty or fifty feet into the water, far enough to 
 allow sail-boats to be drawn up to it. In out- 
 side appearance the house has something of the 
 English farm-house. The roof slopes east and 
 west from a central ridge-pole, with no break of
 
 HOME. 55 
 
 any kind except at the west end, where a big 
 and square chimney-stack rises to a few feet 
 above the level of the ridge-pole. On the east 
 end of the house the roof slants down over a 
 piazza, which is always shady in the afternoons. 
 Part of the piazza at the northeast corner is 
 taken up with a small reception-room, opening 
 upon the piazza, and through which people 
 must pass in order to get into the house itself. 
 From this reception-room portieres open to the 
 main room of the house, which is living-room, 
 library, music-room, and everything but dining- 
 room and kitchen in one ; when we have a 
 crowd, it is a dining-room too. It is thirty feet 
 wide, the whole width of the house, and thirty- 
 five feet long. At the end opposite the entrance 
 is a monumental fireplace, built of brick rather 
 than rough stone, because stone is scarce in this 
 part of the world. The opening is large enough 
 to allow big logs six feet long to be thrown upon 
 the fire, and at least four feet deep. Above 
 the fireplace and the old-fashioned mantle-ledge, 
 which holds a collection of more or less dam- 
 aged bric-a-brac, is a device which perhaps 
 only a musician would understand or care for. 
 A broad frieze seven feet wide and three feet
 
 $6 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 high has been laid off in black mortar, and upon 
 this background music-staves have been out- 
 lined with small white sea pebbles. Upon 
 these staves is the beginning of the fire-motive 
 which is heard at the end of Wagner's " Wal- 
 kiire," when Wotan, the great god of northern 
 mythology, calls upon Loge, the god of Fire, 
 to surround the sleeping Brunhilde with fierce 
 flames. 
 
 The plaster of this big room is purposely left 
 rough, and is colored a sombre red. Across the 
 ceiling goes a big beam or girder a foot square, 
 and were it not for the cold winds of November 
 and December, no plaster at all need have been 
 used. Around the whole room, in lieu of a cor- 
 nice, or frieze, runs a series of silhouettes of 
 life-size heads of friends of the family who have 
 been inmates of the house at one time or an- 
 other. Such silhouettes, if cut out of light- 
 brown paper, show the profile outlined upon a 
 black background with extraordinary vividness; 
 the process of making them is so simple that 
 almost every one has tried it. With a candle 
 and a sheet of paper the shadow of a head 
 is thrown upon any paper screen, and a pencil 
 mark will indicate where the cutting is to be
 
 HOME. 57 
 
 done. Underneath each head is the date in 
 big black letters, painted in with a brush. It is 
 impossible to feel lonely with such shades, liter- 
 ally, around one. 
 
 At one side of the big room the staircase 
 rises up and passes in a little gallery, almost 
 over the fireplace. Underneath the stairs and 
 alongside of the big chimney-place is a door 
 opening into a very small dining-room. Right 
 back of the main fireplace is the kitchen. The 
 whole house measures thirty feet in width by 
 fifty feet in length, including the piazza. The 
 main room is thirty feet wide by thirty-five feet 
 in length, and has windows opening on the pi- 
 azza to the east, on the sea, or the bay, to the 
 south, and on the moors to the north. Yet it 
 is so placed that the last rays of the setting sun 
 get into the house. On the north side of the 
 building, which is shingled from top to bottom, 
 and has never been painted, the storms of win- 
 ter and the sun of summer gradually giving it 
 a silver hue beyond the beauty of any artificial 
 paint, is a tennis-court, shaded in the afternoon 
 by the house. Back, there is a garden, small 
 but perfectly kept up, a chicken-yard, an apiary, 
 and other out-houses. The nearness to the sea
 
 $8 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 is hinted at by the presence of some whales' 
 vertebrae, in the shape of seats sprinkled around 
 the grounds. The orchard, which is at the 
 back of the lot, does not count for much except 
 in the matter of pears, which are wonderfully 
 successful in our part of the world. 
 
 Such a house as this, finished in the roughest 
 shape, but beautified by loving hands, and liter- 
 ally strewn with bits of color in the shape of a 
 rug here, a gigantic Japanese fan there, a palm- 
 tree in this corner, and no end of pottery of the 
 most flamboyant type, has a character which no 
 amount of expensive commonplace work can 
 give. Its glory is the size of its chief room. 
 There is scarcely a private house within miles 
 which boasts a room of that size, and with 
 all its roughness, size produces a good 
 effect. In its present shape, with the five 
 small bedrooms upstairs finished in the very 
 cheapest manner, the total cost of the house 
 has been under $1,600. Counting the cost of 
 some of the ornamental woodwork, which I 
 have done myself as a matter of personal pride, 
 perhaps the whole building might cost to du- 
 plicate $1,700. Yet the kitchen has all the 
 conveniences of a city house. The range gives
 
 HOME. 59 
 
 hot and cold water ; there are stationary tubs ; 
 and a small wind-mill on the little tool house 
 near the orchard pumps all the water to the 
 tank that the house can use. As we are near 
 the sea, it is rare that the breeze is not sufficient 
 to turn the mill, which cost less than $200 all 
 complete. The well is a driven one, and gives 
 an inexhaustible supply of good water. 
 
 It is hard to give in words any thing like an 
 adequate picture of this home. Take a hot 
 night in summer, with the breeze blowing right 
 across our big room, and there is no more de- 
 lightful place for music and talk. Until long 
 after dark the only light comes from the small 
 lamp inside a big swinging wrought-iron bell 
 which hangs in the centre of the room, a piece 
 which I picked up years ago in a junk shop ; 
 it may have been intended for a hanging lamp, 
 but I am inclined to think that it was originally 
 part of the balcony railing of an old-fashioned 
 house in lower Broadway. At all events, it 
 serves its present purpose admirably. The 
 opalescent glass with which it is now fitted 
 casts a subdued light throughout even so big a 
 room as ours. If it is pleasant in summer, it is 
 better in winter. Upon one of our cold blowy
 
 60 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 days in November I know nothing so inspirit- 
 ing as to get home from my oystering or fish- 
 ing or hunting, to find the big room a blaze of 
 light from a royal fire of logs, the candles or 
 the lamps giving the right points of color 
 throughout, the warmth and the brightness 
 making a strong contrast with the cold wind 
 outside and the coming darkness. 
 
 The effect of such a room is due largely to 
 size, and next, to color. Its size would give it 
 a certain air even if the walls and ceiling were 
 of unpainted pine. But color may be called 
 to the rescue, at almost no expense. For the 
 sake of warmth in cold weather, as we stay 
 here until Christmas, and might want to stay 
 here all the year round, the walls have been 
 well plastered with rough plaster tinted a dark 
 gray, and forming an admirable background 
 for such pictures, skins, and bits of bric-a-brac 
 and color as we hang around. To plaster 
 the ceiling would have given an immense 
 stretch of plain surface almost unbroken by 
 light and shade, and to avoid this the beams 
 have been left open, with the immense girder 
 running across the middle of the room at right 
 angles with its length. Girder and beams have
 
 HOME. 6 1 
 
 not even been planed; the girder still shows 
 the marks of the axe, and here again rough 
 color comes to the rescue, for at a cost of less 
 than five dollars the whole ceiling has been 
 painted a rough brown red, giving an infinite 
 variety of nooks and corners in which the 
 shadows play. The frieze which runs round 
 the room three feet from the ceiling, and of the 
 decoration of which in silhouettes I have 
 already spoken, is painted very nearly black. 
 All the painting done in this room will last a 
 generation, and need never be renewed, so far 
 as actual effect goes. The woodwork within 
 reach, the doors, the floor, the stairs, the window 
 boxes and seats are all oiled pine, which may 
 be kept in admirable order at the expense of 
 about ten cents a month for kerosene and a 
 little labor in applying it. I have not yet tried 
 a winter in this house, but from the effect of 
 cold storms in the late autumn, I imagine that 
 it may be necessary to establish a large self- 
 feeding stove in one corner of the big room, 
 and perhaps carry the pipes across the room to 
 the chimney. For the heating of the upper 
 part of the house, I shall try, should we ever 
 need to live in it after Christmas, a plan which
 
 62 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 has worked admirably elsewhere namely, to 
 cut square register holes in the flooring of the 
 upper rooms and trust to the heat from the 
 living room rising sufficiently to keep water 
 from freezing in the bedroom pitchers. Two 
 of our upstairs rooms are provided with open 
 hearths, and should it become necessary to heat 
 any one of the other bedrooms, a small stove, 
 with the pipe running through the hall to the 
 chimney, will be wholly sufficient. We are 
 certain to have plenty of air in such a house, 
 and we want it. Some statistics which I quote 
 elsewhere from Dr. G. B. Barron, an English au- 
 thority, upon the effect of living in small rooms, 
 may be read with interest in this connection. 
 
 Housekeeping in this house has been reduced 
 to scientific simplicity and I will venture to say 
 that no time or money is wasted. Some of our 
 devices partake a good deal of the pic-nic. For 
 instance, with a view to saving all the labor 
 possible, there is but little washing done. The 
 children dress in flannel, and to avoid washing 
 dishes we have found it possible to use wooden 
 plates for certain meals, such as crab suppers ; 
 wooden plates can be bought for nothing and 
 become excellent firewood.
 
 HOME. 63 
 
 In order to rent such a house in the country, 
 if such a house can be found, which is very un- 
 likely, one would have to pay at least four or 
 five hundred dollars a summer, especially if it 
 was furnished so as to be comfortable for a 
 large family. A piano, for instance, and a good 
 one, is a necessity with us. Good lamps for 
 evenings, and ample fireplaces are also neces- 
 sary. By making our home in the wilderness, 
 if a lovely little village can be called a wilder- 
 ness, we are able to fit it with every con- 
 venience and comfort, for such things cost but 
 little money, after all. I do not suppose that 
 my whole investment, land and buildings, but 
 not including the furniture, rugs, and fixtures 
 that were brought here from the city when I 
 gave up work for sport, would represent an 
 outlay of more than $3,000, and in estimating 
 my yearly expenses, I put down rent as $150 a 
 year, that being the interest upon this amount. 
 
 As I needed no large amount of land, for an 
 acre suffices amply for all my purposes, I was 
 enabled to buy almost in the heart of a village 
 where land always has a certain value ; and cer- 
 tainly with the improvements I have made my 
 purchase has not deteriorated. Had I been
 
 64 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 compelled to go far away from the village, such 
 a thing as selling out would have been out of 
 the question, for of all the impossible things to 
 sell, country property far from a station is the 
 most hopeless. Not that I have any idea of 
 selling, and I will not even give the name of 
 the little village where we have found a home, 
 for fear that I may be suspected of wishing to 
 raise the price of land by singing its praises.
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 
 
 T HAVE tried this country life and found that 
 it answers all the requirements of my mod- 
 est way of living. In looking over my sources 
 of income, I should place my garden first 
 and my poultry-yard next. Of course, after 
 some years of experimenting, I have dis- 
 covered other, but subordinate sources of 
 income. For instance, having much time upon 
 my hand and aiming to get all the sunshine and 
 fresh air and physical exercise that I can find 
 during nine months in the year on my country 
 acre, I took up a good many little schemes for 
 money-making, or rather money-saving, for I 
 believe that the city man who retires to the 
 wilderness with the idea that he is going to 
 make money there, will, in ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, be disappointed. I can save 
 money in the country by providing things that 
 we should buy almost as necessaries for in- 
 stance, vegetables, eggs, honey, fish, oysters, 
 65
 
 66 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 small fruits, and wood for open fires. The man 
 who, having managed to obtain a little place of 
 his own, even if not more than an acre or two 
 in extent, will be singularly unfortunate in my 
 opinion, or will work with bad judgment, if he 
 does not succeed in providing for his family all 
 the vegetables, both for winter and summer, 
 that they can use, all the small fruits, all the 
 eggs and chickens, and, if he is on the sea-shore, 
 all the shell-fish that the neighborhood affords. 
 To go into details, and taking my own case 
 because, having done what I have done without 
 much special knowledge and no apprentice- 
 ship, so to speak, any one else animated with 
 a love of out-door work will be able to do as 
 much, or more, here is a list of the things which 
 I have been able to provide in sufficient quan- 
 tity for a large family: vegetables in profu- 
 sion throughout the summer, and enough for a 
 large part of the winter; strawberries and small 
 fruits, more than could be used ; ten times the 
 honey that could be used winter and summer, 
 the honey sold being part of the actual money 
 income of the year ; during autumn and early 
 winter, all the oysters and crabs that the family 
 could be prevailed upon to eat, the children at
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 6/ 
 
 last refusing to accept oysters in any shape as a 
 substitute for meat ; all the eggs and more than 
 could be used, and chickens for the table from 
 the end of July until far into the winter. With 
 the additional experience of several years of 
 this life I find other sources of income looming 
 up, or rather of money-saving, for I should like 
 to emphasize the idea that it is not money- 
 making I aim at. Some of my friends have suc- 
 ceeded admirably with pigeons ; others have 
 done wonders with mushrooms, an acquaintance 
 of mine out in Jersey having paid his rent and 
 the wages of a man out of the proceeds of one 
 small mushroom house not twenty-five feet 
 square. These are things for future experi- 
 menting with me, but of the others I can speak 
 with knowledge. 
 
 At the same time I would warn any one that 
 there is a certain amount of danger, the worst 
 side of the picture having been set forth amus- 
 ingly, although too flippantly, in my opinion, by 
 Mr. Robert Roosevelt, in his amusing book, 
 " Five Acres Too Much." As I have already 
 hinted in my garden talk, there must be hard 
 work and systematic work, and work done in 
 person, and not by proxy. It may be said that
 
 68 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the hired man is the bane of every garden so 
 far as actual money-saving is concerned ; ten to 
 one the inexperienced city man will find the 
 wages of his man about double the value of the 
 vegetables or fruits obtained. There are seasons 
 of extraordinarily bad luck in gardening no 
 rain, or too much rain ; no sun, or all sun ; but 
 with a small garden of an acre or less the 
 intelligent workman is almost master of the 
 situation. I can point to no great money-making 
 operations as the result of my own gardening, 
 but I know of more than one instance in which 
 high culture of a careful and intelligent kind 
 upon one acre of land has produced a money 
 profit of $1,200 in one year. This, to be sure, 
 was done in the neighborhood of high-priced 
 markets, and by an expert. The secret of it, 
 as I learned by watching the process almost day 
 by day, was to allow no bit of the plot to go to 
 waste. Every square foot of the 43,560 square 
 feet in that acre bore its crop, and bore the best 
 crop that could be obtained from it and nothing 
 else. The secret of keeping down weeds was 
 never to let them get a beginning. One man 
 was employed in doing nothing but stir up 
 the earth with a cultivator, with the result that
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 69 
 
 every bit of good in the earth and in the 
 manure that was put into it went into the 
 vegetables. You cannot raise two crops at the 
 same time from the same ground, and it must 
 always be borne in mind that between vege- 
 tables and weeds, the weeds are by far the hard- 
 iest and most voracious. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt, in his " Five Acres Too Much," 
 seems to have had peculiarly bad luck from 
 beginning to end. Every thing that he took 
 hold of cow, pigs, horse, garden, fruit-trees, 
 strawberries, chickens turned out badly, and 
 he could not find enough to say of the misery 
 of his experience. He admitted that he had 
 been led to that experiment by reading "Ten 
 Acres Enough." I will confess that I was led 
 to my experiments by the same book, but my 
 experience has been entirely satisfactory to 
 myself, and I should be sorry to think that it 
 was beyond me to keep a small garden in beau- 
 tiful order and raise a lot of chickens. 
 
 The poultry question has been so often gone 
 over, and so many columns have been written 
 about the vast sums of money to be made by 
 raising poultry, by sending spring chickens to 
 market, or by selling eggs when they are dear,
 
 7O LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 that it is scarcely worth while to say more than 
 a word about my chickens here. I have in- 
 variably found that the schemes of my friends 
 who went into poultry-raising as a business, and 
 several of them have done so, turned out badly, 
 partly because they expected to make money 
 out of the business instead of a mere living, and 
 partly because the keeping of 1,000 chickens 
 seems to be a dangerous proceeding to the 
 chickens. In my own case I have never at- 
 tempted to have more than fifty chickens at a 
 time. With an insignificant expenditure this 
 flock has proved to be quite sufficient. Again 
 this is a case where simple care and system are 
 necessary. In the poultry-yard as well as in 
 the garden beautiful order and precision in 
 work pay. In our part of the country ducks 
 have also proved to be one of the native re- 
 sources, but of that I have no personal 
 knowledge. 
 
 As to the resources of the water, every one 
 cannot live at the sea-shore, and even at the 
 sea-shore there is not always an oyster bed near, 
 or clams, or even great lots of crabs. Friends 
 of mine who have attempted for a few months 
 something of the same life that I lead nine
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. /I 
 
 months in the year and have pitched their tents 
 on the Massachusetts coast, really seem to get 
 more out of the water than out of the land. 
 They get an extraordinary number of fish, lob- 
 sters, and clams, they get sea-weed which they 
 use as manure, and scarcely a day passes but 
 some kind of sea food does not make its ap- 
 pearance upon their table. I have never been 
 so fortunate as to be placed where the fishing 
 was of such a nature that I could depend upon 
 it from day to day to furnish the table. Never- 
 theless, I have no doubt that during the sum- 
 mer and autumn I have provided more than 
 fifty dollars' worth of good fish of various kinds, 
 and I leave out of account entirely the oysters, 
 because they can be had for almost the picking 
 up where we are. With us the bay furnishes 
 perhaps the most valuable manure to be found 
 along the coast the bony fish which the fisher- 
 men get in their nets in enormous quantities 
 and either sell to factories where the oil is 
 squeezed out of them or throw them on the 
 land to be used by the farmers as manure. 
 Making a liberal estimate, I should think that 
 the actual money value of the fish, crabs, and 
 oysters that I get during the summer must be
 
 72 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 at the least one hundred dollars, and this is 
 sport, as many city men will admit, and none 
 the less sport because done week after week, 
 and not during a few days' escape from the 
 city. 
 
 I still remember with something like enthu- 
 siasm the impression that the famous book 
 much ridiculed but nevertheless of serious value 
 to so many persons " Ten Acres Enough," 
 made upon me many years ago. At the time 
 when I came across it by chance I was very 
 tired of city life, of late hours and long hours, 
 of nervous strain, of incessant work with few 
 breathing spells. My routine at that time con- 
 sisted of steady labor from nine o'clock in the 
 morning until twelve o'clock at night with very 
 few intervals for rest and recreation. And then it 
 often occurred that work which had to be done 
 took me out of bed long before daylight. Four 
 years of this sort of drudgery with very small 
 prospects of release in the future or of re- 
 ward which would have made such toil bear- 
 able, often caused me to turn over in my mind 
 whether there was not some avenue of escape. 
 As country pursuits had always had a fascina- 
 tion for me from childhood, I had heard more
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 73 
 
 or less of the famous "Ten Acres Enough." 
 One night as I was leaving my office a friend 
 presented me with an old copy of the book, 
 which he said would interest me as I was fond 
 of preaching upon the superiority of country 
 life to city life. On the way home I opened it 
 with but small expectations that any thing in 
 it could apply to my own case. With all my 
 love for the country and for country pursuits I 
 had never thought of myself as a practical 
 farmer or of the possibility of making any kind 
 of a living out of the soil. It has been pointed 
 out to me too often that while potatoes and 
 cabbages are raised all about New York by 
 men who make a poor living at it, any German 
 or Irishman just landed at Castle Garden could 
 raise more potatoes or cabbages than I because 
 he would have more muscle to put into the 
 work. 
 
 Many of my readers may happen to know 
 that " Ten Acres Enough " is the record of the 
 successful attempt of a Philadelphia merchant 
 to support himself and his family by raising 
 strawberries and other small fruits. Middle life 
 had found him no nearer fortune than when he 
 began ; he felt that strength was ebbing away
 
 74 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 and he was losing enthusiasm ; business cares 
 were becoming thicker rather than otherwise. 
 Notes had to be met which caused him constant 
 anxiety. He could take no pleasure in life. One 
 day a friend suggested to him to drop the whole 
 effort for a fortune and try for a comfortable 
 living in quieter, less ambitious, but safer fields. 
 He took the advice and sold out his business, 
 realizing two thousand dollars, with which sum 
 he bought a little place of ten acres eight 
 miles from Philadelphia, and planted it mostly 
 with strawberries. The book gives the results 
 of five years' work, with figures showing exactly 
 what money came in and what went out. At 
 the end of the five years he had recovered 
 health and spirits ; he had kept his family in 
 comfort ; he had lived an out-door life of far 
 more interest to himself than any business life 
 could have been ; and he found his property 
 more valuable and his bank account larger than 
 when he began. I confess that once having 
 plunged into " Ten Acres Enough " I read the 
 book through with more eager interest than if 
 it had been the most absorbing novel. Here 
 was what I had been looking for. I loved sun- 
 shine, I was fond of gardening, I had a passion
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. ?$ 
 
 for grubbing in the earth, for watching things 
 grow. I have had many years of city life, and 
 far more than my share of city amusements as 
 my connection with newspapers has supplied me 
 with tickets to all places of entertainment. I 
 said to myself : "This is the life for me ; I will 
 raise strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and 
 other pleasant things, and if I do not grow rich 
 I shall at least have strength and health where- 
 with to enjoy the sunlight and the country 
 air." 
 
 For months this idea haunted me without 
 taking practical shape. It is no easy matter for 
 a man absorbed in professional life, especially 
 newspaper life, to get out of it, and without 
 capital as I was, the notion had something un- 
 pleasant about it. To cut loose from an assured 
 income was dangerous. The strawberries might 
 not grow, the drought might kill my blackber- 
 ries, there might be a glut in the market when 
 I came to sell, even if I had any thing to sell. 
 I might get tired of solitude, and might yearn 
 for the nervous activity of the city again. I 
 might come to think that a good opera was 
 worth a million strawberry plants, and the end 
 might be as most of my friends predicted^
 
 76 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 that I should sell my ten acres at a tremendous 
 sacrifice, and take up my newspaper work again 
 under greater disadvantages than ever. Never- 
 theless, so firmly was I convinced that there is 
 a joy in gardening well worth striving for, that 
 when spring opened I took a little house in 
 New Jersey and began to feel my way along. 
 I was quite convinced that for a man who knew 
 nothing about gardening except theoretically, 
 only failure would result from burning my ships 
 behind me at once. So I kept on with my 
 work in the city, but moved out to the country, 
 taking a little place with a small garden. 
 Meantime I bought every popular book bearing 
 upon the subject of gardening, and I subscribed 
 to several agricultural newspapers, which I read 
 with conscientious thoroughness. I have quite 
 a little library upon agricultural matters, col- 
 lected that spring and summer. 
 
 My garden, to begin with, was in the most 
 rudimentary condition, having been allowed to 
 run to grass. After digging up a spot about 
 ten feet square in the turf, taking the early 
 morning for the work, I decided that it would 
 require all summer to get the garden fairly 
 spaded up, and so I hired a stalwart Irishman
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN, fj 
 
 to do the work for me, which he did in a week, 
 charging me nine dollars for the job. As he 
 professed to be also an expert in planting vege- 
 tables, I bought a supply of seeds in the city 
 and entrusted them to him, assuring myself 
 that once in the ground the rest of the work 
 would fall to me ; if I could not keep a garden 
 patch fifty feet square clear of weeds, I had 
 better abandon the business at once, and all 
 hopes of making a living out of scientific gar- 
 dening. The beginning was an unfortunate 
 one. The weather happened to be first very 
 wet, and then so dry and hot that my vege- 
 tables were unable to break their way through 
 the baked earth. When my peas and beans 
 still gave no signs after being in the ground two 
 weeks, I discovered that the whole work would 
 have to be done over again. A Presidential 
 campaign was beginning which kept me in town 
 often late at night, so that the chief labor of 
 the garden fell to my faithful Irishman, who 
 got far more satisfaction out of it than I did. 
 The vegetables finally did come up above the 
 surface, and many an evening I finished a hard 
 day's work by pumping and carrying hundreds 
 of gallons of water to pour upon potato plants,
 
 78 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 tomato plants, bean stalks, and other things 
 which a friend of mine, an expert in such 
 matters, assured me were curiosities of mal- 
 formation and backwardness. My Irishman 
 told me that it was all for want of manure, and 
 by his advice I bought six dollars' worth of 
 manure from a neighboring stable, and had it 
 spread over the ground. The bills for my gar- 
 den were meanwhile mounting up. I had 
 begun the spring with a garden ledger, keeping 
 an accurate account of every penny spent, and 
 hoping to put on the other side of the page a 
 tremendous list of fine vegetables. The ac- 
 counts are before me now, and I presume that 
 every one who has been through the same ex- 
 perience has preserved some such record. 
 
 The tools, rakes, forks, spades, hose, water- 
 ing pots, lawn-mower, etc., cost me $18. 
 Wages to my stalwart friend during the 
 whole season were $26.00; seeds were $2.80, 
 manure, $6.00 ; wire fencing, made neces- 
 sary in order to keep out a flock of my neigh- 
 bors' hens laboring under the idea that in 
 my garden were to be found the best insects 
 of the whole neighborhood, and acting upon 
 this belief, $5.00 total, $57.80. Of this
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 79 
 
 amount the tools and the wire fencing say 
 $20 may be looked upon as well invested for 
 the future, so that my actual outlay, for which 
 I should receive an equivalent in the shape of 
 vegetables, was about $37. The list of vege- 
 tables begins with entries day by day ; then the 
 garden produce is lumped at the end of the 
 week; and finally in September the garden 
 appears to have yielded nothing but tomatoes 
 and beets, the potatoes having failed to come 
 to any thing, owing to a variety of causes, 
 which my assistant explained in different ways 
 on different occasions. One day he said that 
 the potato bugs had done it, and another day 
 he was convinced that if I had put in manure 
 enough earlier in the season I might have had 
 splendid potatoes. In other words, if I had 
 spent ten dollars for manure, and had given up 
 my days to fighting the bugs, I might have had 
 five dollars' worth of potatoes in return. 
 
 The first entry of vegetables is in a bold hand, 
 and is to the effect that on the loth of June 
 we had some radishes of an estimated market 
 value of five cents. Then come lettuce and 
 peas, and later on spinach, beans, radishes, 
 carrots, and finally tomatoes in profusion. For
 
 8O LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 some purpose which I could never fathom, half 
 of my garden plot was planted with cucumbers 
 of a particularly hard and leathery type. They 
 throve in the most wonderful fashion, and there 
 were bushels of them, of no earthly use to any 
 one ; we could not eat them or give them away. 
 They rotted where they grew, and seemed to 
 serve no purpose except perhaps to enable my 
 assistant to point to something in the garden 
 which looked like a successful vegetable. To 
 be brief over a somewhat painful experiment, 
 and estimating the garden stuff that we really 
 got out of my little plot, I should say that de- 
 livered at our door the stuff would have cost 
 us not more than $15, or about half its 
 actual cost. I do not take into account 
 the value of my work in hoeing up tons of 
 weeds and pouring down tons of water, betause 
 the practical knowledge I gathered more than 
 offsets these tremendous labors. 
 
 In the meantime I had profited by studying 
 neighboring gardens, notably a very beautiful 
 one belonging to a neighbor who did all the 
 work himself and produced a crop of vegetables 
 which seemed to me nothing less than miracu- 
 lous. Every inch in this neighbor's garden
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 8 1 
 
 seemed to grow something ; his vegetables took 
 up so much room, were so close together that 
 the weeds had not a chance to squeeze them- 
 selves in. He worked upon the theory that 
 one square foot of garden properly manured 
 and properly attended to was more productive 
 than four square feet half taken care of, and his 
 results proved the soundness of his ideas. It 
 was owing to this neighbor's advice that my 
 second summer's work in my little garden, for I 
 was determined not to give the ground up 
 although it had proved a costly toy, were far 
 more satisfactory in every way than the first. I 
 discovered that my neighbor's total expenses 
 of the year for his garden, which was a far 
 larger one than mine, were less than $10, nine 
 tenths of which sum went for manure. He 
 did all the work himself, got his seeds and 
 plants from neighboring gardens, and the value 
 of his product exceeded $100 during the sum- 
 mer. This was something like gardening, and 
 if one man not a Hercules could do it, why not 
 I ? My second summer showed that by devot- 
 ing an average of two hours a day to my little 
 garden patch I could save about fifty dollars in 
 the vegetable bill of the family. Estimating
 
 82 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 that the garden work begins on the 1st of May 
 and ends on the 1st of September, we have 
 four months, or 120 days, during which I gave 
 two hours a day, or 240 hours, to my garden. 
 At ten hours a day this represents twenty-four 
 days or a month's work. At my regular pro- 
 fession I can make $200 or more during the 
 month, so that at first view the occupation of 
 raising vegetables does not appear well, finan- 
 cially speaking. Upon the other hand, con- 
 sidering that these two hours a day were to me 
 hours of genuine enjoyment and that the work 
 unquestionably did me good in every way, I 
 can say that the garden was a success. 
 
 A good many years have passed since I 
 began my little garden out in New Jersey. In 
 the course of events I found myself compelled 
 to give up playing at garden and to move back 
 to New York. Newspaper life takes all or 
 nothing out of a man, and I was by no means 
 ready or able to neglect serious work which 
 paid me a very fair living in order to amuse 
 myself in a Jersey garden. But during those 
 years of experiment I had learned a good deal 
 about practical gardening. I learned enough 
 to know that with less than three hours' work
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 83 
 
 a day I can provide a good-sized family with 
 all the potatoes, cabbages, turnips, carrots, 
 onions, and beets that will be needed the year 
 round ; all the raspberries, blackberries, straw- 
 berries, and currants for the summer ; all the 
 peas, beans, beets, lettuce, spinach, and toma- 
 toes that will be needed in summer. And I 
 can do this with an expenditure for manure 
 not exceeding $12, provided the ground is in 
 reasonably good condition. I think that the 
 reader will admit that this is something well 
 worth knowing. The trouble with most men 
 who go into gardening upon a small scale is 
 that they pay out money for what they should 
 do themselves to men who are often lazy or 
 dishonest, and that while they themselves may 
 work very hard for a few hours or a few days, 
 the work is intermittent, and that is the worst 
 sort of work for a garden. With a garden, the 
 maxim, " a stitch in time saves nine," is particu- 
 larly true. I have seen pieces of ground in 
 such a condition that in half an hour's work 
 with a steel hoe I could kill every weed there; 
 three weeks later to do the same thing would 
 have required a day's work or more, and then 
 it would not have been well done. To manage
 
 84 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 a small garden scientifically is a matter for the 
 most systematic kind of work. Three hours a 
 day of steady work upon a plot 100 feet square 
 will give every thing that can be wanted in the 
 shape of small vegetables. If potatoes and 
 cabbages are required a larger patch will be 
 needed, but even then systematic culture will 
 tell wonderfully. The use of new tools, such 
 as the hand cultivator, which does more work 
 in half an hour than can be accomplished with 
 a hoe in two hours, has greatly simplified the 
 raising of vegetables in a small garden. It is 
 also more than true that one square foot well 
 cared for is equal to three times the area half 
 cultivated. 
 
 Still another source of income which has been 
 suggested to me by my tramps around the 
 country, and a business which offers no extra- 
 ordinary difficulties to the inexperienced, is the 
 raising of fine fruits for our New York market. 
 We have scores of farmers in my neighborhood 
 who make a living, and a comfortable one, from 
 their fields and their orchards, and trust almost 
 to luck for the quality of what they have to 
 sell. I have been struck many times with the 
 wonderful return for care and manure made by
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 85 
 
 several species of pear-trees that flourish on 
 Long Island. For the city beginner to under- 
 take to raise apples, or strawberries, or common 
 pears, or in fact any orchard or garden produce 
 common in the markets, is to experiment 
 against heavy odds, as he will come in compe- 
 tition with men who have been at it all their 
 lives. At the same time, perhaps he will suc- 
 ceed, owing to better methods and less de- 
 pendence upon routine. But what I should 
 advise the city man who wants to make some 
 money out of his six or eight months' work in 
 the open air, is to try for something not pro- 
 duced by his neighbors, or not produced in the 
 same way. For instance, there are new kinds 
 of pears, which grow profusely in parts of Jer- 
 sey and in parts of Long Island, which never- 
 theless still bring a large amount of money as 
 compared with apples or ordinary pears. I 
 should advise the city man to go in for culture 
 of this sort, devoting himself to an orchard of 
 half an acre, if he cannot keep any more trees 
 in perfect order. I have seen such astonishing 
 results from these new species of pears, that 
 were it not easier for me to make more money 
 by one hour's writing a day than by ten hours'
 
 86 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 work in an orchard, I should certainly go into 
 the business. So much is said about the im- 
 possibility of making any money at gardening 
 or fruit-raising that it is almost hopeless to con- 
 vince any one to the contrary, and it is far from 
 my wish to do any thing of the kind. My aim 
 is to tell how I manage to do without money, 
 not how to make it. The first is a topic upon 
 which I have had some experience, for reasons 
 beyond my control, while as to the last I can- 
 not speak as an expert. The scores of books 
 which prove that if a man can raise ten thou- 
 sand quarts of strawberries from an acre of 
 ground, and sell them at ten cents a quart, he 
 will grow rich and his family will rejoice, are 
 mostly based upon the experience of some 
 wonderfully clever person ; the truth of their 
 theory is irrefutable, provided you admit 
 the premises. They remind me of a circular 
 once sent to me by a man who was offering 
 fame and fortune in return for ten cents in 
 stamps. He set forth that if I bought from 
 him a certain prescription for a magic hair- 
 grower, to be manufactured at four cents a 
 bottle, fortune was mine. For if I sold ten 
 thousand bottles of the stuff to agents at fifteen
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 8/ 
 
 cents a bottle, who in turn would sell it at 
 twenty-five cents a bottle, I would make eleven 
 hundred dollars, the agents would make a thou- 
 sand dollars, and the whole neighborhood would 
 rejoice, except perhaps the bald-headed man 
 who bought the magic restorer. I can tell peo- 
 ple how not to get rich at newspaper writing, 
 but I am not yet ready to offer any advice of 
 the sort given in books patterned after " Ten 
 Acres Enough." My ideal orchard is one given 
 up to trees and grass, and used for poultry until 
 the fruit begins to fall. The trees, the grass, 
 and the poultry are all pretty sure to thrive with 
 the most ordinary care. The chickens kill the 
 worms, and the hay crop will more than pay 
 for all the labor expended in taking care of the 
 trees. As in a garden, my experience has been 
 that the very best results in an orchard are to 
 be obtained by the highest culture of small 
 plots. Two apple-trees of a good sort, kept 
 well pruned, well manured, and free from in- 
 sects, are likely to yield as much fruit as half-a- 
 dozen neglected trees, and the picking will not 
 entail half the labor. I see the same advice 
 given every day in agricultural papers and 
 books throughout the country, and yet for
 
 88 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 some reason a really well kept orchard, with all 
 the trees in prime condition, the fences in neat 
 repair, and not a superfluous twig to be seen, is 
 one of the rare sights of the country. It is also 
 the commonest sight to find upon one farm a 
 few trees which give a splendid grade of fruit, 
 while the next mile or two will show nothing 
 but apples or pears scarcely worth the picking 
 all because the man who planted would not 
 take the trouble to pay a few cents more in or- 
 der to get choice stock from a good nursery. 
 Of all the economies that pay least, is the 
 saving of a few dollars in stocking a young 
 orchard. I have talked with many of our 
 farmers about this, and almost invariably the 
 blunder is due to small economy ; they got 
 their trees from some one in the neighborhood 
 who sold cheap as compared to the prices of 
 first-class nurseries, and, as a result, year after 
 year, their orchards gave them half the returns 
 which would have been received from good 
 trees. My ambition is some day to prove by 
 dollars and cents that it is not impossible for a 
 city-bred man fond of country work to make 
 money in an orchard, for nothing that I have 
 heard to the contrary (and every friend that I
 
 DETAILS AND DOLLARS MY GARDEN. 89 
 
 have warns me of the futility of such an at- 
 tempt) has convinced me that starvation lurks 
 everywhere but in the dust of the city or the 
 turmoil of trade.
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 
 
 OESIDES my oystering, the fishing that I 
 ^ have done has proved to be of no small 
 value as part of our scheme. Unfortunately, 
 since settling down by the water the fishing ap- 
 pears to have become somewhat scarce in my 
 neighborhood as compared with former years. 
 Forty years ago, so old men tell me, the whole 
 Great South Bay was full of salt-water fish ; 
 there were inlets from the ocean at several 
 points between Fire Island and Moriches, and 
 the sea-water ran in through deep channels 
 which years ago became choked up with sand. 
 To-day there is no opening in the Great South 
 Bay to the ocean except at Fire Island. At the 
 other end of the bay, twenty-five miles east- 
 ward, the water has become so fresh that clams 
 will not live in it, and most fish are shy about 
 going so far from deep water. Nevertheless, 
 we catch crabs by the hundred, and in the 
 autumn many young bluefish, known in the 
 90
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. Ql 
 
 neighborhood as "snappers." Once a week I 
 sail my boat down to the neighborhood of Fire 
 Island, where from June to November we get 
 some good bluefishing, thanks to our "chum- 
 ming " machines, a device for chopping up 
 bony-fish in appetizing shape. The boat is 
 brought to anchor, the sails furled, and this 
 chopped fish is thrown overboard in small 
 quantities. The bluefish, running in or out 
 with the tide, are attracted by the " chum," 
 and come to feed. The hooks are baited, and 
 thrown overboard along with the chum. If fish 
 are plenty, the piece of chum which hides a 
 hook is sure to be snapped up. When bluefish- 
 ing is fair in the Great South Bay we can count 
 upon a catch of from twenty to thirty fish, 
 ranging from one to five pounds. But blue- 
 fishing is an uncertain sport. I find from my 
 diary that out of twenty trips to Fire Island, 
 eleven produced nothing, except that each trip 
 gave us ten or twelve hours of glorious sailing. 
 An advantage of this bay for sailing over any 
 other that I know of, is that if rough weather 
 comes on the little craft can take shelter at any 
 of the many villages skirting the bay, and the 
 fishermen can get home by train if it is neces-
 
 92 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 sary. There is always a safe harbor within 
 twenty minutes' sail. 
 
 Our crabbing is enough of a resource to be 
 worth writing about. After August it is at its 
 best. Then the few summer boarders and cot- 
 tagers who linger after the middle of Septem- 
 ber join with the native in hunting the scaven- 
 ger of these waters, counting a day lost which 
 does not bring at least a score of big crabs to an 
 end, which I hope is not " something linger- 
 ing." As an earnest believer in the value of 
 the late Mr. Bergh's work, I have tried to find 
 out by experiment exactly how lingering is the 
 death by boiling water to which the crab's 
 preference for stale fish and other bits of 
 kitchen offal finally brings him. Repeated 
 experiments show that death is almost in- 
 stantaneous, if it is true, as is so often said, that 
 a crab lets go his hold only when dying. In 
 order to clear one's conscience upon this matter 
 it is necessary to submit the crab to what may be 
 extremely painful proceedings. Let a strong 
 crab get a good hold upon a piece of rope or 
 any other soft material not too intimately con- 
 nected with yourself, and lower himself slowly 
 into boiling water ; the crab will let his claws
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 93 
 
 and nearly half of his body get parboiled before 
 he thinks of letting go. Instead of this, begin 
 by plunging the crab instantly under, and the 
 claws open at once. The notion that it is more 
 humane, as some people contend, to half pul- 
 verize the crab with an axe before boiling him, 
 is the sheerest nonsense, as any one can find 
 out by experiment. 
 
 The last year has been an excellent one for 
 crabbing a better catch has not been known 
 since 1876. Earlier in the season, before the 
 first crabs had made their appearance, an old 
 " Cap'n " and fisherman of this neighborhood, 
 who is an expert in all matters pertaining to 
 fish, tides, weather, and profane language, told 
 me that there would be no crabs this year. He 
 is a dear old man, close upon eighty years of 
 age, who is so full of gentle humor and kindly 
 shrewdness that he can rip out oath after oath 
 without offending any one. " He swears so 
 gently," said a lady of my acquaintance, " that 
 it does n't seem like real swearing." 
 
 " That 'ere blizzard," said the old fellow 
 
 to me one evening in June, as we sat on some 
 eel-pots discussing the next day's weather, 
 " killed every crab in the bay, sure. The
 
 94 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 ice hurt 'em , and then the bliz- 
 zard made the water so cold that the 
 
 critters all died. You wont see a crab here 
 
 this summer." 
 
 But it seems that the crab crop is somewhat 
 like the peach crop. The regular spring an- 
 nouncement to the effect that every peach-bud 
 in the country has been nipped by the frost is 
 hailed with joy by every lover of peaches, who 
 then feels sure that a fair crop can be counted 
 upon. The blizzard may have done many 
 things; it certainly did not kill all the crabs. 
 It knocked down the docks of the neighbor- 
 hood, and put back the spring about a fortnight ; 
 it did all sorts of damage to chimneys, roofs, 
 and fences. But it did not kill the crabs, and it 
 gave an inexhaustible topic of conversation to 
 the gentry who gather around the store-stove 
 six nights out of the seven to settle the affairs 
 of the nation, if talk can settle them. If the 
 fish did not bite ; if the summer was windy and 
 cold which it was ; if the surf was dangerous, 
 the apple crop poor, and the potatoes rotten, 
 the fault was laid to the blizzard, that awful 
 visitation, when, as the Cap'n says, " New York 
 did n't hear from us for more than a week."
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 95 
 
 The crab is a stupid fellow about the traps 
 laid for him, and when hungry will hang to 
 a bit of fish even when lifted half out of water. 
 The later the season and the bigger the crab, 
 the more certainty that no crabs will escape. I 
 suppose that we catch our crabs in about the 
 same fashion that crabs are caught everywhere ; 
 tie a piece of fish or meat to a string, throw it 
 off a wharf or off your boat, and wait for a bite. 
 The crab, prowling about the bottom, seizes it 
 with his nippers, and begins his meal. By rais- 
 ing the bait a few inches from the bottom, a 
 person can tell, after small experience, whether 
 a crab is around or not. If the crab likes his 
 fare, he will hold on until he is drawn well up 
 to the surface, when, with a deft movement, the 
 scoop-net is run under him, and all is over for 
 that crab. All kinds of bottoms seem to suit 
 him sand, mud, even eel-grass. When caught 
 in a calm and able to drift slowly over the flats 
 which extend for a mile or more into the bay 
 from the narrow sand strip which separates us 
 from the ocean, one can catch crabs by the 
 dozen if quick with the net and not too afraid 
 of falling overboard. The favorite habitat of 
 the beast, however, is the channels which skirt
 
 96 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the shore, especially where the offal from board- 
 ing houses or hotels is thrown into the water. It 
 is counted poor sport when an afternoon's crab- 
 bing does not produce thirty or forty crabs. 
 On calm days, the boys often catch their bas- 
 ketful by watching the water along the sides of 
 the docks ; the crabs swim on the surface in 
 search of the shrimps and minnows that hide in 
 the grass and sea-weeds that grow upon the 
 spiles. 
 
 The money value of the crab, even here, 
 where they can be caught by wholesale, is 
 sufficient to cause many of the fishermen to 
 make a business of " shedding " them in con- 
 finement. Fair hard-shell crabs are worth, even 
 upon the dock here, thirty cents a dozen, while 
 for " shedders " or soft-shells, a dollar a dozen 
 is not considered exorbitant. This high price 
 of soft-shell crabs has resulted in a regular busi- 
 ness of keeping in floating boxes or " cars " such 
 crabs as are about to shed their shells. An ex- 
 pert can tell the crab that is going to shed al- 
 most without looking at him. By dint of ques- 
 tioning every man within two miles of here who 
 owns a car I think that I can tell some crabs 
 that are going to shed. To the inexperienced
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 97 
 
 all crabs look alike ; they are crawling creatures 
 with a surprising grip. Few persons, and no 
 women, ever get near enough to a crab to 
 admire his superb coloring and the delicacy of 
 his work upon a piece of old fish. But the stu- 
 dent who has listened to a dozen life-long ex- 
 perts and has tried to reconcile their wholly 
 opposite accounts of the nature of the animal, 
 know that there are crabs and crabs. Turn 
 a dozen crabs over on their backs and they 
 may easily be divided into three classes. One 
 set will be perfectly white, with the " breast- 
 bone " or plate, a narrow strip ; another set, 
 having the breastplate expanded so as almost 
 to cover the whole shell and streaked in dark 
 blue and green ; still others have the narrow 
 breastplate, but the whole under part of the 
 crab is discolored and not a cream-white. The 
 first class comprise crabs that have already shed 
 this year and have grown hard. The second 
 class are the " pocket-books," as the fishermen 
 call them, crabs that will shed no more ; and 
 the third class are those which may shed their 
 shells this year. For eating, the crab with a 
 cream-white color upon the underside is most 
 esteemed. All the very large crabs are likely to
 
 98 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 be " pocket-books," but some that I have eaten 
 were quite as good as any of the white fellows. 
 An expert can tell by squeezing the crab 
 whether the shedding period is near. If within 
 a few days of the time, the crab is put into a 
 car with others supposed to be in about the 
 same condition. It might be thought that 
 soft-shelled crabs ought to be cheap if they 
 can be hatched out in this easy fashion. The 
 trouble is that eternal vigilance is the price of 
 the soft-shell crab. Every fisherman has to 
 watch his crabs night and day if he wishes to 
 save his soft-shell crabs from being eaten by the 
 other crabs. Until within five hours of the 
 shedding, the crab retains his activity and vo- 
 racity, when he will fall upon any thing eat- 
 able ; then comes a period of stupor, and then 
 the old shell is thrown off, leaving a perfect 
 crab, one size larger, but soft and helpless. If 
 all the other crabs in the box are not equally 
 helpless, the new soft-shell fares no better than 
 in Washington Market. My friend, the Cap'n, 
 examines his crabs at six in the morning, at 
 noon, at six o'clock at night, and often again at 
 midnight, when he has a large number of " shed- 
 ders " on hand. Moreover, a crab gets hard so
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 99 
 
 quickly that for market purposes he should be 
 taken out of the car and packed in sea-weed the 
 moment he sheds. In five hours after shedding, 
 a crab, if left in water, becomes a " leather- 
 back " and of no value, comparatively speak- 
 ing. There is one man near us who, with the 
 aid of his two boys, sends to market more than 
 a hundred " soft-shells " a day in the season. 
 The artificial propagation of crabs in shallow 
 salt-water ponds has been tried here, but aban- 
 doned, owing to the regularity with which the 
 crabs devour their young when they can catch 
 them. 
 
 Cooks seem to differ as to the right time 
 which a crab should boil. Expert opinions 
 vary from five minutes to half an hour. I am 
 inclined to think, after many experiments, that 
 twenty minutes is none too long, and that half 
 an hour's boiling does no harm. If the pail of 
 crabs is lifted to the edge of the pot of boiling 
 water, and slightly tilted, the crabs will walk to 
 their own death upon hearing the bubble of the 
 water. Thus it is pleasant to think that the 
 crab's last impressions may have been a satis- 
 faction to him ; the gurgle of water is in his 
 ears as he takes the plunge, and before he dis-
 
 IOO LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 covers that he is not in the Great South Bay 
 all things are indifferent to him. The change 
 of color from dark-green and blue to cardinal- 
 red takes place the moment after the crab is in 
 boiling water, and is no indication that he is 
 cooked. Those persons who know the cooked 
 crab only have no conception of the superb 
 coloring in green, turquoise-blue, and ivory- 
 white which makes a live crab a thing of 
 beauty. Crabs in market are so often cooked 
 in order to keep them the better, that it is no 
 wonder some people imagine that the crab goes 
 through life in a scarlet coat. I saw last winter 
 a game picture which had, among other things, 
 a bright-red crab crawling off the dish. 
 
 A friend of mine insists that in order to eat 
 a crab with any comfort it is necessary to have 
 at hand, besides the crab, a bowie-knife, a 
 hammer, and a bucket of water. Others, 
 equally ignorant, insist that there is nothing to 
 eat in a crab. As a matter of fact, the opening 
 of a crab can be made a pleasure, and there is 
 really a great deal of delicious eating to be 
 found. To begin with, the outfit for crab- 
 eating should consist of nut-picks, nut-crackers, 
 finger-bowls, and napkins. The big claws are
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. IOI 
 
 easily broken open with the nut-crackers. The 
 legs can be thrown away in times of plenty 
 To get at the inside of a crab with neatness 
 and despatch, turn up the under breastplate 
 and break it off. Then the whole back can be 
 lifted off, exposing a good deal of a yellow, 
 greenish substance, which is the fat of the 
 crab and its best relish. Having the crab di- 
 vested of underplate and back-shell, break it in 
 two, and the white meat will be readily ex- 
 tracted with a nut-pick. The muscles which 
 operate the crab's claws and legs constitute the 
 meat. A little practice will convince any one 
 that crabs are not to be despised. Their flavor 
 is incomparably finer than that of a lobster, 
 while the scientific opening of a crab has all 
 the charm of a surgical operation. 
 
 To those who contend that crabs are deadly 
 poison, especially if eaten after dark, I can 
 only say that I have experimented upon my- 
 self and upon a number of other people's 
 children without unpleasant results. A crab 
 (cooked) is one of the favorite playthings of 
 babies in this neighborhood. It is said that 
 milk and crabs, when taken together, raise a 
 tempest inside of one. Again I may say that I
 
 102 LIBERT? AND A LIVING. 
 
 have experimented and escaped. The proba- 
 bility is, that people who eat crabs with vinegar 
 and other rich sauces ought not to drink milk 
 at the same time. 
 
 How to handle a crab is a subject better 
 taught by actual experience than by directions. 
 It is not so difficult a matter as most people 
 suppose, and the ladies who would no sooner 
 meet a crab than some terrible beast of prey 
 say a mouse are all wrong. I have known a 
 whole earful of people utterly demoralized by 
 a few poor timid little crabs. During the sum- 
 mer some friends who went crabbing with me 
 one day wanted to take a few fine specimens to 
 New York. I packed them carefully in a bas- 
 ket, with sea-weed below and on top, and over 
 all I tied a newspaper. It was dark when my 
 friend and his wife reached the railway. He 
 put the basket under the seat in the car and 
 went to sleep. Just as he was dreaming that 
 he had landed a crab as big as a porpoise, his 
 wife awoke him with a tragic whisper : " Harry, 
 the crabs are out one has just walked over my 
 foot ! " 
 
 The situation was a critical one. The wet 
 sea-weed had weakened the paper covering of
 
 WITH FISH-LINES AND NETS. 1 03 
 
 the basket, and the crabs were coming forth in 
 a solemn procession ; by the looks of the bas- 
 ket, at least twenty must have gone some- 
 where. My friend jammed a heavy shawl into 
 the basket over what remained, and awaited 
 developments in fear and trembling. They 
 were not long in coming. A shriek from a 
 lady at the other end of the car announced 
 that one crab had made his presence felt. All 
 was excitement in a moment. " She 's got 
 heart disease," said one old gentleman ; " stop 
 the train and get a doctor." " Catch it, catch 
 it, it 's under my seat, it 's bitten my foot ! " 
 cried the poor woman. My friend had to do 
 something. " Ladies and gentlemen," he 
 shouted, " it 's all right. A few little crabs 
 that I had in a basket have escaped that 's 
 all." That was all, was it? Every woman in 
 the car jumped shrieking upon the seats, and 
 quiet was restored only when the last crab had 
 been kicked off the rear platform by the brake- 
 man. 
 
 If taken properly, the crab is the most harm- 
 less of dangerous beasts. Bear in mind that if 
 you take a crab firmly where the hind legs joins 
 his body, he cannot get at you with his nip-
 
 IO4 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 pers ; also, that any quick motion disconcerts 
 the crab for the moment, and you will be mas- 
 ter of the situation. By a little experimenting 
 you will find the exact place where a crab may 
 safely be seized, and possibly some places where 
 it is not safe. Rapid passes before the eyes 
 of a crab appear to paralyze him. If, there- 
 fore, you quickly turn him over and over until 
 you see an opportunity of seizing him by the 
 hind leg close to the body, there is not one 
 chance in five that the crab will get hold of 
 you before you get hold of him. After all, 
 suppose he does get a nip now and then ? his 
 revenge for ill-treatment is insignificant com- 
 pared with what yours will be.
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 
 
 A T daylight all was bustle and preparation 
 ** for a fishing trip to Fire Island ; one 
 would think from the excitement of the chil- 
 dren that we went fishing but once a year in- 
 stead of once a week, and that the prospect of 
 catching a fish was something altogether un- 
 usual. I do not remember a more perfect 
 morning. When Arthur and I started down 
 to the boat to see that all was ready, an iri- 
 descent mist hung over the bay, and the distant 
 highlands down toward Fire Island were tipped 
 with fire. The air was cool enough to make 
 one relish the idea that the sun would be warm 
 in a few hours, and there was enough promise 
 of a breeze to warrant a start as soon as break- 
 fast had been disposed of. It was a pleasure 
 even to jump aboard the Nelly and get her 
 ready for her thirty-mile trip. The man who 
 does not love the water and a boat can scarcely 
 understand such joy as this ; but to me and to 
 105
 
 106 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 some people I know, a boat, and especially a 
 sail-boat, is a never-failing source of pleasure. 
 The fact that I have seen some pretty rough 
 days in the Nelly, and that there have been 
 times when I would not have wagered much 
 upon my chances of getting her into port, seem 
 rather to endear her to us ; a boat that has 
 stood a hundred gales, and has carried us 
 thousands of miles, deserves something of 
 gratitude in return. I cherish on the desk 
 at which I now write a brass cleat from a little 
 sail-boat I once owned ; it serves as a paper- 
 weight and as a reminder of scores of pleasure 
 days. On one side of it is engraved the name 
 of the boat, and on the other the date "April- 
 December, 1880." When the time came for 
 selling her, I retained this memento of many 
 an exciting sail, and, as my wife would add, of 
 many a hairbreadth escape. 
 
 We hoisted the Nelly s sail to dry in the sun, 
 and started back to breakfast. There were but 
 few of the natives about the shore, but among 
 those few I found my friend the Cap'n, who 
 had been out to his nets, and had brought back 
 a plentiful supply of " bunkers," which we could 
 have as bait. These " bunkers " are the " bony.
 
 WE GO A- FISHING. IO? 
 
 fish," or the menhaden of the oil factories ; 
 when our bay fishermen take them in their nets, 
 they are not thrown back, but are used as ma- 
 nure. As the Cap'n says, every " bunker " 
 represents a good-sized potato to him. For a 
 few cents we get a bucketful of them for bait. 
 It is six o'clock by the time we get back to the 
 house, to find the breakfast steaming on the 
 table. Half an hour later we are off to the 
 shore again, and before seven o'clock the Nelly 
 is bowling along westward at the rate of five 
 miles an hour. The village is still, to all in- 
 tents and purposes, asleep, although the sun 
 has begun to melt the mists, and the air has 
 lost the keen sharpness of an hour before. As 
 we glide along, all to the south of us, over tow- 
 ards the ocean, is one flood of golden light, with 
 the low ridge of the sand hills standing out in 
 shadow ; above these lines of sand dunes the 
 morning sky is resplendent, and between us 
 and the beach the bay glitters with dancing 
 sunbeams. On the other side we have the 
 Long Island shore, with its hills and woods, its 
 farmhouses and hay-stacks. From our point of 
 view, about a mile out in the bay, we can see 
 the spires of half-a-dozen villages Bellport,
 
 108 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 Patchogue, Bayport, and Sayville among them. 
 The prevalent idea to the effect that Long 
 Island is a flat stretch of sand, is one of the 
 first impressions to disappear when one gets out 
 upon the water here. There are no mountains, 
 to be sure, but we have respectable hills, and 
 when seen from the water in certain lights they 
 give a mountainous background to the country 
 along the shore. To get the full effect of these 
 Long Island hills as an imposing background, 
 one has to sail from the Great South Bay down 
 to Moriches on just such a morning as this. 
 Starting from Patchogue at five or even at six 
 o'clock, if the wind is fair, the entrance to the 
 narrow strait at Smith's Point is reached before 
 the mists rise, and one gets a view of Moriches, 
 which has reminded more than one person I 
 know of a miniature Swiss landscape. The 
 little village seems to nestle at the foot of a 
 range of mountains, more or less imposing, 
 according to the power of the sun upon the 
 mists. Sailing out of Patchogue, we could not 
 imagine ourselves upon a Swiss lake, for the 
 hills in the background were too far off to 
 dominate the town ; moreover, the air was bet- 
 ter than ever blew over Lake Geneva.
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 1 09 
 
 A fishing expedition to us who live nearly at 
 the other end of the Great South Bay, means a 
 day's trip, as a rule, and as usual we get fairly 
 off before we begin to take stock of the neces- 
 saries that have been left behind. It is a 
 twelve-mile sail to the cinder-beds, as our fish- 
 ing grounds are called, and as we are pretty 
 sure to have to beat against the wind one way, 
 it is called a thirty-mile sail there and back. 
 There are five of us in the boat, not counting 
 the children, and to two of our friends the trip 
 is a novel one in every respect ; they had 
 never been on the bay before, they had never 
 seen a bluefish caught, and they had serious 
 doubts as to whether a day on the water might 
 not end in disaster. One of the ladies had 
 braved the terrors of a thirty-mile sail, notwith- 
 standing the fact that when she went last to 
 Europe she was so sea-sick that " every thing 
 came out of her except her immortal soul." 
 Sailing on our bay is somewhat dangerous to 
 sea-sick people, because it is so shallow that a 
 breeze makes a sea in less time than it takes to 
 tell it ; because the water is like a mill-pond in 
 the morning is no promise that it may not be 
 like the " raging main " by afternoon. Es-
 
 110 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 pecially is this the case when the wind is from 
 the north. I have recorded the results of a 
 "norther" often enough to feel certain as to 
 the day's weather on this water ; when the 
 water is smooth, and the north breeze comes 
 in the morning like a zephyr, look out for a 
 squally gale by noon one of the worst winds 
 we have for small boats. It will blow in gusts 
 all day until the sun sinks, when it will die 
 away, and the day will end as it began. 
 
 As we sailed along I gave our friends some 
 details as to the life upon the Great South Bay, 
 its pleasures and its hardships, which may be 
 resumed in a few pages and may possibly inter- 
 est people who know little about this part of 
 the coast and its sports. As between a life along 
 the coast and a life in the hills, I have found by 
 experience my own and that of others that 
 success depends largely upon temperament and 
 constitution. There are people who cannot 
 stand salt air, much as they love it ; and I have 
 known earnest lovers of the sea and the coast 
 to suffer such agonies from throat and lung 
 troubles when living near the ocean, that no 
 amount of pleasure to be derived from water 
 sports could atone for these drawbacks. Every
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. Ill 
 
 man should make a certain number of experi- 
 ments in determining what part of the world, 
 within certain limits, is best suited to his needs 
 and purposes. People are too prone to settle 
 down meekly wherever the Fates cast them. 
 There comes a time in life when almost every 
 man can (perhaps by a little sacrifice) cut loose 
 from money-making work of a routine character 
 and take some sort of what I should call ra- 
 tional employment in the open air, whether it 
 be fishing, gardening, or hunting. When such 
 a time comes, why should not the man who 
 determines upon so important a change, look 
 over the whole field ? We have almost all con- 
 ditions of climate and soil within a few days of 
 us. I have known busy New-Yorkers to cut 
 loose from the bank or the business desk, and 
 adopt life down on the Cheseapeake Bay ; 
 others have taken to raising oranges in Florida ; 
 some of my own relatives have been for years 
 engaged in vineyards and wine-making in Cali- 
 fornia ; others, again, have taken to small 
 fruits ; still others have embarked in sheep- 
 raising in northern Connecticut, and made it 
 pay. I myself, perhaps from timidity, have set- 
 tled down within a few miles of New York, for
 
 112 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 I find a good deal in favor of this sheet of water 
 which constitutes our happy hunting-ground. 
 
 The common idea that the Long Island coast 
 is simply one long stretch of sand, varied by 
 occasional patches of green in the shape of salt 
 meadows, called marshes by city visitors, may 
 be true so far as concerns the country within 
 forty miles of New York. But beyond that 
 there is a decided change. There are actually 
 hills to be seen here and there ; not very high 
 ones, but high enough to be called hills. Most 
 persons who have noticed on the maps the 
 words " Shinnecock Hills," wonder what kind 
 of country this may be, for at the point where 
 the Shinnecock reservation is situated, Long 
 Island is but a mere neck of land, at one point 
 not more than a few hundred rods wide. The 
 Shinnecock Indians at one time occupied this 
 part of the island, and their descendants are 
 still to be found. Along the coast, starting 
 from a point forty miles from New York, there 
 are hills to be seen even far more imposing 
 than the famous Shinnecock range, which is in 
 reality merely a collection of sand dunes, scant- 
 ily covered with grass upon which sheep are 
 pastured. The central range of hills, or the
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 113 
 
 back-bone of the island, is quite an imposing 
 line when seen from the ocean, and even as 
 viewed from the Great South Bay upon a misty 
 morning it gives, as I have already said, quite 
 an air of mountainous wilderness to the back- 
 ground. In former days, when the Great South 
 Bay and Shinnecock Bay were deep enough to 
 afford navigation for good-sized schooners, it 
 is probable that all this region stretching 
 between Islip on the west and East Hampton 
 on the east, was the scene of much more ani- 
 mation the year round than at present. We 
 who resort here for quiet are rather glad of the 
 change. Old ocean has helped us. It has 
 played such tricks with this coast that it seems 
 to be only a matter of time when these bays 
 will become wholly land-locked. Fifty years 
 ago there was a large outlet to the ocean in the 
 Great South Bay nearly opposite Patchogue, 
 whereas now the boats have to go twenty miles 
 farther down the bay to Fire Island inlet before 
 they can go out into the ocean. Year after 
 year, this Patchogue inlet grew narrower as 
 each great storm washed up thousands of tons 
 of sand. At last a great storm closed up the 
 inlet, and it was only when the people went to
 
 114 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 work with shovels and carts that any communi- 
 cation between the bay and the ocean was 
 maintained. For several years there was a 
 day appointed, usually in the spring, when the 
 farmers and fishermen within ten miles of 
 Patchogue and Bellport were called upon to 
 meet at the inlet and put in a day's work at 
 Digging. If the response to the call was a 
 satisfactory one, the work of clearing out the 
 channel to a depth of four or five feet right 
 across the sand-bar took but a few hours ; 
 then, if there came up no great storm, such an 
 inlet would last all summer, giving plenty of 
 salt water to the bay. In the autumn the first 
 great storms of winter filled up the inlet, and 
 in the spring the work had to be done all over 
 again. About twenty-five years ago it became 
 evident that the ocean was a far better work- 
 man than the people of Patchogue, and was 
 making it more and more difficult to keep up 
 communication with the bay. As no vessels 
 of any size could sail through this artificial 
 ditch, the only use for it was to give salt water 
 to the bay, and this benefited only the fisher- 
 men. So the farmers objected to working for 
 this purpose, and the inlet was allowed to
 
 WE GO A-F1SHING. 115 
 
 become so choked up that to-day it would cost 
 thousands of dollars and months of labor to cut 
 an opening at the place where half a century 
 ago vessels sailed through. 
 
 In Shinnecock Bay, twenty-five miles farther 
 along, exactly the same experience has been 
 gone through within the last ten years ; but 
 the people of that neighborhood still keep up 
 courage, and work at the inlet every spring, 
 with the hope that nature will some day come 
 to their assistance and restore the old channels. 
 The canal, which the government is now cutting 
 through the neck of land separating Shinnecock 
 and Peconic bays, may create a current ocean- 
 ward which will carry the sand out to sea. The 
 reason for this greater activity upon the part of 
 the Shinnecock people is that without commu- 
 nication with the ocean, Shinnecock Bay would 
 soon become a fresh-water and a very unhealthy 
 pond. Even now it is impossible to grow clams 
 in Shinnecock Bay, once the best clamming 
 spot along the coast, because the water is not 
 salt enough, and if the canal does not help 
 matters, the time is not far distant when, not- 
 withstanding the yearly cleaning-out of the 
 inlet, all fish and oysters will disappear.
 
 Il6 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 At the upper end of the Great South Bay 
 the effect of filling up the inlets communicating 
 with the ocean has been felt chiefly by the 
 fishermen. As there is no communication with 
 the ocean, no sand of any consequence is thrown 
 into the bay by winter storms. For the last 
 twenty-five years the bottom of the Great 
 South Bay has undergone no changes, and the 
 soundings made by the government many years 
 ago are still trustworthy. In the great storms 
 of winter the spray of the ocean sometimes 
 washes into the bay, rolling over the sand-bar, 
 but the agitation of the water in the bay is not 
 sufficient to cause the sand to shift. We have 
 still a depth of from four to seven feet right up 
 to the end of the bay, with long stretches of 
 shallow flats, sometimes covered with grass, in 
 which the ducks take shelter and feed in win- 
 ter. These flats extend along the sand-bar 
 from one to two miles into the bay, and any 
 one who has sailed for a summer or two in the 
 bay, learns pretty well how to keep clear of 
 them by the .looks of the water. Along the 
 main shore there is plenty of water for from 
 two to three miles out from the shore, and this 
 makes the bay a superb sailing-place for small
 
 WE GO A-FI SUING. 1 1/ 
 
 boats. As for the fishing part, it has grown 
 less and less, until to-day it is not what might 
 be called a good fishing-ground, except within 
 a few miles of Fire Island inlet, where the blue- 
 fish still run in the right season. Perhaps the 
 number of fishermen has had something to do 
 with the scarcity of fish. The fame of Fire 
 Island inlet has spread so far among lovers of 
 bluefish that not a day passes from late June 
 until late September when there cannot be 
 found a fleet of from twenty to two hundred 
 boats on the look-out for bluefish. The 
 fishing industry of Babylon is entirely de- 
 voted to taking out parties for bluefishing; 
 the professional fisherman scarcely professes to 
 fish at all. His duty is to keep his smack in 
 order, to furnish bait and lines, and to be ready 
 to pilot his patrons to the best place in the bay 
 for a catch. Whether fish are caught or not, 
 the fisherman gets his dollars, and finds it more 
 profitable to take people fishing than to fish 
 himself. 
 
 Oysters, of course, have remained one of the 
 great resources of the Great South Bay. The fa- 
 mous Blue Point, so named because of the blue 
 tint of the weeds which formerly covered the
 
 Il8 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 point, still remains the ideal spot of this region 
 for oyster-dredging, and when the summer vis- 
 itor runs away frightened by the first Septem- 
 ber storm, the oysterman takes off the fancy 
 trimmings of his boat, stores away the awn- 
 ings, camp chairs, and cushions, and prepares 
 for hard work. In reality, the first two months 
 of oystering are what is to me the pleasantest 
 time of the year. Once the September gales 
 have abated, the weather settles down into glo- 
 rious days, and from early October until Christ- 
 mas the Blue Point oysterer has an existence 
 which might be envied by any one fond of out- 
 door exercise. On such days as these, the bay, 
 calm and peaceful, is given up to its rightful 
 owners. The summer visitors have disap- 
 peared. The smacks of the fishermen have 
 resumed their working appearance, the duck- 
 shooters have begun to sound the alarm along 
 the coast, and from sunrise to sunset, the air, 
 whether it comes from the ocean or from the 
 pine woods of the Long Island plains, is full of 
 a fragrance which cannot be found in the neigh- 
 borhood of great cities. People talk about the 
 sufferings of the oystermen, and we hear a 
 good deal about frozen hands, night work, and
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 119 
 
 perilous adventures. As a matter of fact, al- 
 though I have followed the doings of the bay 
 oystermen with considerable interest, I have 
 found no evidences of exceptional hardship. 
 It is cold work sometimes, but as compared to 
 the work of a city car-driver it is sport. Al- 
 though each oyster smack has a comfortable 
 little cabin warmed by a stove, it is a common 
 sight to see the oystermen eating their dinners 
 in the sunlight on deck rather than keep to the 
 cabin on a blustering December day. The 
 worst that can be said of the life of the profes- 
 sional oysterman is that it does not pay, and 
 even this may be called in question. The crew 
 of a smack devoted to fishing in the bay, 
 whether for bony fish for the oil factories, or 
 for oysters, usually consists of two men and a 
 boy ; the boy sails the boat, while the men at- 
 tend to the nets or the dredges. The smack is 
 worth from $600 to $1,200, according to size 
 and appointment. I have known the profits of 
 a season, which begins in June and ends when 
 the bay freezes over in January, to be $2,500 
 for one smack. The fishing lasts till October, 
 when the oystering begins. The boats are 
 usually owned by the men who sail them, and
 
 120 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the boy who goes as sailor gets a percentage of 
 the catch, whether of fish or of oysters. One 
 young fellow who sailed in a Patchogue smack 
 last summer got $600 as the returns of his sum- 
 mer's work. 
 
 To-day, as the morning breeze dies away 
 about ten o'clock, leaving us in the middle of 
 the bay, two miles from land on either side, it 
 seems hard to believe that within a few weeks 
 the oystermen will be blowing on their fingers 
 and swinging their arms, and that the duck- 
 shooters will be ranging this very spot. The 
 water is so warm that it is still full of jelly-fish, 
 which the children catch with a scalp net as we 
 glide slowly along. Half an hour later the 
 breeze dies out entirely, and the boom swings 
 from one side to the other, the sail flapping 
 idly. No amount of whistling brings a breeze. 
 It is hot and still. The buzzing of an occa- 
 sional fly and noises from the distant shore are 
 faintly heard ; the barking of dogs and the 
 hammering of some carpenters are very dis- 
 tinct. As the little air moving comes from the 
 shore, we cannot hear the boom of the surf on 
 the other side of us. The cinder beds, our 
 fishing grounds, are still five miles away. By
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 121 
 
 watching the bottom, a few feet below us, we 
 estimate that the boat is moving at the rate of 
 one yard a minute, at which pace we shall get 
 there some time next year. This is part of fish- 
 erman's luck, and the man who should feel re- 
 sentment or show impatience in such circum- 
 stances has no business to go fishing on the 
 Great South Bay, or anywhere else. We have 
 books with us, we have hopes of a breeze to 
 come and fish to be caught. 
 
 The true fisherman enjoys fishing whether he 
 catches fish or not. The love of fishing is 
 much akin to the love of gambling ; whether 
 you win or lose there is pleasurable excitement 
 about it. It is the hope of getting something 
 for nothing, so to speak, and your true fisher- 
 man will sit upon the edge of a boat or the 
 string-piece of a wharf all day, content to be 
 there and meditate upon what he might have 
 caught or may yet catch. The best fisherman 
 I know are the old fellows who dangle their 
 legs over the edge of the Paris quays waiting 
 for goujons to bite little fish half the size of 
 a herring ; and the catch of a round half-dozen 
 makes a red-letter day for the Seine fishermen. 
 I remember a picture of two of these enthusi-
 
 122 LIBERTY AND A LIVING, 
 
 asts going home in a pelting rain with an 
 empty creel between them. They have been 
 out all day and are drenched to the skin. One 
 says : " What a glorious sport this fishing is ! 
 What would life be without it ? " " Yes, in- 
 deed," responds the other, " I shall never forget 
 that nibble as long as I live ! " This is the true 
 spirit in which to fish. 
 
 I was pretty sure that upon so clear and 
 cloudless a day there would be wind after the 
 sun passed the meridian, and, sure enough, the 
 breeze began to come clear and cold from the 
 ocean before one o'clock. It was a good breeze 
 to take us home, and so we determined to push 
 on for a few miles more for the sake of trying 
 the bluefish on the cinder beds. The enjoyment 
 and refreshment of a cold wind after the sultry 
 stagnation under a hot sun was reward enough 
 for our previous discomfort, and the spirits of 
 the party rose as the boom swung over to star- 
 board and we started again for Fire Island, 
 headed down the bay. Luncheon was got out, 
 and we munched our sandwiches and prepared 
 the tackle for fishing. 
 
 With the breeze a haze also spread over the 
 horizon. South of us we had the Fire Island
 
 W 'E GO A-FISH1NG. 123 
 
 coast, which is here splendidly wooded with 
 scrub oak and is dotted at long intervals with 
 the summer-houses of people who care less for 
 society than for nature. We were sailing within 
 half a mile of the island. Back of us Patchogue 
 was lost in the mist. The breeze grew fresher 
 and fresher. The waves began to rise, and it 
 was as lively sailing as any one could want when 
 we reached the little fleet of fishing-boats lying 
 on the cinder beds and cast out our anchor. 
 We were late for the right tide, but as the 
 crews of the other boats reported the fishing to 
 be fair, we decided to try it. With such a 
 breeze it would be less than a two hours' sail 
 home, and it was not yet two o'clock. We 
 should have time for an hour's fishing, for half 
 an hour's run on shore in order to rest the 
 children, and then we could make sail for home 
 with a fresh wind at our stern for a ten miles' 
 run. 
 
 The routine of our bluefishing I have de- 
 scribed elsewhere. Fish are a secondary con- 
 sideration. If we catch any, well and good ; if 
 not, we have had a pretext for sailing thirty 
 miles and idling away the day in the most 
 profitable way imaginable. " L'Art de ne Rien
 
 124 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 Faire " is after all one of the most difficult of 
 arts. Nature and the animals flourish in idle- 
 ness. But man is supposed to deteriorate when 
 not engaged in producing things, or robbing his 
 neighbors in the finesses of trade. If, because 
 of the vicious warp inherited from ancestors 
 who deified work for its own sake, we feel un- 
 comfortable at the idea that we are sailing the 
 Great South Bay from morning till night with 
 no dollars in view, we may perhaps quiet our 
 utilitarian instincts by this pretext of fishing. 
 We are trying to obtain food for the family ; 
 we may not have hoed any corn or dug any 
 potatoes, or written any articles which editors 
 may be willing to pay for, but we have tried to 
 provide food for the household, and our con- 
 science is clear. It may be said that this is but 
 a subterfuge, for if I had stayed at my desk 
 cudgelling my brains for ideas of merchantable 
 value, I should have earned enough money to 
 buy bluefish for the whole summer. This may 
 be true, and yet I do not admit the force of 
 any such reasoning. The mere ability to earn 
 enough money to keep one's family decently 
 sheltered, fed, and clothed is the most ordinary 
 ability in the world ; the man who fails to do it
 
 WE GO A-FISHING. 12$ 
 
 is either extremely unfortunate or uncommonly 
 incompetent. He is the exception. We should 
 aim to accomplish something more than what 
 every one does. We should endeavor to eat 
 our cake and keep it too. I am led to say all 
 this in order to explain why it was that we did 
 not give way to dejection when we discovered, 
 after a throw or two of the lines, that the tide 
 had turned and that there were no fish to be 
 had. The other boats had begun to raise their 
 anchors and were taking advantage of the fine 
 southwesterly breeze to spread their wings for 
 home. It was a question whether the wind 
 would last until sundown or not. So the fish- 
 ing was abandoned, and we sailed over to the 
 wharfs near the oil-factories for a run on shore. 
 By the time that the last of the fishermen 
 had made sail for home, we took up the tail of 
 the procession. No more splendid breeze could 
 be desired straight from the southwest and 
 without a flaw. With our centreboard up we 
 cared not for flats there was enough water for 
 us, and our course was laid straight for home. 
 Every thing in the east was hazy, and it looked 
 as if rain might be falling in the neighborhood 
 of Montauk Point, for the sun was painting re-
 
 126 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 splendent pictures upon the banks of clouds. 
 Two hours later we swung around among our 
 little Patchogue fleet and made fast to shore. 
 The wind had gone down with the sun ; the 
 bay was like a mirror, and we could hear the 
 oars of people becalmed a mile from home.
 
 MY BEES. 
 
 A S I have already said elsewhere, my bees 
 ** have contributed a few dollars a year to 
 my income, and have given me a great many 
 pounds of honey and no little amusement. 
 Some five or six years ago a newspaper para- 
 graph concerning the large amount of money 
 to be made by raising bees and selling their 
 honey caught my eye, and I had the curiosity 
 to look up the only firm in this part of the 
 country which at that time made a business of 
 selling hives fitted out with bees. My investi- 
 gation resulted in the purchase of a hive con- 
 taining a swarm of pure Italian honey-bees 
 warranted to do justice to their reputation as 
 indefatigable workers, and to make my fortune 
 if I looked after them with intelligence and 
 perseverance. The people from whom I bought 
 my first hive were full of information as to the 
 vast amount of honey and, of course, profit I 
 was to get from my investment ; they said 
 127
 
 128 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 nothing about a vast number of stings. Ac- 
 cording to the rosy picture which was drawn 
 of my future, I should merely have to buy my 
 hives and hire a convenient place in which to 
 store the honey as it was produced by the ton. 
 I was told that any neighborhood where vege- 
 tation throve was good for bees, and that an 
 able-bodied man could take care of two hun- 
 dred hives with ease and live in comfort upon 
 the products of his little servants. The details 
 of the business were said to be easy to learn, 
 and its prosecution one long delight. In sup- 
 port of this story, I was presented with several 
 works by men who had kept bees and were 
 impelled from the enthusiasm which filled them 
 to tell the world how much money and joy 
 might be found in bee-keeping. One man 
 went so far as to give the actual amounts which 
 he had made in a few years, with fac-similes of 
 the checks he had received in payment for his 
 enormous shipments. According to his ac- 
 count, bee-keeping was the easiest, pleasantest, 
 and most profitable of all employments ; all the 
 bee-keeper had to do was to take out the honey 
 from the hive and sell it to the misguided 
 people who keep no hives of their own. An-
 
 MY BEES. 129 
 
 other little book told of a bright young city 
 man who gave up the delights of the theatre 
 and base-ball matches to retire to the country 
 with a hive of bees ; he emerged five years 
 later with something like a fortune made out 
 of honey. 
 
 The first supply was to be the only cost of 
 the enterprise beyond that of the hives in 
 which to place other swarms, and the little 
 boxes which are put in the hives to receive the 
 honey. I was assured that very few people 
 who took hold of the business gave it up 
 because of the stings they received, and that, 
 if I could take the opinion of all bee-keepers 
 upon the subject, I would find that it was 
 virtually a chorus of praise in honor of this 
 industry, which is almost literally as old as the 
 hills, and yet has been completely revolution- 
 ized, turned upside down, within the last 
 twenty years. For centuries people had gone 
 on allowing bees to do as they thought fit. 
 Twenty years ago an inventive genius discov- 
 ered that the bees knew nothing about making 
 the most of their time, and were living a life of 
 riotous idleness. 
 
 It is some five years since, thus induced to
 
 130 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 consider the bee business as something which 
 offered me exactly what I wanted a life of 
 ease, with nothing to do and plenty of money, 
 I paid $15 for my hive stocked with bees, 
 $i for a veil to put over my head, $2 for a pair 
 of rubber gloves, and several dollars more for 
 various implements to be used, as I found out 
 afterwards, in righting the infuriated insects. 
 My bill for the original outfit was $20 and some 
 cents, according to the accounts of the business, 
 which I have kept with great care, and which 
 are now before me. During these five years I 
 have had an experience worth all the money 
 paid out, and as there may be some other 
 people anxious for a life of ease and plenty of 
 money, my experience may not be without 
 interest and profit to them. Seriously, I have 
 not had a bad time of it, and for the number 
 of hours and the amount of money which I have 
 devoted to my bees, I am inclined to congratu- 
 late myself over the result, and to advise others 
 to at least make the experiment of keeping a 
 few hives. I have never thought of honey- 
 making as any thing but the amusement of idle 
 hours in the country, and I first gave time and 
 thought to bee-raising very much as I might to
 
 MY BEES. 131 
 
 chicken-raising or any other hobby of the city 
 man who has only a few hours in the country 
 which he does not devote to sleep. 
 
 My first hive was bought when I was living 
 in the Orange Mountains of New Jersey, about 
 twenty miles from New York. It arrived by 
 express, the top of the hive covered with wire- 
 cloth, through which the bees peered rather 
 curiously but not at all viciously. The direc- 
 tions were to take off the wire-cloth as carefully 
 as possible, and put on a large wooden cover. 
 As the construction of a modern beehive is 
 radically different from that of the old-fashioned 
 straw one, I may as well say a few words about 
 it. The essential part of a modern hive con- 
 sists of a wooden box eighteen inches wide, 
 two feet long, and about fourteen inches deep. 
 This box contains from eight to ten " frames," 
 which are filled up with a sheet of comb of the 
 average thickness. These sheets of comb, some- 
 times partly filled with honey by the bees, hang 
 side by side in the hive, and usually occupy the 
 whole of the box. It is possible to lift out any 
 one of the frames and see exactly what is going 
 on upon the sheet of comb it contains. The 
 same sheet may be partly given up to honey,
 
 IJ2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 or may contain young bees in the various 
 stages of growth from the egg to the live bee. 
 In the spring there is usually very little honey 
 left in the hive, the bees having eaten it all dur- 
 ing the winter, and filled up the empty cells 
 with eggs, fast becoming bees. The frames of 
 the hives are not often disturbed by the begin- 
 ner in bee-hiving, since the bees are apt to 
 resent this investigation into their private apart- 
 ments. Above the box containing the frames 
 comes a cover, which is sufficiently high to 
 allow a number of honey-boxes to be placed 
 right on top of the frames. These honey-boxes 
 are easily contained in a large case, which 
 enables them all to be put on or lifted off 
 together. In this case there are from twenty 
 to thirty boxes to be filled by the bees. In 
 some hives boxes for honey are also placed in 
 the lower part of the hive along the outside 
 walls, when the bees will often fill them in 
 preference to going up into the cover of the 
 hives. 
 
 In the old-fashioned hives it was necessary to 
 kill the bees by suffocating them with sulphur 
 smoke before the honey could be cut out of the 
 hive. In the new hives, if I may so call the
 
 MY SEES. 133 
 
 hives which date from twenty years ago, the 
 bees are never much disturbed when honey is 
 taken out of the hive ; the idea of killing bees 
 in order to get honey would now be considered 
 atrocious barbarism. The modern method of 
 taking the honey-boxes out of the hives is sim- 
 ply to drive the bees from the boxes down to 
 their own frames by the use of the smoke of 
 rags, when the boxes may be lifted off without 
 injuring the bees. About five hundred patents 
 have been taken out within the last twenty 
 years for improved beehives, and the farmers 
 in some parts of the country have been so 
 annoyed by the claims of people who pretend 
 to own patent rights upon hives which they 
 had purchased, that the rapacity of these hive 
 inventors has driven many of them out of the 
 business. The moment a man bought what 
 seemed to be a sensible and cheap hive, he was 
 called upon to pay royalties to some one who 
 claimed the patent. The number of different 
 hives, each type having its champions, is a very 
 large one, and almost every well-known bee- 
 keeper has left a hive of his own devising which 
 is expected to do something that other hives 
 will not do. It has been found by long experi-
 
 134 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 ence that bees are very accommodating insects, 
 and will adapt themselves to almost any variety 
 of home, provided it is sufficiently dark and 
 secure from the attacks of animals. 
 
 My first year's experience consisted in open- 
 ing the hives every day or two, after suffocating 
 all the bees with five times the necessary amount 
 of smoke, and studying what was going on in- 
 side. This effectually prevented the bees from 
 making any honey, but it gave me some insight 
 into their habits, and a very perfect knowledge 
 of the treatment of stings. As to honey, the 
 first year was only a partial success. The very 
 day after the beehive arrived and had been put 
 in place, I put over the frames every honey-box 
 that came with the hive, and watched for the 
 result. In one of my books it is recorded that 
 a swarm of bees will sometimes bring in as 
 much as twenty pounds of honey in one day ; 
 my bees had evidently never read this book. 
 I could not find that they brought in an ounce, 
 unless for their own use. After some weeks of 
 anxious watching and disappointment, I con- 
 sulted a neighbor, who knew somebody else 
 whose brother had once had a beehive, and in 
 the end I discovered that an old farmer ten
 
 MY BEES. 135 
 
 miles off had some bees, and actually got some 
 honey from them every year. I went to see 
 him, and found out that in that part of Jersey, 
 at least, bees do very little in the way of honey- 
 making from the end of June until the end 
 of August ; moreover, that if I want to get 
 them to make honey in the little boxes which 
 are sold by the grocers, I should have to en- 
 courage them by placing in each box a little 
 sheet of wax marked with the comb indenta- 
 tions. These wax " starters " are the invention 
 of a German bee-keeper. I also learned that, 
 in order to get the bees to do their whole duty, 
 a modern device, likewise the invention of a 
 German, known as an " extractor," would be 
 necessary. 
 
 The extractor is simply a tin barrel contain- 
 ing a frame which can be made to whirl around 
 upon a central pivot. Into this frame the hive 
 combs, when they contain honey, are placed, 
 and made to revolve so rapidly that the honey 
 is forced out of the cone by centrifugal action 
 and trickles down to the bottom of the extract- 
 or. Before bees begin to store honey in the 
 little boxes in the top of the hive, they first fill 
 up such parts of the large frames as are not
 
 136 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 used by them for rearing young ; and the mo- 
 tion of the extractor is so regulated that the 
 eggs and young bees are not thrown out with 
 the honey. The comb having been emptied 
 of the honey, the frame is replaced in the hive, 
 and the bees, finding their stores gone and 
 fearing starvation, will go to work again with 
 the energy of despair. Some bee-keepers use 
 their bees entirely for producing this extracted 
 honey, and never make any box-honey, as the 
 honey in the comb is called. The sale of ex- 
 tracted honey, put up in bottles, is naturally 
 larger than that of box-honey, as it can be 
 kept in better order and for a longer time ; but 
 its price is less by several cents a pound, and 
 the temptation to adulterate it with sugar and 
 water has given it a bad reputation in some 
 communities. As yet no one has found a 
 method of making artificial comb and filling it 
 with artificial honey. A dealer in honey said 
 to me one day : " These rascals who adulterate 
 honey with glucose are ruining our business in 
 extracted honey. Fortunately, they cannot imi- 
 tate comb-honey. It has been tried, but does 
 not succeed ; I would give $10,000 to find a 
 good method of doing it." So much for busi-
 
 MY BEES. 137 
 
 ness virtue. The only way in which adultera- 
 tion comes into play with comb-honey is in the 
 practice of feeding the bees upon glucose or 
 maple-sugar and water, which mixture they, of 
 course, store up in the boxes and " cap " over 
 in the usual way, as if it was genuine honey 
 from flowers. 
 
 The internal economy of a beehive, with its 
 thousands of workers, its drones, and its one 
 queen, has been described so often in print 
 that I need not waste space upon it. A good 
 beehive, well filled, contains about 25,000 bees. 
 My first beehive had about 5,000 when it came 
 to me, but reached the maximum before the end 
 of the autumn. When the queen lays eggs, she 
 does so at the rate of several hundred a day, and 
 in less than three weeks the bees from these 
 eggs are flying around. Much has been said of 
 late as to the superiority of the Italian bee, 
 which carries three yellow bands upon its body, 
 over the native black bee, and as high as $50 
 have been paid for a good Italian queen. 
 Means have been devised of so packing queens 
 that they often come from Europe by mail, 
 and are sent all over the country in the same 
 way. The average price for a good queen is
 
 138 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 at present one dollar. At the end of my 
 first summer's experience in the bee busi- 
 ness, and after allowing my bees to take 
 care of themselves for the six weeks from the 
 middle of September to the end of October, 
 I found that I had twelve pounds of honey 
 stored up in boxes, and that the nine frames 
 of the lower part of the hive were completely 
 full of honey and weighed eight pounds apiece. 
 I took out three of the frames which were 
 filled and left in six for the winter, thus giving 
 the bees nearly fifty pounds of honey to live 
 upon. The preparation for winter in Jersey is 
 simply to take off the top and side boxes, fill- 
 ing up the void with sawdust ; I left the hive 
 out-of-doors, and I have followed the same 
 plan in Connecticut with success. In northern 
 New England and in the northwestern States, 
 where the thermometer often falls below zero, 
 it is customary to winter the hives in cellars. 
 
 After a pretty severe winter I discovered in 
 the first sunshiny days of March that my bees 
 were coming out of the hive freely, and taking 
 a warm day for investigation, I lifted out a 
 frame to find it full of " brood," as the bees not 
 yet out of the cell are called. As the spring
 
 MY BEES. 139 
 
 advanced the hive became more and more 
 lively, and when the willows blossomed the 
 noise of my bees could be heard fifty feet 
 away ; apparently I had twice as many bees as 
 in the autumn, and I looked forward to a tre- 
 mendous crop of honey. Authorities upon 
 the bee business say that the average product 
 of a good hive ought to be 60 pounds of 
 honey a year. Some bee-keepers boast of 
 having obtained 100 pounds, and the farmer 
 who still keeps bees in a common wooden box, 
 provided with no movable frames, is satisfied 
 with 25 or 30 pounds. May came, and I filled my 
 hives with boxes fitted out with wax " starters." 
 The hive appeared to be crowded with bees, so 
 much so that early in May a tremendous swarm 
 came out one day, and after hanging to a cedar 
 tree for some hours, went off to find new 
 quarters ; I was away in the city and lost it. 
 Swarming is nothing more or less than a sign 
 that the hive is too small for the family. The 
 queen goes off with a certain number of the 
 bees to find a new home, but not without leav- 
 ing things in such a state that a new queen 
 will be hatched out in a few days. Within ten 
 days of the loss of my first swarm, another one
 
 I4O LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 appeared on a Sunday, and I found it without 
 difficulty hanging to a small cedar tree. I put 
 the cover on an old soap-box, and bored two 
 or three holes in one side of the box with an 
 auger. Then I put it on the ground near my 
 first hive, carefully cut off the small limb upon 
 which my swarm had clustered, and laid the 
 black mass down in front of the soap-box, with- 
 in an inch or two of the auger holes. The bees 
 made a straight line for these openings, tum- 
 bling over one another in their anxiety to get 
 in. In half an hour the last one entered. The 
 next day I bought an empty hive in town. 
 Upon opening my soap-box to get the bees 
 into the new hive, which I did within forty-eight 
 hours, I found that they had already begun 
 making comb and the queen had begun to lay 
 eggs. I made the transfer without difficulty. 
 During this second year my two hives gave me 
 between them forty-seven pounds of honey in 
 boxes, and thirty-two pounds of honey which I 
 cut from the frames. I found that the best 
 honey season in that part of the country was 
 not in the spring, but in the late autumn, the 
 golden-rod affording most of the supply. At 
 the close of the second summer I prepared the
 
 MY BEES. 141 
 
 bees as usual and left them out in the snow for 
 the winter. 
 
 In May following I increased my number of 
 hives to four by taking out half of the bees in 
 each of my two hives and putting them into 
 new hives. The process is too complicated for 
 description here ; every bee-book gives a de- 
 tailed account of how to do it. I succeeded 
 perfectly. From my two old hives came a 
 swarm apiece, both of which I succeeded in 
 catching. This gave me six hives. The third 
 year resulted in a harvest of 120 pounds in 
 boxes and 90 pounds in the frames. The result 
 was not so good as it might have been had I 
 watched the hives carefully enough to deter- 
 mine exactly when the frames ought to have 
 been emptied of their contents by the use of 
 an extractor. I have never taken the trouble to 
 get an extractor at all, preferring to work en- 
 tirely for box-honey. Also, I did not take out 
 my boxes as fast as they were filled, and this 
 had something to do with the work of the 
 bees, who do their best when starvation threat- 
 ens them. For the fourth year, inasmuch as 
 six hives were simply flooding me and my 
 neighbors with honey, I neglected to hive the
 
 142 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 swarms at all, and simply let them go, knowing 
 that more honey would mean a serious amount 
 of time taken in looking after the hives and 
 in selling the honey. The last year has given 
 me no less than 280 pounds of honey in boxes 
 and 160 pounds in the frames. Half of this 
 honey has been sold at an average price of 14 
 cents a pound, which is about two thirds of 
 the price obtained for it by the local grocer to 
 whom I sold it. 
 
 To sum up the results of my experiments in 
 bee-culture, I have six hives completely filled 
 with bees and ready for the winter, which have 
 cost me in all $46, including the original outlay. 
 During the five years I have spent exactly 80 
 cents in food for the bees ; when the spring is 
 very late, they sometimes require to be helped 
 along with a little candy. I estimate the value 
 of my plant at $100, and my honey which re- 
 mains for the winter's consumption at $30. 
 The time necessary to look after and take care 
 of 6 hives is certainly not more than three 
 hours a week, and the number of stings received 
 depends upon the caution and skill of the bee- 
 keeper. I have found that it is not necessary
 
 MY BEES. 143 
 
 to be stung at all, and that even when a few 
 bees do manage to sting, it is not a very serious 
 matter. Any man who wants a most interest- 
 ing hobby can find no end of interest and some 
 honey by getting a beehive and putting it on 
 the roof, even if he lives in the city. Some 
 years ago one of our downtown janitors, who 
 kept a small apiary on the top of a big 
 office building, had to give it up because a 
 neighboring candy-shop on Broadway com- 
 plained of the clouds of bees which the candy 
 attracted. With judicious management one 
 hive ought to give enough honey for a family, 
 and to require almost no attention. Bees will 
 fly four miles in search of honey, so that 
 our New York city bees get most of their sup- 
 plies in Jersey or over on Long Island. At one 
 time a few years ago California honey seemed 
 about to drive our Eastern bees out of the 
 business. Since then, however, there has been 
 a reaction, and our honey is preferred for its 
 flavor, and higher prices are paid for it. One 
 bee-keeper of Cherry Valley, New York, exports 
 yearly to England $25,000 worth of honey 
 raised by his own bees. I am now about to
 
 144 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 move my bees down to my Long Island home, 
 having found that there are thriving apiaries in 
 the neighborhood and plenty of buckwheat and 
 golden-rod for their sustenance. If I cannot 
 get several hundred pounds of honey every 
 year to offset my grocery bill I shall be disap- 
 pointed.
 
 "DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE." 
 
 T AM sorry for the man who cannot get pleas- 
 ^ ure out of a wood fire. One of the prom- 
 ising signs of the times, according to my view, 
 is the reappearance of the open hearth in most 
 of our modern country-houses. If the aesthetic 
 movement in house-building leaves us no other 
 memento of its passage than the big open 
 hearth and the andirons of our forefathers, we 
 can afford to be thankful, for its sins are as 
 nothing as compared to this blessing. Twenty 
 years ago, one could find all over the country 
 noble old houses in which the big fireplace had 
 been bricked up in order to substitute a grate 
 for coal, or, what is worse, a pipe-hole for a 
 stove. With the better sentiment of the last 
 few years, the fortunate people who own such 
 houses have had the bricks torn down and the 
 old andirons rescued from the attic. At my 
 own fireside I have a pair of andirons that have 
 been in use in the family for more than a hun- 
 145
 
 146 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 dred and fifty years, and it is no small pleasure 
 to dream of the people, long since dead and 
 gone, who have watched the flames reflected in 
 those burnished brass relics of the olden time. 
 The man who has not learned to love a log fire 
 has missed one of the comforts of life ; it is the 
 love of a fire which has kept me from moving 
 to Florida or some country where vegetation 
 and gardens flourish the year round. Fond as 
 I am of working among growing things, and 
 eagerly as I look forward year after year to the 
 first dandelion, I cannot bear the idea of losing 
 my noble blaze and the peculiar odor which a 
 log fire, especially of pine wood, gives to a room 
 when the winter blast outside sends an occa- 
 sional whiff of smoke and flame down the chim- 
 ney. Along with the petty miseries of life in 
 large cities I should be inclined to place the ab- 
 sence of a wood fire, for even if there is a big 
 fireplace, which is not always the case in a city 
 house of the ordinary type, wood is too dear to 
 allow of its use as I understand it. I want a fire 
 of logs a foot through and four feet long, which 
 burns from morning till late at night, which 
 throws out light enough to do without lamps 
 until the dinner-bell rings, and I am sure that
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 147 
 
 the children who grow up with the remem- 
 brance of that fire-light hour before their bed- 
 time will be the better for it. It will inculcate 
 in them a love of something healthy, spiritually 
 and physically. Thoreau says : " Dead trees 
 love the fire." 
 
 Of all the woods that we burn upon our big 
 hearth in winter, the balsam pine knots are the 
 most precious, because they send out an aro- 
 matic odor through the room somewhat akin to 
 that of sandal-wood. Often, when the gale 
 does not send us a whiff of smoke backing 
 down the chimney, I take a pine knot out of 
 the fire with the tongs and wave it through the 
 room for the sake of getting that peculiar scent 
 which has always seemed full of medicinal prop- 
 erties. In order to get pine knots of the kind 
 I want, we make two or three trips every 
 summer to a wooded headland within six miles 
 of us, where for a trifle the owner has given me 
 the privilege of cutting down a lot of old pines 
 that are fit for nothing but firewood or fence 
 posts. These firewood expeditions are hailed 
 with delight by the children, because each one 
 constitutes a sort of picnic for them. Yester- 
 day was one of our firewood days, and we got
 
 148 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 off by a glorious morning soon after seven 
 o'clock, taking, of course, all the children and a 
 friend with us. As we marched down to the 
 boat, our axes, fishing-poles, and oars over our 
 shoulders, we met the first stage starting from 
 our little hotel for the railroad station, full of 
 unfortunate business men bound to New York 
 for another week's heat, worry, fatigue, and 
 money. I suppose that every one of them 
 hoped to make at least one hundred dollars by 
 the week's work, for life is expensive when one 
 has a large family and boards at the country 
 inn. That would be about fifteen dollars a day. 
 I was going to earn enough firewood, or rather 
 enough pine knots, to give a balsamic scent to 
 our fires for half the winter. Probably I could 
 have hired a man to go and do the work for me 
 and bring back more wood than I should re- 
 quire, all for three or four dollars. If money is 
 the object of life, then my conscience ought to 
 prick me to the quick as we nod good-bye to 
 the money-makers and keep on down to the 
 bay. There is but little breeze stirring, scarcely 
 enough to send us along. Nevertheless, up 
 goes the sail, the children throwing aboard 
 their baskets and bags containing the lunch-
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 149 
 
 eon, and we cast off prepared for a good day's 
 outing. 
 
 It sometimes occurs to me whether there 
 may not be such a thing as the cultivation of 
 idleness whether the love of idleness does not 
 grow by idleness. Many people have told me 
 that the normal man needs to work in order to 
 be healthy and happy, and by work they mean 
 money-making of some kind. This giving a 
 whole day to going after a quarter of a cord of 
 pine knots would be looked upon as a peculiarly 
 vicious idleness because of the specious attempt 
 to dissimulate. I remember many years ago, 
 when quite a young man, that chance threw 
 me out of business for several months, and as it 
 happened I employed most of my time in strip- 
 ping a superb orchard of its apples and barrel- 
 ing them for sale in the city. I forget exactly 
 what the venture netted me in money. The 
 apples were going to waste and I invested the 
 necessary money in empty barrels and freight 
 charges. The work, I did myself, beginning 
 before breakfast and stopping when it grew too 
 dark to tell a good apple from a bad one. Then 
 I went back to routine work at my own profes- 
 sion. But in after years the memory of that
 
 150 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 apple-picking became a delight. I often spoke 
 of it to friends, only to be told that no one but 
 the laziest of men would think of wasting 
 months in an apple orchard. Perhaps as a 
 business investment, such work might pay the 
 wages of a day laborer, but it was unworthy of 
 a man who could earn ten or twenty dollars a 
 day by writing newspaper articles or trading in 
 lead pipe or leather. Moreover, I was assured 
 that had I kept on for a few months longer at 
 such work, it would have filled me with pro- 
 found discontent and a wild desire to get back 
 to the city at any cost. I was assured that for 
 any man above the rustic lout, the country and 
 all its occupations would be intolerable except 
 as a recreation for a few weeks of the year, 
 unless there was plenty of money wherewith to 
 live a life of absolute idleness and watch others 
 work. It has always been taken for granted by 
 these good friends of mine that this is so self- 
 evident as to require no argument. The man 
 who wants to earn bread and butter for his 
 family must work in the city. Yet all these 
 years, I have retained a sneaking fondness for 
 the belief that years of work in an apple orchard 
 might not result disastrously for me or mine.
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 151 
 
 I recall the fact that during those three months 
 I was never better in health, that I never took 
 greater pleasure in my books and papers, that I 
 never looked upon life with more satisfaction. 
 And this accidental taste of country life at a 
 profit of a dollar or two a day, a small sum as 
 compared to my city earnings, had great in- 
 fluence in my determination to cut loose from 
 the city for a large part of the year. 
 
 To come back to the Great South Bay, it was 
 as smooth as a mill-pond, as we made sail for 
 our headland, looming up cool and shady to 
 the eastward. The water was so clear beneath 
 us that each patch of oysters could be dis- 
 tinguished on the bottom. Our friend M., 
 whom we had along with us, and to whom I 
 sang the praises of a pine-knot fire, suggested 
 that if every one took to wood fires and burned 
 up a dozen cords of wood in the winter, as 
 we did, wood would become exorbitantly dear, 
 and none but millionaires would be able to 
 afford it. It is said that it takes the wood of 
 five square miles every year to furnish matches 
 for the world, the daily consumption in this 
 country reaching ten matches per head for
 
 I$2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 every man, woman, and child. And about once 
 a year the papers contain articles warning the 
 people that our forests are disappearing, never 
 to grow again. This sort of talk is rather lost 
 upon any one who lives down on Long Island 
 anywhere beyond Babylon, for here there are 
 tracts of country where one can walk for miles 
 and miles without meeting a soul or seeing 
 a house, and yet covered with a growth of 
 excellent firewood, untouched almost from 
 generation to generation. Yet we are with- 
 in seventy-five miles of the greatest city on 
 the continent. If New York City should ever 
 take to wood fires, Long Island can grow 
 wood just as well as cabbages. Even now, 
 when our Long Island woods have been shame- 
 fully neglected for generations, no one ever 
 thinking of replanting a forest that has been 
 cut down or burned up, good firewood, of 
 pine or oak, can be bought for three dollars a 
 cord, cut and delivered. A cord of wood will 
 give a roaring blaze every night for a month. 
 If you cut the wood yourself, as I do, you can 
 have it almost for nothing. There may come 
 a time when wood will become scarce in this 
 neighborhood, but it will not be in my day or
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 153 
 
 in the day of the children whom I am teaching 
 to look upon a blazing hearth as an essential 
 feature of home. By that time, man will 
 probably get his heat from stored-up sunlight, 
 or from electricity furnished by the rush of the 
 tides or the sweep of the winds. 
 
 As we have a good hour's sail before us, one 
 of the party reads out Thoreau's chapter on 
 firewood, a wonderful study which rather 
 dwarfs all attempts to say much upon the 
 same subject. This is what I call a happiness 
 beyond the making of any number of dollars. 
 Here we are in our staunch, safe boat, gliding 
 along with just enough sea breeze to take us 
 to that haven where we would be, my wife and 
 children finding health and spirits in it, a few 
 books and magazines, and the prospect of sev- 
 eral hours of hard, healthy work in the woods 
 before we make sail for home as the sun goes 
 down. The boom of the surf is the only sound 
 that comes to us as we reach the middle of the 
 bay and head straight for the little half-rotten 
 dock which is all that is left of some improve- 
 ments made years ago by a company of specu- 
 lators who expected to establish a summer re- 
 sort at the point we are steering for. Away
 
 154 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 to the north of us a puff of steam or smoke 
 shows where the locomotive is dragging those 
 poor wretches off to their daily treadmill. 
 How very far away all such life seems. If it 
 were not for the daily newspapers, I should 
 almost forget that there were so many miser- 
 able beings grinding out their few years of 
 existence with so utter a disregard of the es- 
 sential facts in the case. That puff of smoke 
 is the last reminder of civilization that we shall 
 have during the day before we sight our village 
 again. As the last line of Thoreau's chapter is 
 read, the boat swings round into the breeze and 
 Arthur jumps ashore and makes us fast, while 
 we gather up our implements of work. The 
 shore here presents a picture not unusual at 
 this part of the bay. For three or four hun- 
 dred feet from the water there is a meadow 
 filled with low bushes and blackberry vines of 
 the creeping type. Then comes a rise in the 
 ground, and a plateau stretches away to the 
 north, covered with a heavy growth of trees. 
 The spot is a superb one for a big hotel or a 
 colony of cottages, and undoubtedly it would 
 long ago have been used for this purpose but 
 for the distance from the railroad ; it is a five-
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 155 
 
 mile drive to the nearest railway station, and 
 that would be a fatal waste of time to any busi- 
 ness man. One of the reasons given for the 
 success of the big hotel at Babylon is that it 
 stands so near the railroad that the New Yorker 
 can step from his train to the piazza of the 
 hotel. 
 
 The shore presents this morning a beautiful 
 picture of absolute calm. At nine o'clock 
 nothing is heard as we stand on the little wharf 
 and survey the scene but the distant boom of 
 the surf to the south of us on the other side of 
 the sand-bar, and the singing of the birds in the 
 woods around us. The bay sleeps quietly in 
 the sunlight, and the whole Long Island coast 
 is in brilliant relief, with its hills in the back- 
 ground, just beginning to show the first tints 
 of autumn. Our miniature forest is but a five 
 minutes' stroll up to the headland, and the 
 children begin an attack on the last of the 
 blackberries as we go along. Upon reaching 
 our grove I spied my old friend the Cap'n 
 coming along the shore in his cat-boat from a 
 visit to some distant eel-pots, and with the con- 
 viction that he may have something worth 
 buying besides eels, I go down to the shore
 
 156 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 and hail him. I stand high in the Cap'n's con- 
 sideration just now that is, as high as any 
 land lubber can ever expect to stand, for I have 
 placed at the side of my writing-desk one of 
 his eel-pots which I use as a scrap-basket. I 
 got the Cap'n to make it for half a dollar, and 
 as I couldn't quite make him understand for 
 exactly what purpose I wanted it, as a waste- 
 basket is something he had never heard of, he 
 made me a perfect eel-pot, and having put it in 
 place I called him in and showed him how 
 admirably its served its purpose. It was nauti- 
 cal, ichthyological, and harmonizes with the 
 room full of nets, poles, and guns. The Cap'n 
 was so much pleased with the sight of his eel- 
 pot half full of the waste from my desk that I 
 can scarcely get him to accept pay for bait, and 
 some day I think that he will show me a few of 
 the places in the bay where weak-fish are really 
 caught, instead of many places where they are 
 not, as is the custom with professional fisher- 
 men. Sure enough, the Cap'n has a bushel of 
 clams in his boat which he is taking over to the 
 beach for a friend, and it is not hard to divert 
 the store to our own purposes. The children 
 come down to the shore and I pull the basket
 
 DEAD TUBES LOVE THE FIRE. 157 
 
 up the bank under the shade of some pines, 
 while they begin to collect firewood enough for 
 a clambake at dinner-time. If we cannot get 
 clams at our end of the bay, the water being 
 too fresh so far from an ocean inlet, we can at 
 least have them brought from fifteen to twenty 
 miles farther down, and then they can be 
 thrown into the water, where they will live for 
 months, to be taken up whenever wanted. 
 
 The real work of the day then began. While 
 the ladies sewed and read in the shade, and 
 the children picked late blackberries, we sturdy 
 laborers undertook to cut down half-a-dozen 
 small pines and saw their gnarled limbs into 
 suitable pieces for the fire. It was hot work, 
 and it made it hotter to think of the blaze 
 that we were preparing for. To quote Tho- 
 reau again, he used to say that he got more 
 warmth out of cutting his firewood than out 
 of its blaze, and his conscience was never quite 
 easy as to the return he made for the blessings 
 of a log fire. He used to say that though he had 
 paid money to the owner of that wood, he was 
 never quite sure that the debt had been wholly 
 discharged. In two hours we had done enough 
 of our work to see that with a little sawing
 
 158 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 after dinner there would be sufficient to load 
 up the boat, and then after a short rest we be- 
 gan to prepare for dinner. Whoever wants to 
 know what clams are worth, must cook them 
 on the shore, and with drift-wood picked up 
 for the purpose. I have tried a clam-bake in 
 our garden, I have tried it on the kitchen 
 stove, but whether the difference is in the 
 clams or in our appetites, the result is never 
 the same. It is the easiest thing in the world 
 to bake clams to perfection, if a few simple 
 rules are observed. Sweep a flat space upon 
 the sand, and lay upon it the sort of griddle 
 made for the purpose, which can be found all 
 over Long Island. The clams are held upright 
 in this griddle, which holds at least one hun- 
 dred, and sometimes more. Right on top of 
 the clams build a loose fire of the drift-wood, and 
 after it has blazed well for five minutes, and 
 the clams begin to hiss violently, half smother 
 it with wet sea-weed ; a moment after, one or 
 two clams may be tested. Pick one out with a 
 pair of tongs and throw it up in the air, letting 
 it come down upon any hard surface, a board, 
 or a stone. If it flies open, all is well, and the 
 feast may begin ; if not, the clams are not
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. 159 
 
 quite done. When all is ready, shovel them 
 into a large tin pan. We always keep the 
 implements for a clam-bake in one of the lock- 
 ers of the boat, for scores of times every sum- 
 mer we find that we can have a clam-bake 
 when we least expected it, just as it happened 
 this morning. Two hundred clams disap- 
 peared among seven of us, almost sooner than 
 it takes to tell the tale, and back we went to 
 our work. 
 
 As I shouldered my axe again I could not 
 help one more thought of the miserable toilers 
 in town. Was I stealing a living? If so, the old 
 adage regarding stolen sweets once more proved 
 true. The children are set at work carrying 
 the wood down to the shore ready to be put 
 on board, and even the youngest, a sturdy 
 damsel of not quite four, shouts with indig- 
 nation if any one proposes to help her along 
 with her load. It is not four o'clock when 
 we have enough wood to fill up the sail-boat, 
 and we have to put some of it on deck. It 
 has turned out to be a pretty hot day, and 
 as there is enough breeze to take us home in 
 less than an hour, we decide for a surf-bath, 
 and the Nellie s prow is turned over to the
 
 l6o LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 beach, a mile off. I suppose that with some 
 people the daily surf-bath from June till Octo- 
 ber might become so much a matter of course 
 as to lose half its delights. As with country 
 life, so it is with the surf, so far as I am con- 
 cerned. It is always the keenest of pleasures 
 and never more so than after a good day's 
 hard physical work. By five o'clock we make 
 sail for home, and for an hour we have before 
 us a more splendid painting than was ever 
 made by man. Here, on the Great South Bay, 
 we seem to be particularly favored in the mat- 
 ter of sunsets, for certainly more than half our 
 days end with one of these color displays as 
 changing as it is indescribable. We have 
 grown so used to these wonderful pictures that 
 adjectives and superlatives have long ago 
 been used up ; some one points now and then 
 to a particularly exquisite blending of gold 
 and silver, and the rest of the party nod in 
 silence. By the time we reach our harbor, the 
 sun has gone down with the breeze, and we 
 drift slowly into the little slip. The village is 
 at supper, and my friend, the Cap'n, who 
 stands on the dock, is the only one to greet us. 
 He peers curiously at the wood, and seems
 
 DEAD TREES LOVE THE FIRE. l6l 
 
 doubtful when I tell him that it is to burn. 
 For the Cap'n also has his ideas about queer 
 people who waste a whole day and sail ten 
 miles to get a lot of pine knots that any " nig- 
 ger" would have delivered for a two-dollar bill. 
 The Cap'n's notion of otium cum dignitate is 
 probably an unfailing supply of tobacco, and an 
 endless conference around the village store stove 
 upon the affairs of the neighborhood and the 
 nation. I told him once that I should think 
 he would enjoy making eel-pots, for the work 
 has a certain fascination about it this weaving 
 together of strong, supple twigs of oak, the 
 converting of an old log into hundreds of pots 
 that will do duty for years. Every day the 
 Cap'n can feel that he has produced something 
 of value, which is more than a great many 
 more pretentious people I know of can say. 
 Down comes the sail, and while the boys tie it 
 up and make the ropes ship-shape for the night, 
 we gather up our traps and start for the house, 
 leaving the Cap'n deep in thought, as he 
 squints first at the horizon and then at our 
 little pile of logs. Even twelve hours of open 
 air have not quite satisfied me, and were it not 
 for several letters to write and a good many
 
 1 62 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 proof-sheets to read, I should like to join the 
 Cap'n in a tour of his eel-pots. There is no 
 wind, so that the bay reflects every star as it 
 peeps out, and away down in the southwest 
 we catch a gleam from the Fire Island light.
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING HENRY DAVID 
 THOREAU. 
 
 TT has often been urged that such a scheme as 
 mine would be all very well for a man with 
 even a small income, say sufficient to insure him 
 and his family against starvation at any time, 
 and to give him the few luxuries which with 
 most people of refinement have become almost 
 necessary. For instance, even an income of 
 five hundred dollars a year might warrant a 
 person of very simple tastes in making such an 
 experiment as I have outlined ; such a sum 
 would, at least, provide oatmeal and milk, bread 
 and coffee. It would be largely a return to 
 first principles in household economy, but there 
 are people who would not grumble could they 
 exchange a life of intellectual plenty even at 
 this cost of superfluities. So modest a sum 
 as five hundred dollars a year, if used with skill, 
 might provide a glimpse of such dissipation as 
 an occasional theatre, or a strain of music in 
 163
 
 164 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the depth of winter, the only time when the 
 real countryman would have the time to leave 
 his home, or the inclination to do so. The rest 
 of the year would be pretty fully taken up. In 
 my own case, it happens that unlike most men 
 who have to look to the earnings of the year 
 for bread and butter, I can throw all city work 
 overboard when the spring opens, and not set 
 foot in town before the snow flies. To most 
 men, and to all business men, such an arrange- 
 ment is impossible ; the merchant cannot inter- 
 rupt his work for so long a time with any cer- 
 tainty that he will be able to pick it up again ; 
 the clerk in a shop or a factory must be at his 
 post all the year around, or not at all ; the 
 lawyer has to "keep track" of his clients' 
 affairs, or he would soon find himself without 
 clients. The world's machinery cannot stop, 
 and the engineers must be at their posts. 
 There are very few occupations outside of cer- 
 tain departments of journalism which can be 
 taken up and thrown down at will. The mer- 
 chant, the clerk, the lawyer, the doctor, must 
 remain at their posts pretty much the year 
 around, and this rule obtains all the more 
 strictly with subordinates.
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 165 
 
 Therefore the problem becomes in the case 
 of ninety-nine men out of a hundred : Either to 
 give up one or the other. I have listened to 
 scores of persons to whom I have submitted 
 this problem, who are very certain that no 
 man, especially if bred in a large city, would 
 consent to forsake the pleasures of the town 
 for the quiet of the country. I took the 
 trouble once to find out, as nearly as possible, 
 exactly what the average business man means 
 by the word " pleasure." It seems that in the 
 opinion of the typical young man of business, 
 pleasure means going to the theatre once or 
 twice a week, meeting large numbers of other 
 young men and young women in the shops, or 
 in the streets, or in their homes, or at church. 
 The essence of this pleasure is the crowd, 
 largely of inane people characterized by unrest, 
 hurry, or idle curiosity. This same love of the 
 crowd characterizes many strata of society in 
 cities, and the disease seems to thrive by what 
 it feeds upon. As an illustration, take the his- 
 tory of the efforts made by one of our charita- 
 ble societies to induce some of the very poorest 
 inhabitants of our most squalid neighborhoods 
 to get into the country. For nearly twenty
 
 1 66 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 years the district lying between the Bowery and 
 the East River in New York City has been 
 crowded with very poor people, who make a 
 business of sewing upon ready-made clothing. 
 They are largely Polish Jews of small intelli- 
 gence, and apparently no instinct beyond self- 
 preservation. They live, or rather herd, to- 
 gether in vile holes, for which they pay exorbi- 
 tant rents, and their life is one long struggle and 
 incessant work. According to credible reports, 
 work begins soon after daybreak and lasts far 
 into night, when the poor wretches sink down 
 exhausted upon the piles of clothing which 
 they are making for the cheap shops of the 
 country. Whole families live and die in this 
 wretchedness, the children knowing no child- 
 hood, as we understand it, and old age being 
 out of the question in this atmosphere of foul 
 air and incessant toil. It is not the work of 
 healthy people, but a nervous strain to accom- 
 plish two days' work in one. In many visits 
 which I have made to such homes, I have in- 
 variably noticed that the workers seldom look 
 up, and then only for a hurried glance time is 
 too precious. Well, the society in question at- 
 tempted to solve the problem before them.
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. l6/ 
 
 Here were thousands and thousands of people 
 who never knew what rest or recreation really 
 meant, whose children had never seen a green 
 field, or had had a real play in good air, whose 
 lives were apparently hopeless. Ask some of 
 the most intelligent of these slaves of the needle 
 why they cannot move out into the suburbs 
 where they could get nice little cottages for 
 less money than they pay in their horrible 
 quarters in the tenement districts, and the 
 answer is always that they cannot spare the 
 time needed to go back and forth with the 
 bundles of clothing upon which the family 
 labors. In New York such errands require but 
 a few moments; in the country they would take 
 up time and money for car fares. 
 
 The society resolved to do away with that 
 trouble by paying for the expressage of cloth- 
 ing to and from the city for people who might 
 like to move away, and a quiet spot was found 
 out on Long Island where a dozen little houses 
 were made ready for the first colony of these 
 people. When it came to actually leaving New 
 York there was some trouble in inducing a 
 dozen families to go, but by collecting people 
 with many children and making the rents of
 
 1 68 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the cottages almost nominal, a dozen families 
 were found to make the experiment. In less 
 than a year and a half the scheme was aban- 
 doned. At no time were the cottages all 
 occupied after the first month, and it required 
 great inducements to prevail upon the tenants 
 to remain more than a quarter. The reasons 
 given by them for returning to New York 
 were, in all cases, the same : the women of 
 the family were lonely they missed the society 
 of the tenements. They missed the life of 
 the streets, the drunken brawls, the yells and 
 screams, the dirt, the noise, the heat, the foul 
 air, and language of the slums. The children 
 may have enjoyed the country, but their elders 
 wanted society. Going higher in the social 
 scale, it seems to be very much the same story. 
 People with not much to think about cannot 
 get on without the crowd, no matter what kind 
 of a crowd. I am convinced that this is a far 
 more potent factor in keeping people in great 
 cities and attracting them than the prospect of 
 better clothes and whiter hands which the shop 
 offers to the young man from the farm. There- 
 fore in order to wean city people, who ought 
 not to live in the city, away from improper
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 169 
 
 environment it is necessary to influence them 
 in some other way than the offer of purely 
 physical or economical advantages. Proba- 
 bly but very little can be done in this field 
 except through the children, and the value 
 of the work accomplished by the Children's 
 Aid Society in sending out waifs picked out 
 from the streets to green fields and pastures 
 new in the far West, cannot be overestimated. 
 With the average young man or young woman, 
 who finds ample enjoyment in the gossip of the 
 shops and is inclined to pity any one condemned 
 to country life, I am inclined to think that the 
 case is almost equally hopeless. The man 
 who takes nothing into the country with him, 
 intellectually speaking, ought not to go there ; 
 -he will be lonely. I was strongly impressed 
 with this phase of the matter when I made 
 some visits among the cheap shops which line 
 Grand Street, east of the Bowery. There are 
 large shops here, employing hundreds of clerks 
 of both sexes. Work begins early and lasts 
 until seven or eight o'clock in the evening. In 
 many of the shops it is so dark that gas or 
 electric lights have to be used at mid-day. 
 The neighborhood is alive with people of the
 
 1/0 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 lower and middling classes, and the life of a 
 clerk in one of these shops is perpetual motion. 
 I questioned young men and young women 
 in these shops as to how they liked their work, 
 and as to why they did not try to get into some- 
 thing that offered them more time and better 
 air. In no case out of twenty or thirty persons 
 whom I addressed as particularly likely to 
 sympathize with the suggestion that such a life 
 in such a place was the life of a dog, did I 
 meet with a responsive note. It seemed to 
 these people that all was right ; it was a case of 
 where " ignorance is bliss." 
 
 I remember again passing through Grand 
 Street early one morning last summer, on my 
 way to take the train for a far-off country 
 village. The morning was intensely uncom- 
 fortable, the forerunner of a terrible day, sure 
 to count its victims by the score. In front of 
 every shop along this thoroughfare were groups 
 of clerks busy piling up dry goods in more or 
 less artistic shape, intended to impress the 
 passers. I saw hundreds of men, many of them 
 gray-headed and able-bodied, who seemed to 
 find nothing unpleasant about their work. To 
 one or two I ventured the remark as I went
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. I/I 
 
 along that it was going to be a very hot day, 
 and that the country boys had the advantage 
 of their city brothers. Even that, the few 
 clerks to whom I spoke were inclined to dispute. 
 The country lad, they argued, had his troubles. 
 It was hot in the cornfield as well as on Grand 
 * Street, and while the dry-goods clerk could 
 retire into the depths of the shop, the farm lad 
 had to work away. I found no one inclined to 
 prefer the life of field work to which I looked 
 forward to that of the Grand Street dry-goods 
 shops. These young gentlemen would carry 
 nothing with them should they abandon the 
 shop and their equally empty-headed associ- 
 ates. Why should they give up the society 
 they knew for the utter solitude of a life on the 
 farm, or the bay? 
 
 I have put some words of Thoreau's upon 
 the title-page of this book, and no one who 
 has taken the pains to dip into its pages can 
 have failed to see that I have read the famous 
 hermit of Walden Pond with persistency and 
 admiration. There has always been to me 
 something fascinating about this out-door ideal- 
 ist. I never have been, and probably never 
 shall be, a sympathizer with the view which
 
 1/2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 makes Thoreau a skulker, as Carlyle calls him, 
 or a loafer, as most of our typical American 
 business men, if they know any thing about 
 him at all, would probably dub him. At the 
 same time, I will confess that the man's asceti- 
 cism has less fascination for me than the per- 
 sistency with which he harps upon the idea 
 that nine tenths or ninety-nine one-hundredths 
 of our people waste their time in making money ; 
 touch Thoreau at any point with regard to 
 business policy or business life, and he fairly 
 bristles with sarcasm and jibes. It has been a 
 life-long wonder to me that the man has not 
 been valued more highly even in this com- 
 munity devoted to matters of fact, and that so 
 few outside of a narrow circle of writers and 
 thinkers know any thing about him. I am con- 
 vinced that the time will come when the name 
 of Henry David Thoreau will stand high in 
 American annals. He was our first noted Prot- 
 estant passionate, earnest, persistent, honest, 
 against the sordid materialism of this coun- 
 try. Our earlier years as a nation were natu- 
 rally taken up with hard material work, and if 
 to-day we place work, as work, upon a pedestal 
 which it does not deserve, it is due to the heredit-
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 1/3 
 
 ary warp of the last one hundred years, when the 
 drawing of water and the hewing of wood were 
 essential to life, to say nothing of comfort. 
 There was certain to be some energetic protest 
 against the narrow view of life which all work 
 and no play was sure to produce in us as a 
 people, and the wonder is that Thoreau stands 
 alone as a protestant. 
 
 The personality of the man is so interesting 
 that I will take the liberty of devoting a few 
 pages to saying something of him, using many 
 words and expressions which I find in an ad- 
 mirable little article contributed some years 
 ago to the Cornhill Magazine, by Stevenson. 
 " Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, 
 even in a bad wood-cut," says this writer, 
 "conveys some hint of the limitations of 
 his mind and character. With his almost 
 acid sharpness of insight, with his almost 
 animal dexterity in action, there went none 
 of that large, unconscious geniality of the 
 world's hero. He was not easy, or ample, 
 or urbane, not even kind." " He was bred 
 to no profession," says Emerson ; " he never 
 married ; he lived alone, he went to no church ; 
 he never voted, he refused to pay a tax to
 
 1/4 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the State ; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, 
 he never knew the use of tobacco ; and 
 though a naturalist, he used neither trap or 
 gun. When asked at dinner what dish he pre- 
 ferred, he answered, ' the nearest.' " He was 
 no ascetic, rather an epicurean of the noblest 
 sort. And he had this one great merit, that he 
 succeeded so far as to be happy. He was con- 
 tent in living like the plant he had planted and 
 watered with solicitude. For instance, he ex- 
 plains his abstinence from tea and coffee by 
 saying that it was bad economy and worthy of 
 no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of 
 the morning with stimulants ; let him see the 
 sunshine and he was ready for the labors of the 
 day. These labors were partly to keep out of 
 the way of the world. His faculties were of a 
 piece with his moral shyness. He could guide 
 himself about the woods on the darkest night 
 by the touch of his feet. He could pick up an 
 exact dozen of pencils by feeling ; pace dis- 
 tances with accuracy. His smell was so dainty 
 that he could perceive the fcetor of dwelling- 
 houses as he passed them at night ; his palate 
 so unsophisticated that like a child he disliked 
 the taste of wine ; and his knowledge of nature
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 1/5 
 
 was so complete and curious that he could have 
 told the time of year within a day or so by the 
 aspect of the plants. There were few things 
 that he could not do. He could make a house, 
 a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, 
 a scholar, a natural historian. He could run, 
 walk, climb, skate, and swim, and manage a 
 boat. The smallest occasion served to display 
 his physical accomplishments; and a manufac- 
 turer, upon observing his dexterity with the 
 window of a railway car, offered him a situation 
 on the spot. 
 
 Thoreau decided from the first to live a life 
 of self-improvement ; he saw duty and inclina- 
 tion in that direction. He had no money, and 
 it was a sore necessity which compelled him to 
 make money even the little he needed. There 
 was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man 
 in his nature that rebelled with violence against 
 the yoke of custom ; he was so eager to culti- 
 vate himself and to be happy in his own 
 society, that he could consent with difficulty 
 even to interruptions of friendship. " Such are 
 my engagements to myself that I dare not prom- 
 ise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation ; 
 and the italics are his own. Thoreau is always
 
 176 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 careful of himself, and he must think twice 
 about a morning call. Imagine him condemned 
 for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and 
 unmeaning business. He shrank from the very 
 look of the mechanical in life ; all should, if 
 possible, be sweetly spontaneous. Thus he 
 learned to make lead-pencils, and when he had 
 gained the highest certificate and his friends 
 began to congratulate him on his establishment 
 in life, he calmly announced that he should 
 never make another. " Why should I," said 
 he ; " I would not do again what I have done 
 once." Yet in after years, when it became 
 needful to support his family, he turned 
 patiently to this mechanical art. He tried 
 school-teaching. " As I did not teach for the 
 benefit of my fellow-men," he says, " but simply 
 for a livelihood, this was a failure." He tried 
 trade with the same results. As I have al- 
 ready said, his contempt for business and busi- 
 ness men was utter. He says: "If our mer- 
 diants did not most of them fail and the banks 
 too, my faith in the old rules of this world 
 would be staggered. The statement that ninety- 
 nine in a hundred doing such business surely 
 break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. If] 
 
 statistics have revealed." The wish was prob- 
 ably father to the figures. A/k *v**^A.. JC~ fy^^i **, 
 
 " The cost of a thing," says Thoreau, " is 7 
 the amount of what I will call life which is 
 required to be exchanged for it, immediately or 
 in the long run." The idea may be common- 
 place, and yet most of us will admit a leavening 
 of truth in it while declining to make an ex- 
 periment. Do you want one thousand a year, 
 or two thousand a year ? Do you want ten 
 thousand a year? And can you afford what 
 you want ? It is a matter of taste, and within 
 certain lines not in the least a question of duty, 
 although commonly supposed to be so. There is 
 no authority for that view anywhere. Thoreau's 
 tastes are well defined. He loved to be free, to 
 be master of his times and seasons ; he preferred 
 long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections 
 to the consideration of society, and an easy, 
 calm, unfettered life among green trees to dull 
 toiling at the counter of a bank. And such 
 being his inclination, he determined that he 
 would gratify it. 
 
 In 1845, when twenty-eight years old, an age 
 by which the liveliest of us have usually de- 
 clined into some conformity with the world,
 
 1/8 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 Thoreau, with a capital of less than twenty-five 
 dollars, and a borrowed axe, walked into the 
 woods by Walden Pond, and began his experi- 
 ment. He built himself a dwelling, and returned 
 the axe, he says, sharper than when he borrowed 
 it ; he reclaimed a patch of ground where he 
 cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and sweet- 
 corn ; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, 
 and for six weeks in the summer he worked as 
 surveyor or carpenter. For more than five 
 years this was all that he required to do for his /<-<, 
 support. For six weeks of occupation, a little 
 cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening,^ 
 the man had as good as stolen his living. Or it 
 must rather be allowed that he had done far 
 better; for the thief himself was continually 
 and busily occupied. He says : " What old 
 people tell you you cannot do, you try and find 
 you can." And his conclusion is : "I am con- 
 vinced that to maintain one's self on this earth 
 is not a hardship but a pastime if we will live 
 simply and wisely ; the pursuits of simpler 
 nations are still the sports of the more arti- 
 ficial." When Thoreau had had enough of 
 Walden Pond, he showed the same simplicity 
 in giving it up as in beginning. He made no
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 179 
 
 fetish of his scheme, and did what he wanted 
 squarely. The frugality he exercised and his 
 asceticism are not the notable points of this 
 notable experiment. The remarkable part of 
 it is his recognition of the position of money; 
 he had perceived and was acting on a truth of 
 universal application. A certain amount of 
 money, varying with the number and extent of 
 our desires, is a necessity to each one of us in 
 the present order of society ; but beyond that 
 amount, money is a commodity to be bought or 
 not to be bought, a luxury in which we may in- 
 dulge or stint ourselves like any other. And 
 there are many luxuries that we may legiti- 
 mately prefer to money, such as a grateful con- 
 science, a country life, or the woman of our in- 
 clination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this 
 conclusion may appear, we have only to look 
 around us to see how scantily it has been 
 recognized ; and after a little reflection perhaps 
 we may decide to spend a trifle less for money 
 and indulge ourselves a trifle more in freedom. 
 Says Thoreau : " To have done any thing by 
 which you earned money merely, is to be idle 
 and worse." There are in his letters two pas- 
 sages relating to firewood which illustrate
 
 180 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 curiously the man's habits and instinct of 
 studying causes and reasons rather than effects. 
 He says : " I suppose I have burned up a 
 good-sized tree to-night and for what? I 
 settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day ; 
 but that was n't a final settlement. I got off 
 cheaply from him. At last one will say : ' Let 
 us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?' 
 and I shall shudder to think that the next 
 question will be : ' What did you do while 
 you were warm ? " It is not enough to have 
 earned our livelihood. Either the earning 
 should have been serviceable to mankind or 
 something else must follow. To live is some- 
 times difficult, but it is never meritorious in 
 itself, and we must have a reason to give our 
 own conscience why we should continue to 
 exist upon this earth. Again he says, speaking 
 of his wood : " There is a far more important 
 and warming heat, commonly lost, which pre- 
 cedes the burning of the wood. It is the 
 smoke of industry, which is incense. I had 
 been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit 
 that when at length my fuel was housed I 
 came near selling it to the ashman as if I had 
 extracted all its heat." Thus Thoreau was not
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. l8l 
 
 an idler by any means. Industry was a passion 
 with him, but it must be productive industry. 
 There is not a day when Thoreau does not re- 
 cord some useful work in his diary. He writes, 
 he works his garden, he chops down trees, he 
 helps others. The art he loved was literature. 
 He believed in good books ; his reading was 
 not particularly wide, for he hated libraries and 
 had not money wherewith to buy books. In 
 one of his diaries he recalls his indisposition to 
 go to Cambridge or Boston in order to look 
 at books in the library, and he suggests that 
 libraries should be built in the woods where 
 sensitive men might enjoy their contents with- 
 out being compelled to face the noise and dust 
 of the towns. He wrote at all times ; in the 
 evening at his desk, or during a moment's rest 
 upon a fallen log or stone. He composed as he 
 walked, the length of his walk making the 
 length of his writing. When he could not get 
 out-of-doors during the day, for one reason or 
 another, he wrote nothing; he said that houses 
 were like hospitals, and the atmosphere of them 
 enervated the mind as well as the body. His 
 great subjects, the text which he viewed on 
 all sides and was always preaching from, was the
 
 1 82 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 pursuit of self-improvement even in the face of 
 unfriendly criticism as it goes on in our society. 
 He was a critic before a naturalist. His books, 
 such as "Walden," and "A Week on the Con- 
 cord," would be delightful studies of nature 
 even without the touch of interest they acquire 
 at the thought that the man himself is preach- 
 ing to an audience of people who consider him 
 little better than a madman. Unquestionably 
 he was a true lover of nature. 
 
 The quality which we should call mystery in 
 a painting, and which belongs so particularly to 
 the aspect of the external world and to its in- 
 fluence upon our feelings, was one which he 
 was never weary of attempting to reproduce in 
 his books. The significance of nature's ap- 
 pearances, their unchanging strangeness to the 
 senses and the thrilling response they awaken 
 in the mind of man continued to surprise and 
 stimulate his spirits. He writes to a friend : 
 "Let me suggest a theme for you to state to 
 yourself precisely and completely what that 
 walk over the mountains amounted to for you, 
 returning to this essay again and again until 
 you are satisfied that all that was important in 
 your experience is in it. Don't suppose that
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 183 
 
 you record it precisely the first dozen times 
 you try, but at 'em again ; especially when, 
 after a sufficient pause you suspect that you 
 are touching the heart -or stomach of the mat- 
 ter. Reiterate your blows there and account 
 for the mountain to yourself. Not that the 
 story need be long, but it will take a long while 
 to make it short." Perhaps the most success- 
 ful work that Thoreau accomplished in this 
 direction is to be found in the passages relating 
 to fish in the " Week." These are remarkable 
 for a vivid truth of impression and a happy use 
 of language not frequently surpassed. 
 
 Perhaps the very coldness and egoism of his 
 own nature gave Thoreau a clearer insight into 
 the intellectual basis of our warm mutual tolera- 
 tions grouped under the head of friendship ; 
 testimony to the value of friendship comes with 
 added force from one who was solitary and dis- 
 obliging, and of whom a friend remarked : " I 
 love Henry, but I cannot like him." He made 
 scarcely any distinction between love and friend- 
 ship. He was, indeed, too accurate an observer 
 not to remark that there exists already a natu- 
 ral disinterestedness and liberality between men 
 and women ; yet he thought friendship no re-
 
 1 84 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 specter of sex. " We are not what we are," 
 says he, " nor do we treat or esteem each other 
 for such but for what we are capable of being." 
 Again : " It is the merit and preservation of 
 friendship that it takes place on a higher level 
 than the actual characters of the parties would 
 seem to warrant. Is this not light in a dark 
 place ? We are different with different friends ; 
 yet if we look closer, we shall find that every 
 such relation reposes on some particular hy- 
 pothesis of one's self." Yet this analyst of 
 friendship was not friendly with many per- 
 sons and was intimate with none. Thoreau 
 had no illusions ; he does not give way to love 
 any more than to hatred, but preserves them 
 both with care, like valuable curiosities. He is 
 an egoist ; he does not remember that in these 
 near intimacies we are ninety-nine times disap- 
 pointed in our beggarly selves for once that we 
 are disappointed in our friends ; that it is we 
 who seem most frequently undeserving of the 
 love that unites us. Thoreau is after profit in 
 these intimacies ; moral profit, to be sure, but 
 still profit to himself. " If you will be the sort 
 of friend I want," he remarks, " my education 
 cannot dispense with your society." As though
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 185 
 
 his friend were a dictionary. And with all this, 
 not one word about pleasure, or laughter, or 
 kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It 
 was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such 
 close relations with the fishes. We can under- 
 stand the friend already quoted when he cried : 
 "As for taking his arm, I would as soon think 
 of taking the arm of an elm tree." It is not 
 surprising that he experienced but a broken 
 enjoyment in his intimacies ; he went to see 
 his friends as one might stroll in to see a cricket- 
 match not simply for the pleasure of the 
 thing, but with some afterthought of self- 
 improvement. It was his theory that people 
 saw each other too frequently ; they had noth- 
 ing fresh to communicate ; friendship with him 
 meant a society for mutual improvement. 
 
 " The only obligation," says he, " which I 
 have a right to assume is to do at any time 
 what I think right." " Why should we ever go 
 abroad, even across the way to ask a neighbor's 
 advice ? " " There is a nearer neighbor within 
 who is incessantly telling us how we should be- 
 have. But we wait for the neighbor without to 
 tell us of some faults." " The greater part of 
 what my neighbors call good I believe in my
 
 186 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 soul to be bad." To be what we are and to be- 
 come what we are capable of becoming is the end 
 of life. It is " when we fall behind ourselves," 
 that " we are cursed with duties and the neglect 
 of duties." " I love the wild," he says, " not less 
 than the good." The life of a good man will 
 hardly improve us more than the life of a free- 
 booter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly 
 in the infringement as in the observance, and 
 our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense 
 of virtue of some kind." "As for doing good," 
 he writes elsewhere, " that is one of the profes- 
 sions that are full. Moreover, I have tried it 
 fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied 
 that it does not agree with my constitution. 
 Probably I should not conscientiously and delib- 
 erately forsake my particular calling to do the 
 good which society demands of me to save the 
 universe from annihilation ; and I believe that 
 a like but infinitely greater steadfastness else- 
 where is all that preserves it now. If you should 
 ever be betrayed into any of these philanthro- 
 pies, do not let your left hand know what your 
 right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." 
 
 In the case of Thoreau so great a show of 
 doctrine contrary to what the world believed,
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 1 87 
 
 demanded some practical outcome. If nothing 
 were to be done but build a shanty at Walden 
 Pond, we have heard too much of these decla- 
 rations of independence. That the man wrote 
 some books is nothing to the purpose, for the 
 same has been done in a suburban villa. That 
 he kept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient 
 excuse, but it is disappointing to the reader. 
 We may be unjust, but when a man despises 
 commerce and philanthropy and has views of 
 good so soaring that he must take himself apart 
 from mankind for their cultivation, we will not 
 rest content without some striking act. And 
 it was not Thoreau's fault if he were not mar- 
 tyred ; had the occasion come, he would have 
 made a noble ending. He made one practical 
 appearance on the stage of affairs, and strangely 
 characteristic of the man. It was forced on him 
 by his calm but radical opposition to negro 
 slavery. " Voting for the right is doing noth- 
 ing for it," he says ; " it is only expressing 
 to men feebly your desire that it should pre- 
 vail." " I do not hesitate to say," he adds, 
 " that those who call themselves abolitionists 
 should at once effectually withdraw their sup- 
 port both in person and property from the gov-
 
 188 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 ernment of Massachusetts." This is what he 
 did. In 1843 ne ceased to pay the poll tax. He 
 had seceded. He says: " In fact I declare war 
 with the State after my own fashion." He was 
 put in prison, but that was a part of his design. 
 " Under a government which imprisons any un- 
 justly, the true place for a just man is also in 
 prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, 
 if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name 
 ay, if one honest man in this State of Massa- 
 chusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to 
 withdraw from this copartnership and be locked 
 up in the county jail therefor it would be the 
 abolition of slavery in America." A friend paid 
 the tax for him and continued year by year to 
 pay it, so that Thoreau was free to walk the 
 woods. 
 
 This curious personality of Henry David 
 Thoreau stands alone, apparently, as a practical 
 attempt to grasp the good things of this world, 
 in a higher sense, without paying the penalty 
 which tradition and custom exact. In more 
 ways than in money we constantly pay for the 
 privilege of living in crowds. To say nothing 
 of the nervous wear and tear, the whole drift is 
 by association tending towards deterioration.
 
 THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. 189 
 
 So long as we continue to live in crowds 
 there must be an infinite amount of contact 
 with human nature which is petty, mean, 
 despicable. We cannot escape from it. While 
 in Rome we must do as the Romans. I confess 
 that if my fellow-man is typified in the crowd 
 I see around me, especially in large cities, I 
 detest my fellow-man. It may be the height 
 of selfishness for the egoist to say: "These 
 people have nothing good to teach me; I can 
 gain nothing from them ; let them keep to 
 themselves and allow me to strive for some- 
 thing higher, untrammelled by their association, 
 or their advice." But such a course maybe wise &. k"u 
 in order to make the most of what little capi-^/^ 
 tal we have fallen heir to in the shape of health, 
 intelligence, and appreciation of things which are ^ 
 priceless in every sense, such as the sunlight 
 and the color of the clouds. To get rid of un- 
 pleasant and seemingly unprofitable associa- 
 tions Thoreau cut loose from society and buried 
 himself at Walden. You may call it selfish- 
 ness, if you will, but which is more likely to 
 occur : that you will sink to the level of the 
 crowd which surrounds you, or that, by taking 
 up your cross and remaining at your post, the
 
 IQO 
 
 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 crowd will benefit by your self-sacrifices and 
 reflect one gleam of what you may consider to 
 be your superior light ? Is there not egoism in 
 either course, perhaps the lesser in fleeing from 
 the crowd and trying to work out salvation for 
 one's self and one's family?
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 
 
 "\17HEN the prisoners were released from the 
 Bastille by the mob, it is said that some 
 of the old men begged to be allowed to return 
 to their cells ; they had become so accustomed 
 to darkness and confinement that they dreaded 
 the open air. The man who can find nothing 
 but ennui in the fields is an illustration of the 
 same curious phenomenon the loss of apprecia- 
 tion of what is best in life. For several years I 
 have been harping upon this theme ; I have 
 preached in season and out of season, that open- 
 air life is the right one, and that any man who 
 ties himself down for eight or ten hours a day 
 the year round to a desk, is paying too much 
 for the money he earns; and I have done this 
 without, so far as I know, making a single con- 
 vert. I have preached country life and coun- 
 try work until some of my friends dread the 
 mention of the subject. In the beginning 
 they argued the matter ; now they laugh, as if 
 191
 
 IQ2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 to say that I have become so infatuated with 
 my hobby as to have lost all sense of propor- 
 tion. I never expected to make a convert ; in 
 fact, I should feel rather uncomfortable if any 
 friend of mine should desert his desk and take 
 to the garden for a living upon my advice. 
 So that I have not been disappointed. At the 
 same time, I have discovered nothing to make 
 me doubt the soundness of my position. I 
 listen to ridicule and argument, endeavoring to 
 give due weight to what I hear. The chief 
 reasons why this desertion of the town is de- 
 nounced as folly may be summed up as follows : 
 (i) The loneliness of the country will become 
 oppressive ; (2) it will be impossible to give my 
 family more than the comforts of a workman's 
 home our living will be plain, our clothes will 
 be unfashionable, our rich neighbors will not 
 call upon us; (3) the children will grow up no 
 better than farmers' children ; (4) in the end 
 there will be a return to town to take up the 
 old life under conditions of greater hardship 
 than ever, years of absence having broken con- 
 nections that might have become profitable 
 with time ; (5) to leave town for good, or prac- 
 tically for good, is unfair to my wife and chil-
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 193 
 
 dren, even if I do find pleasure and profit 
 myself in such a step. It is implied that life 
 without new bonnets is not worth living to a 
 woman, and that children may grow up to be 
 young savages. In the following pages I try 
 to answer these objections. Whether or not I 
 succeed in convincing any one, I am sure that 
 they rest upon a wholly false estimate of the 
 value of city life and upon the equally false 
 notion to the effect that intellectual growth 
 cannot take place far from great cities. One of 
 my acquaintances to whom I announced one 
 day that I hoped never again to spend more 
 than ten weeks of the year in the city, said to 
 me : " How do you get on without society ? 
 In summer you may have city friends glad to 
 share your bluefish and honey for a few weeks, 
 but the rest of the year before July and after 
 September it must be lonely enough to drive 
 you crazy." 
 
 So I must hear the talk of the town in order 
 to be happy ? Seriously, I do not believe that 
 from one end of the week to the other passed 
 in the very heart of the city's turmoil, working 
 for many hours in a busy newspaper office 
 the very place where interesting talk is sup-
 
 194 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 posed to centre visiting a club or two, going 
 to the theatre and to the opera several times 
 I do not believe that in this busy week I hear 
 enough interesting talk to compensate me for 
 the loss of one hour in my orchard or on the 
 bay. You cannot get out of people what is 
 not in them. You cannot expect the success- 
 ful dealer in butter, sugar, or candle-grease 
 to tell you any thing you do not know, unless 
 it is about things he buys and sells, and I am 
 not interested in these things. Of all the dreary 
 stuff with which our dreary newspapers are 
 filled, by all odds the most dreary to me con- 
 sists of the reproductions of the talk of these 
 good people. The personal-gossip column, 
 which of late years has grown to great lengths 
 millionaire A's explanation of the recent rise 
 in the price of leather, Senator B's reason's for 
 believing that Coroner Jones will again be 
 elected this year, are matters that do not inter- 
 est me in the least. An ocean of gabble 
 which to-day appears to hide the paucity of 
 ideas among us has broken into the newspapers. 
 The exaggeration of trifles is one of the dis- 
 eases of the age. The instructions given to 
 our reporters seem to be to question the boot-
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 195 
 
 black who blacks their shoes, the washerwoman 
 who brings home their shirts, and the President 
 of the United States, if they are lucky enough 
 to meet him, printing all that the washerwoman, 
 the boot-black, and the President, may have to 
 say about their respective businesses. The 
 stuff is ground over and over again. Nothing 
 interesting can come from people who have no 
 ideas, and ideas do not come by dint of gabble. 
 Silence is golden. In my orchard there is 
 silence. I have always admired Webster's reply 
 to a barber, who asked him how he wished to 
 be shaved. " In silence," replied the great man. 
 I suppose that I am told a dozen times a day 
 by different persons that it is a fine day, or a 
 wet day, or that it was cold yesterday, or will 
 rain to-morrow. The boy who opens the door 
 for me as I leave my house gives me his opin- 
 ion as to the weather, the man who runs the 
 elevator downtown does the same thing, the 
 waiter who brings me some luncheon gives me 
 his views on the weather, past, present, and 
 future, and as I ride home the conductor, if he 
 finds time, tells me what kind of weather we are 
 having. At the risk of seeming crusty to a 
 degree I will confess that I care for no man's
 
 196 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 opinion about the weather, unless it is the gov- 
 ernment expert's, and not much for his. 
 
 It is assumed that in town one meets with 
 people who have ideas authors, writers, think- 
 ers, men of science, whose words are full of in- 
 spiration. Perhaps I have been rather fortunate 
 in meeting with people whose names are heard 
 frequently. Yet I cannot say that the loss of 
 such opportunities as I have enjoyed in this 
 respect ever worries me. Take the authors and 
 the writers, for instance. The man who has 
 time and leisure may occasionally, if he likes* 
 that sort of thing, meet the author whose nov- 
 els are most read at the moment. But it is 
 extremely doubtful whether this gentleman will 
 talk half so well in the drawing-room as he does 
 in his book. These authors are devoting the 
 best part of their lives to thinking of something 
 brilliant wherewith to amuse me ; they polish 
 their work, going over it scores of times, finally 
 presenting it to me nicely printed and illus- 
 trated, if necessary. And I may listen as long 
 or as little as I like to what they may have to 
 say. In days when there were no such thing 
 as cheap printing and magazines, I suppose that 
 the talk of the town was essential to many peo-
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 197 
 
 pie. To-day, the author who has a clever idea 
 sells it. The very dependence upon gossip for 
 ideas betrays lack of reading. When for a few 
 cents we can buy the results of the best think- 
 ing of our best writers, why should we run 
 after the writers themselves? Of course I am 
 not talking about what men of high position in 
 the literary world or the social world may be 
 able to get out of the life of cities ; I am speak- 
 ing of what the poor man, hard driven to earn 
 the few thousand dollars a year needed to keep 
 
 his children in bread and butter, will probably, 
 judging by my own experience and that of 
 some of my friends, be able to think of as a 
 possible loss in considering the advisability of 
 deserting the city for the country. 
 
 I am not sure but that we enjoy the work of 
 some men all the better because we do not 
 know them personally. At a distance they are 
 heroes, more or less. I have heard some peo- 
 ple say that their enjoyment in the magic of 
 Richard Wagner's works would be unquestion- 
 ably deepened had they not had the misfortune 
 to meet the man himself a great genius 
 who was utterly indifferent to what people 
 thought of him, and utterly careless of the
 
 198 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 wounds he inflicted. I esteem it rather a piece 
 of good fortune that I never saw the greatest 
 musician that the world has ever seen or prob- 
 ably will see for generations to come. The 
 personality of the man was not a pleasant one, 
 and I believe that I am justified in saying this, 
 notwithstanding some attempts to make out a 
 different case. A famous Leipsic lawyer, a 
 Jew, has in his study a marble bust of Wagner, 
 with a wreath of laurel on its brow and a rope 
 around its neck. " The one," he says to visit- 
 ors, " shows what I think of the composer, the 
 other what I think of the man." And the Jews 
 are not alone in their detestation of the man, 
 while confessing to an unlimited admiration for 
 the musician. His pamphlets againsts the Jew 
 in music, his caricatures of the French in de- 
 feat, were only a small part of the offensive, 
 wounding things that Wagner allowed himself 
 to utter. The anecdotes of the man's arro- 
 gance are many. I know of one young Amer- 
 ican who would enjoy Wagner's music more 
 had he never attempted to interview the com- 
 poser of " Tristan." This particular enthusiast 
 had been sent by one of our newspapers to 
 Bayreuth for the express purpose of telling
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 199 
 
 Wagner how much the great world of America 
 delighted in the master's works, and to get from 
 him some sort of pleasant acknowledgment, if 
 possible, of the courtesy. The scribe arrived 
 in Bayreuth and wasted a score of cards and 
 letters without obtaining the promise of an in- 
 terview. The situation was becoming desperate 
 his newspaper wanted an interview. The 
 young man learned that Wagner was accus- 
 tomed to stroll every morning in a certain wood 
 soon after sunrise. He waylaid the composer 
 and found him seated upon a bench. Now 
 Wagner did not love newspapers or newspaper 
 men, and he had good reason. But surely an 
 exception might be made in favor of America. 
 There he had not been attacked or ridiculed by 
 newspaper men, for the very good reason that 
 his name was scarcely known, to say nothing 
 of his music. The interviewer made a bold 
 attack. Mustering up his best German, he be- 
 gan his address, Wagner gazing dreamily at 
 him and not moving a muscle : " I am commis- 
 sioned by a great newspaper of that great Re- 
 public over the seas, where your music is already 
 a household word (!), to tell you of the deep 
 admiration that exists for you there, and to ask
 
 200 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 you for some words of greeting in return." Not 
 a word did the great man vouch in reply. Per- 
 haps he failed to catch my meaning, thought 
 the young man ; and so he repeated his little 
 speech. Then Wagner pointed towards the 
 gates of the park, muttering a few German 
 words, a free but fair translation of which might 
 be " Get out ! " While this was not the sort 
 of interview which had been hoped for, it did not 
 prevent the interviewer from making a column 
 talk with Wagner, in which the composer was 
 made to bubble over with gratitude to America 
 and Americans. Those in the secret knew that 
 the interview upon Wagner's part consisted of 
 but two words. I am not defending the insti- 
 tution of interviewing, and I do not doubt that 
 Wagner may have had excellent reasons for ob- 
 jecting to such an intrusion ; the world may 
 have lost some musical thought of the utmost 
 beauty by the enterprise, so-called, of this 
 American ; I am simply giving an illustration 
 of what may be lost by too near a view of a 
 great man. 
 
 The art of writing most beautifully upon 
 charity may exist in a man whose life knows 
 not a charitable instinct or act. The man who
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 2OI 
 
 can talk and write exquisitely about love tow- 
 ards one's neighbor may be conspicuous for a 
 vile temper at home. The novelist who de- 
 lights me in print may, and probably will, dis- 
 appoint me in person. Upon the whole, while 
 I can look back to some pleasure derived from 
 the talk of men whose writings are famous, I 
 doubt whether the disappointments do not 
 outweigh the pleasures. Certainly the satisfac- 
 tion which I have found in meeting persons who 
 write well has been infinitesimal as compared 
 with the pleasure which these same persons have 
 given me by their books. As to the so-called 
 literary evenings of great cities occasions 
 upon which some person in public view at the 
 moment is placed upon exhibition by Mrs. Leo 
 Hunter, I know of few less dreary ways of wast- 
 ing precious time. 
 
 I presume that in this matter of house, 
 grounds, clothes, and other signs of outward 
 luxury, the fact that poverty is considered sy- 
 nonymous with inferiority is primarily due to 
 simple causes. I wear a patched coat ; there- 
 fore I have no money wherewith to buy a new 
 one. The absence of money implies inability 
 to earn money ; therefore I am not so energetic
 
 2O2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 or so clever as some of my fellow-men who earn 
 more money and wear good coats. In a coun- 
 try where the measure of a man is the amount 
 of money or property that he has been able to 
 acquire, either through industry or luck in gam- 
 bling, it is inevitable that the money stand- 
 ard, or the coat standard, should acquire the 
 weight of a moral law. The man who wears a 
 patched coat and only wears gloves when the 
 weather makes the gloves a physical comfort, 
 must be an inferior sort of man, because he has 
 evidently not kept pace with his fellows in the 
 race. In the Old World the struggle for money 
 and material prosperity has not been so exhaust- 
 ing these last few hundred years, and has not 
 excluded spiritual things so completely as with 
 us ; and there we find, in consequence, that the 
 outward signs of the ability to earn money are 
 not deemed so essential to the fixing of a man's 
 standing in the community. To wear a patched 
 coat and to work with one's hands in a garden, 
 do not in themselves stamp a man in France 
 and England as an inferior person. I was par- 
 ticularly impressed with this when some years 
 ago an English clergyman a man of much cul- 
 ture and reading gave up his cure in a fashion-
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 2O3 
 
 able summer resort not a thousand miles from 
 New York, because he found that his love of 
 working his own garden was looked upon with 
 surprise, to use no stronger term, and he was 
 made to feel that his parishioners considered the 
 dignity of their church endangered by their 
 pastor's curious fancy for digging. In England 
 it had been his custom to raise his own vegeta- 
 bles. Here it was not thought dignified for the 
 pastor to work like a common laborer, hang- 
 ing his coat on a bramble bush, and one of his 
 vestry-men hinted that the church might be 
 able to squeeze out enough money to provide a 
 gardener for the pastor. The pastor did not 
 want a gardener, and he gave way to some one 
 else who would keep his coat on and his hands 
 clean. It may be said that instead of resign- 
 ing his place, this victim of the Philistines 
 should have preached a few sermons upon the 
 dignity of manual labor, recalling the fact that 
 Christ was a carpenter; but the depth of such 
 prejudice is beyond the plummet of argument. 
 The commonplace mind is never tolerant of 
 other views. For years manual labor, because it 
 does not bring in much money, has been looked 
 upon as the work of the inferior man ; the am-
 
 2O4 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 bition of every one has been to get away from 
 it. The farmer's son deserts the farm ; the car- 
 penter's son leaves the bench ; any occupation 
 which allows a man to wear a coat and keep his 
 hands white is considered better than manual 
 labor. It is commonly considered that of all 
 the occupations farming pays the least money 
 in proportion to the care and labor expended. 
 Therefore farming and gardening must be the 
 last occupation that a man of parts will take 
 up. To devote hours to digging or gardening 
 or any work which a laborer at a dollar a day will 
 accomplish as well, is considered folly when a dol- 
 lar an hour can be earned at other work. If the 
 accumulation of money is the end of life, I sup- 
 pose that public opinion is right ; but even upon 
 this point it may be doubted whether or not in 
 the long run the man who acquires sound health 
 by systematic out-door work does not stand a 
 better chance in the race for money than nine 
 tenths of his fellow-men. 
 
 Dress is not an art founded upon fixed princi- 
 ples of beauty. What one generation admires 
 the next will ridicule. Perhaps the time will 
 come when patches will be in fashion. We 
 already find it possible to admire Oriental rugs
 
 WHA T WE LOSE AND WHA T WE GAIN. 20$ 
 
 in tatters, and vast sums are paid for bits of 
 Persian carpets about to fall in pieces. Does 
 not every one know that should the Prince of 
 Wales appear in public with a shabby coat and 
 a patch upon both knees, that patches would 
 appear upon every fashionable knee, and that 
 unpatched trousers would be viewed with sus- 
 picion ? There are no end of stories which 
 illustrate how strongly the traits of our simian 
 ancestors are marked in us. Some years ago 
 the Prince of Wales could not find the over- 
 coat he wanted when about to leave for the 
 opera one evening, and picked up a rough 
 shooting-jacket he had brought from the High- 
 lands ; result : ulsters appeared all over the 
 world. More recently, the same leader of fash- 
 ion dropped one glove in the street and put 
 on another of a different color; result : people 
 begin to wear gloves that do not match. The 
 Prince of Wales is growing bald ; result : the 
 sale of magic hair-growers has fallen off by two 
 thirds in the United Kingdom. The traces of 
 the monkey are to be seen all around us. Not 
 one man in a thousand knows that the two 
 buttons to be found upon the backs of most 
 coats date from the time when men needed
 
 206 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 these buttons to hold on their sword-belts. 
 The swords have gone, but we continue to in- 
 sist upon the buttons because " everybody 
 wears them." The necktie once held the shirt 
 together at the throat, and thus served a useful 
 purpose. Buttons now fill the office, but the 
 tie survives, and the man who goes without a 
 necktie is held up to scorn. A score of such 
 customs which have now no other warrant than 
 that " every one else does so " might be given. 
 Yet it is more difficult to teach a boy the neces- 
 sity of truth than the folly of too much atten- 
 tion to his clothes. As things go there is a 
 reason in the present insistance upon fine 
 feathers ; the man who wishes to be well paid 
 must make people believe that he is worth 
 large pay and that other people think so. If 
 he is richly dressed, it is a sign that his services 
 have been considered worthy of a rich reward. 
 " It pays to dress well," has become a maxim 
 with us, and there is reason behind it. It does 
 pay in money. But we must take care that 
 we do not pay too much for that money. 
 
 The matter of clothes has been suggested as 
 offering possible obstacles to a life without 
 money, and the topic has been treated so fully,
 
 WHA T WE LOSE AND WHA T WE GAIN. 2O? 
 
 and so much better by Thoreau than I can 
 hope to treat it, that I will venture to quote at 
 length from his " Walden." It is begging the 
 question to assume that because one may 
 attempt to get a great deal of life out of com- 
 paratively few dollars, the result will be rags 
 for the family. Thoreau is eloquent upon the 
 subject of patches, and could see nothing to be 
 ashamed of in them. Since his day the matter 
 has been largely simplified for the weaklings 
 who do not like to excite comment even of 
 people who have never pondered upon the 
 beauty of patches. Clothing, and every other 
 commodity which is largely made by machinery 
 has been cheapened in proportion to the part 
 of the work performed by machinery, and every 
 year this part grows larger and larger. Conse- 
 quently, the amount of clothing which can be 
 bought for a day's labor is six or seven times 
 as great as it was one hundred years ago, and 
 three or four times as great as when the hermit 
 of " Walden " jotted down sarcastic notes about 
 the man who was not ashamed of going around 
 with a broken leg, but very much ashamed of 
 a broken pair of trousers. This process is go- 
 ing on so steadily that it is easy to foresee the
 
 208 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 ... day when a few days' work upon the part of 
 the laborer or mechanic will be sufficient to 
 provide himself and his family with unpatched 
 
 '^and well-made clothing for the year. I have a 
 " prejudice against patches to the extent of dislik- 
 ing any thing that will attract the attention of 
 W Tom, Dick, and Harry, and their female counter- 
 
 ^ parts. If for a few dollars spent in clothing 
 which is whole I can save myself from their 
 attentions, it is money well spent, and the same 
 thing holds good with regard to the clothing 
 of my wife and children. We might spend a 
 few dollars less every year upon bonnets and 
 dresses, but the question is : Would it pay ? We 
 are not living in the woods, and our desire 
 is to avoid attracting attention. 
 
 To go back to Thoreau, he says in " Walden " : 
 
 " As for clothing, to come at once to the 
 practical part of the question, perhaps we are 
 led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard 
 for the opinions of men in procuring it than by 
 a true utility. Let him who has work to do 
 recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to 
 retain the vital heat, and, secondly, in this state 
 of society, to cover nakedness, and he may 
 judge how much of any necessary or important 
 work may be accomplished without adding to
 
 WHA T WE LOSE AND WHA T WE GAIN. 2OO, 
 
 his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a 
 suit but once, though made by some tailor or 
 dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the 
 comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no 
 better than wooden horses to hang the clean 
 clothes on. Every day our garments become 
 more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the im- 
 press of the wearer's character, until we hesitate 
 to lay them aside, without such delay and medi- 
 cal appliances and some such solemnity even as 
 our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in 
 my estimation for having a patch in his clothes, 
 yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, 
 commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean 
 and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound 
 conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, 
 perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. 
 I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests 
 as this : Who would wear a patch, or two extra 
 seams only, over the knee? Most behaved as 
 if they believed that their prospects for life 
 would be ruined if they should do it. It would 
 be easier for them to hobble to town with a 
 broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often 
 if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, 
 they can be mended, but if a similar accident 
 happens to the legs of his pantaloons there is 
 no help for it, for he considers not what is truly 
 respectable but what is respected. We know 
 but few men, a great many coats and breeches. 
 Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you stand-
 
 2IO LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 ing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute 
 the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other 
 day close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recog- 
 nized the owner of the farm. He was only a 
 little more weather-beaten than when I saw him 
 last. I have heard of a dog that barked at 
 every stranger who approached his master's 
 premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted 
 by a naked thief. It is an interesting question 
 how far men would retain their relative rank if 
 they were divested of their clothes. Could you 
 in such a case tell surely of any company of 
 civilized men which belonged to the most re- 
 spected class? When Madame Pfeiffer, in her 
 adventurous travels round the world from east 
 to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia 
 she says she felt the necessity of wearing other 
 than a travelling dress when she went to meet 
 the authorities, for she ' was now in a civilized 
 country where people are judged of by their 
 clothes ! ' Even in our democratic New Eng- 
 land towns the accidental possession of wealth 
 and its manifestation in dress and equipage 
 alone obtain for the possessor almost universal 
 respect. But they who yield such respect, 
 numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and 
 need to have a missionary sent to them. 
 
 " A man who has at length found something 
 to do will not need to get a new suit to do it 
 in ; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty 
 in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 211 
 
 shoes will serve a hero longer than they have 
 served his valet if a hero ever has a valet ; 
 bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make 
 them do. Only they who go to soirees and 
 legislative halls must have new coats, coats to 
 change as often as the man changes in them. 
 But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and 
 shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do, 
 will they not ? Who ever saw his old clothes, 
 his old coat actually worn out, resolved into its 
 primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of 
 charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him, 
 perchance, to be bestowed on one poorer still, 
 or shall we say richer, who could do with less? 
 I say beware of all enterprises that require new 
 clothes and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 
 If there is not a new man, how can the new 
 clothes be made to fit ? If you have any enter- 
 prise before you, try it in your old clothes. All 
 men want not something to do with, but some- 
 thing to do, or rather something to be. Per- 
 haps we should never procure a new suit, how- 
 ever dirty or ragged the old, until we have so 
 conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some 
 way, that we feel like new men in the old, and 
 that to retain it would be like keeping new 
 wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like 
 that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. 
 The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. 
 Thus, also, the snake casts its slough, and the 
 caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal indus-
 
 212 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 try and expansion ; for clothes are but our out- 
 most cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we 
 shall be found sailing under false colors, and be 
 inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion 
 as well as that of mankind. 
 
 " When I ask for a garment of a particular 
 form, my tailoress tells me gravely : ' They do 
 not make them so now,' not emphasizing the 
 ' They ' at all, as if she quoted an authority as 
 impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult 
 to get made what I want, simply because she 
 cannot believe that I mean what I say that I 
 am so rash. When I hear this oracular sen- 
 tence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, 
 emphasizing to myself each word separately 
 that I may come at the meaning of it, that 
 I may find out by what degree of consanguinity 
 ' They ' are related to me, and what authority 
 they may have in an affair which affects me so 
 nearly ; and, finally, I am inclined to answer 
 her with equal mystery, and without any more 
 emphasis on the ' They/ It is true they did 
 not make them so recently, but they do so 
 now. We worship not the Graces, nor the 
 Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves 
 and cuts with full authority. The head mon- 
 key at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all 
 the monkeys in America do the same. I some- 
 times despair of getting any thing quite simple 
 and honest done in this world by the help of 
 men. They would have to be passed through
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 21$ 
 
 a powerful press first, to squeeze their old no- 
 tions out of them, so that they would not soon 
 get upon their legs again, and then there would 
 be some one in the company with a maggot in 
 his head, hatched from an egg deposited there 
 nobody knows when, for not even fire kills 
 these things, and you would have lost your 
 labor. 
 
 " On the whole, I think that it cannot be 
 maintained that dressing has in this or any 
 other country risen to the dignity of an art. 
 At present men make shift to wear what they 
 can get. Like shipwrecked sailors they put on 
 what they can find on the beach, and at a little 
 distance, whether of space or time, laugh at 
 each other's masquerade. Every generation 
 laughs at the old fashions, but follows reli- 
 giously the new. We are amused at beholding 
 the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Eliza- 
 beth, as much as if it was that of the King and 
 Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume 
 off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the 
 serious eye peering from and the sincere life 
 passed within it which restrain laughter and 
 consecrate the costume of any people. Let 
 Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and 
 the trappings will have to serve that mood too. 
 When the soldier is hit by a cannon-ball, rags 
 are as becoming as purple. The childish and 
 savage taste of men and women for new pat- 
 terns keeps how many shaking and squinting
 
 214 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 through kaleidoscopes that they may discover 
 the particular figure which this generation re- 
 quires to-day." 
 
 In writing of clothing, I wish, however, to 
 make plain that inexpensive clothes do not 
 imply shabbiness or carelessness in personal 
 appearance, but simply that the blouse of the 
 French workman is better than the dirty linen 
 shirt of the American workman. To be appro- 
 priately dressed does not, in these days of cor- 
 duroys and flannel shirts, cost either much 
 money or time, and the man who allows him- 
 self and his children to go dressed as scarecrows 
 misses one element for good in country life. 
 Clothing which may be out of place in town 
 may become just the thing in the country life, 
 even though its cost is insignificant as com- 
 pared to the dress of the city man. Were my 
 income twenty times as large as it is, I should 
 not care to dress better than I do. For the 
 children blue-flannel dresses are cheap, but 
 could any thing be more appropriate for the 
 life on the water which they lead ? 
 
 In one of his books on fishing, Frank Forester 
 (H. W. Herbert) says that if he led the life of 
 a backwoodsman, and dwelt in a cabin on top
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 21$ 
 
 of a mountain, he should still put on evening 
 dress for dinner. This is an exaggeration, but 
 there is truth behind. Slovenly, ill-fitting, 
 dirty, ragged clothing may lead to slovenly 
 habits of mind, and are not the necessary 
 accompaniments of such life as I prescribe. 
 
 One of my critics, for whom I have great 
 personal deference, tells me that my theory of 
 life tends to a relapse into barbarism, and in 
 illustration of the truth of his position, he 
 pointed one evening to a music-stand near the 
 piano with the remark : " With your ideas, 
 that stand would never be made of mahogany 
 and elaborately ornamented, but would be of 
 pine, perhaps stained." 
 
 Well, suppose it was. I am inclined to 
 think that the greater use of common material, 
 stained pine and other cheap wood, in the 
 houses of people of taste is a distinct indication 
 of a needed reform. Take the little music- 
 stand in illustration. Its purpose is to hold a 
 number of music-books and loose sheets of 
 music. It has three or four shelves, and is so 
 made as to stand in a corner near the piano and 
 take up but little room. It is made of mahog- 
 any, highly polished, and is ornamented, as
 
 2l6 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 most people would call it, with a sort of stucco- 
 beading, which to me is distasteful. But it 
 cost money, and therefore has its reasons for 
 being in certain eyes. I have forgotten what 
 it cost me probably from fifteen to twenty 
 dollars. Thanks to the growth of good taste, 
 I can to-day pick out from half-a-dozen books 
 I know of a little design for a music-stand, or 
 sketch it myself, and the nearest carpenter will 
 make the thing in a day at a cost of two or 
 three dollars for wood, labor, and staining. 
 The result will be something which is pleasanter 
 to my eye, and I will venture to say to the eyes of 
 nine out of ten persons of educated taste. The 
 other fifteen or sixteen dollars saved may be 
 devoted to books, pictures, music any of the 
 things which really add something to life. The 
 music-stand of stained pine will do its work 
 just as well as the one made of mahogany, 
 inlaid with stucco beading in fact it will do 
 it better, for it will not need a periodic 
 rubbing on the part of the parlor-maid to keep 
 it bright and polished, and it can be moved 
 about when occasion demands, as it weighs but 
 little. It is as strong as the other, and it will 
 last a hundred years. '
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 2lf 
 
 The music-stand is typical of the whole 
 theory upon which I have preached so per- 
 sistently and to some extent practised. In 
 every affair of life, we have been insisting upon 
 mahogany, with stucco trimmings, and wasting 
 money which might have gone far towards buy- 
 ing books and sunlight. It is a hopeful sign 
 when we find the saving remnant, as Matthew 
 Arnold has it, taking to stained pine instead 
 of mahogany with stucco trimmings. I have 
 a sincere love for pretty things. I will walk a 
 mile to see a set of china exquisitely decorated. 
 Some Persian rugs give me as much pleasure as 
 many pictures. A noble house is something 
 that I should like to own. But there has 
 always been the question : Is it going to pay 
 me to have china at my table which costs one 
 hundred dollars, or a rug before the fire which 
 costs half as much again ? It is all a question 
 of whether I will give up something else. Shall 
 I exchange a week of sunlight for the sake of 
 that dinner service, and another week for the 
 sake of that rug, and another month for the 
 sake of living in the house which pleases me, 
 and so on. After weighing the losses and the 
 gains pretty carefully, I say No.
 
 218 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 A far more serious objection which is made 
 to my plan of life is that it is not fair to my 
 children. I have had the advantage of good 
 schools, I have been sent abroad to study, I 
 have had years of life among people who know 
 something of books and art. It may be very 
 well for me to desert from the ranks, and 
 settle down in the woods, intellectually speak- 
 ing, of this end of Long Island. This is a 
 serious question. Had I never conceived the 
 idea of seceding, I should at this time be pay- 
 ing rent for a little house or an apartment 
 in some part of New York City, or what is 
 more likely I should live most of the year in 
 some of the little settlements, within easy rail- 
 road distance from New York, which dot the 
 Jersey hills. Years ago, before my eyes were 
 opened, I paid seven hundred dollars a year for 
 a cottage in just such a settlement. With that 
 expense and the cost of three months' board in 
 New York, for newspaper work makes it neces- 
 sary for me to be in New York at least that 
 length of time, I may say that my rent was 
 about a thousand dollars, a moderate sum, and 
 yet large enough, when taken in connection 
 with the other expenses of servants and house-
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 2 19 
 
 keeping, to necessitate pretty steady drudgery 
 upon my part the year round. In the mean- 
 time, my children attended a little school which 
 was quite as good as any preparatory school of 
 the same type to be found in the city. 
 
 From the experience that I have had with 
 children's schools, I have been led to think 
 that the most pretentious are often the least 
 productive of any good to the child, and I pre- 
 sume that most parents will agree in condemn- 
 ing the ultra-fashionable and most expensive 
 schools as wonderfully well designed to make a 
 child all that it should not be. With the pri- 
 mary schools there is scarcely any choice to be 
 made between those of the city and the coun- 
 try. The home life of the child before twelve 
 years of age counts for so much in forming the 
 character and the intellectual judgment of the 
 child that schools, good or bad, are not of 
 great weight. If any thing, the little, unpre- 
 tentious district school of the smallest country 
 village is better than the city school, because 
 there are fewer children, and consequently 
 their idiosyncrasies are more likely to have full 
 play. The worst that can be said of our pub- 
 lic-school system is that it tends to eliminate
 
 22O LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 individuality and make each child the counter- 
 part of the standard child, often a very low 
 standard. At the most impressionable age, 
 we send our children to schools in which the 
 effort is to turn out boys and girls all knowing 
 the same thing, taking the same view of every 
 topic, and approaching more closely to a type 
 with which educated persons have really very 
 little sympathy. It is a standard in which the 
 commonplace dominates. Matthew Arnold at- 
 tributed the uninteresting character and mo- 
 notony of much of the casual talk which he 
 heard in our public places to the universal cus- 
 tom of sending children to the public schools. 
 Spencer holds that there is no harm, but rather 
 good, in allowing a child to grow up a healthy 
 animal almost ignorant of ordinary school rudi- 
 ments until he reaches the age of eight or ten. 
 By that time it is to be hoped that he will be 
 less plastic, and that the influence of home 
 surroundings will have brought out an individu- 
 ality not to be effaced by the routine schooling 
 of the next few years. The tendency to do 
 away with book lessons for young children has 
 always seemed to me one of the healthiest 
 signs of the day, and with my own children
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 221 
 
 I have had no compunctions of conscience in 
 teaching them to swim and row and to love 
 fishing and hunting before they knew how to 
 read or write a line. The worst that could 
 happen to them would be to have them turn 
 out to be counterparts of the commonplace 
 type I find in most of the public schools. The 
 boy who at the age of twelve is a good swim- 
 mer, a good sailor, fond of shooting, fishing, 
 and out-door sports, is able to read and write, 
 and has a genuine love and appreciation of a 
 score of good books, and not a little good 
 music, is pretty sure to get along in whatever 
 school he finds himself, for whatever he knows, 
 he will know thoroughly and not superficially. 
 
 The real school is, after all, the home school, 
 of which the father and mother are the head 
 teachers. Here, again, is one reason why life 
 in the wilderness is an advantage to the child. 
 He is with his father most of the day, and if 
 the household has any atmosphere of culture 
 about it, he is pretty sure to absorb some of it. 
 In city life, the father may be seen at break- 
 fast, and possibly for a moment before the 
 children go to bed, but that, as a rule, is all, ex- 
 cept on Sunday, when he is often too tired to
 
 222 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 bother with the children and too unfamiliar 
 with them to take much interest in their do- 
 ings. More than half the pleasure that I get 
 out of my country life is due to constant asso- 
 ciation with the children. The boat seldom 
 sails away without three or four of them on 
 board, they are never left behind when we 
 start for a day's outing, they know as much 
 about the garden as I do, and probably to this 
 active open-air life they owe largely their 
 strength and ruddy cheeks. I have tried both 
 ways of life, and whatever may be said in favor 
 of the city so far as adults are concerned, there 
 are no two ways of thinking s*o far as concerns 
 the children. After a few years, when it be- 
 comes necessary to fit them for active life, I 
 suppose that the boys will go to college, and I 
 am not at all afraid of their ability to hold 
 their own and to get all the good that may be 
 obtained by a struggle for wealth if they should 
 choose to strive for it. As to the girls, it may 
 be said that in the wilderness they would grow 
 up ignorant of most accomplishments valued 
 in young women, such as music, painting, etc. 
 But here again, it is a question of home influ- 
 ence. Inasmuch as my girls will hear at home
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 22$ 
 
 twenty times as much good music as the aver- 
 age New York girl even in fashionable life 
 is likely to hear, and a hundred times as much 
 talk about it, there is no fear that if they have 
 any capacity for the divine art, it will not make 
 itself felt. It is so rare to find among even our 
 so-called best people of the town any under- 
 standing or appreciation of the meaning and 
 beauty of literature, music, and art, that the 
 fear that my children may not know something 
 of these things because they do not habitually 
 associate with these so-called best people, 
 seems really comical to me. The well-to-do 
 people of the city will spend money upon any 
 thing but art ; they will cheerfully lavish dol- 
 lars upon mahogany furniture with stucco 
 veneering, but it will never occur to them to 
 try pine and have their children taught to 
 understand a Beethoven sonata. It has been 
 said that under such a system as mine my 
 boys are likely to grow up fishermen, and 
 nothing more, and that my girls will probably 
 know how to make good butter. Even taking 
 this material view of the matter, I am not at 
 all sure but that an intelligent fisherman who 
 lives in comfort the year round, harassed by
 
 224 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 no anxieties, and getting the most out of 
 the sea-breeze and the sunlight, has not a far 
 better lot than his city brother who wears 
 more expensive clothes and talks about the 
 price of lard or leather instead of the fish and 
 the tides. As to the essentials of intellectual 
 culture, the fisherman with a taste for reading 
 and his long winter evenings has by far the 
 greater opportunities. 
 
 With regard to the physical advantages of 
 country life modern science has brought statis- 
 tics to bear. Not a physician can be found 
 who does not preach the value of better air 
 than can be found in cities. 
 
 Upon this subject Dr. G. B. Barren, in a 
 paper entitled " Town-Life as a Cause of De- 
 generacy," read at a recent meeting of the 
 British Association, at Bath, England, said : 
 
 " I venture to advance the proposition that 
 the ' vital force ' of the town-dweller is inferior 
 to the ' vital force ' of the countryman. The 
 evidence of this is to be found in a variety of 
 ways. The general unfitness and incapability 
 of the dwellers in our large hives of industry to 
 undergo continued violent exertion, or to sus- 
 tain long endurance of fatigue, is a fact requir- 
 ing little evidence to establish ; nor can they
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 22$ 
 
 tolerate the withdrawal of food under sustained 
 physical effort for any prolonged period as com- 
 pared with the dwellers in rural districts. It 
 may be affirmed also that, through the various 
 factors at work night and day upon the consti- 
 tution of the poorer class of town-dwellers, 
 various forms of disease are developed, of 
 which pulmonary consumption is the most 
 familiar, and which is doing its fatal work in a 
 lavish and unerring fashion. Thus it may be 
 conceded as an established fact that the towns- 
 man is, on the whole, constitutionally dwarfed 
 in tone, and his life, man for man, shorter, 
 weaker, and more uncertain than the country- 
 man's. I hold the opinion that the deteriora- 
 tion is more in physique, as implied in the loss 
 of physical or muscular power of the body, the 
 attenuation of muscular fibre, the loss of integ- 
 rity of cell-structure, and consequent liability 
 to the invasion of disease, rather than in actual 
 stature of inch-measurement. The true causes 
 of this deterioration are neither very obscure nor 
 far to seek. They are bad air and bad habits. 
 
 " Taking these causes in the order in which 
 I have placed them, but without reference to 
 their relative intensity, I think bad air is a 
 potent factor of enfeeblement. Included in 
 the phrase ' bad air ' are bad sanitation and 
 overcrowding. I have no doubt in my mind 
 that it has a powerful and never-ceasing action, 
 paramount and decisive, on the physical frames
 
 226 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 of young and old town-dwellers, producing 
 deterioration of physique, lowered vitality, and 
 constitutional decay. For over thirty years I 
 have been hammering away at this question of 
 ' bad air ' and ' bad sanitation ' as the prime 
 causes of impairment of health and race, and 
 the more I consider it the more I am con- 
 vinced of the soundness of my conclusions. A 
 great deal has been said on this subject, and it 
 is not difficult to adduce conclusive evidence 
 from a large variety of reliable sources in proof 
 of the deleterious effects of impure air on the 
 animal economy. Consumption is the best 
 type of degenerative action and loss of vital 
 energy. It stands out in bold relief as the 
 disease most rife wherever foul air exists. The 
 significance and value of fresh air were recog- 
 nized by the old fathers of medicine. Hippo- 
 crates was accustomed to advise a walk in fresh 
 air of ten or fifteen miles daily. Aretasus, Cel- 
 sus, and Pliny speak of the good effect of fresh 
 air; and our great English physician, Syden- 
 ham, did the same thing. Dr. Guy found that 
 of 104 compositors who worked in rooms of 
 less than 500 cubic feet of air for each person, 
 12.5 per cent, had had spitting of blood ; of 
 115 in rooms of from 500 to 600 cubic feet, 
 4.35 per cent, showed signs of consumption ; 
 and in 100 who worked in rooms of more than 
 600 cubic feet capacity, less than 2 per cent, 
 had spit blood. Consumption is only one of
 
 WHAT WE LOSE AND WHAT WE GAIN. 227 
 
 the long list of evils to which the town-dweller 
 is exposed. It may be well to mention that 
 the Labrador fishermen and the fishermen of 
 the Hebrides, with plenty of fresh air, are 
 practically exempt from this disease. The 
 absence of pure air acts upon the animal econ- 
 omy in much the same way as the withdrawal 
 of light on plants, the result being pallor and 
 feebleness of constitutional vigor. This effect 
 ramifies in every direction ; the tissues of 
 which the human body is composed lose their 
 tonicity and contractile power, and even men- 
 tal integrity may be more or less affected. The 
 pent-up denizens of the courts and alleys of our 
 large towns, surrounded on every side by im- 
 perfect light, bad air, and the general aspects 
 of low life, necessarily degenerate in physical 
 competency, and their offspring is of a feeble 
 type. 
 
 " The digestive capability of the town-dweller 
 is of a lower standard and less capable of deal- 
 ing with the ordinary articles of diet, than the 
 latter. Consequently town-dwellers live on 
 such food as they can digest without suffering 
 bread, fish, and meat ; above all, the last. 
 The sapid, tasty flesh of animals which sits 
 lightly upon the stomach, gives an acceptable 
 feeling of satiety, so pleasant to experience. 
 Such selection is natural and intelligible, but it 
 is fraught with danger. I quote from a former 
 paper : ' The chief diet selected by the town-
 
 228 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 dweller begets a condition known to doctors as 
 the uric-acid diathesis, with its many morbid 
 consequences. Pulmonary phthisis and Bright's 
 disease seem Dame Nature's means of weeding 
 out degenerating town-dwellers.' Such are 
 some of the medical aspects of the case." 
 
 Mr. Henry T. Finck, says in his " Roman- 
 tic Love and Personal Beauty " : 
 
 " I am convinced from many experiments that 
 the value of country air lies partly in its tonic 
 fragrance, partly in the absence of depressing 
 foul odors. Now the tonic value of fragrant 
 meadow or forest air lies in this that it causes 
 us involuntarily to breathe deeply, in order 
 to drink in as many mouthfuls of this luscious 
 aerial Tokay as possible ; whereas in the city 
 the air is, well, say unfragrant and uninviting, 
 and the constant fear of gulping down a pint of 
 deadly sewer-gas discourages deep breathing. 
 The general pallor and nervousness of New 
 York people have often been noticed. The 
 cause is obvious. New York has the dirtiest 
 streets of any city in the world, except Con- 
 stantinople and Canton ; and, moreover, it is 
 surrounded by oil-refineries, which sometimes 
 for days poison the whole city with the stifling 
 fumes of petroleum, so that one hardly dares to 
 breathe at all."
 
 THE DANGERS OF CUTTING LOOSE FROM TOWN 
 DRUDGERY. 
 
 '"THE late Matthew Arnold found nothing 
 more characteristic to say about us than 
 that we Americans and our institutions are un- 
 interesting. The length of our railroads, our 
 piles of money, our big buildings, our vast 
 spaces on land and water did not impress him. 
 The human interest was lacking partly because 
 so much of our time or attention and our talk 
 was taken up with these other material matters 
 in themselves not peculiarly interesting. Sir 
 Lepel Griffin, in a harsher review of us and our 
 institutions, says that he would rather live al- 
 most anywhere than here, and again he remarks 
 that we are uninteresting. As a nation, we may 
 have attained to a higher level in material mat- 
 ters than the great nations of the Old World ; 
 but the work of our public schools in turning 
 out vast armies of pupils, knowing all the same 
 things and viewing every thing from the same 
 229
 
 230 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 standpoint, necessarily implies monotony. In 
 our views of what makes a life worth living 
 there is pretty certain to be a good deal of this 
 monotony. Ask half a hundred men and 
 women, taken at random, what makes life 
 worth living, and certainly the great majority 
 will say that a life of luxurious idleness offers 
 the greatest opportunities. At least this is 
 what they mean, although they will hesitate to 
 use the word idleness, as contrary to good 
 morals. Given good health and an ample in- 
 come, that life is worth living to the liver at 
 least may be considered as sure to follow in 
 the general estimation of people. Nevertheless 
 most of us can point out some people who have 
 health and more money than they know what 
 to do with, and yet do not live a life which we 
 consider the best that they could lead. 
 
 I will define a life worth living as the one 
 which offers out-door work and sport, freedom 
 from anxiety, and plenty of intellectual exer- 
 ^0 cise. I doubt whether a man who passes more 
 JL /*v than three fourths of his waking hours in-doors 
 ****Yv\ can remam a healthy animal or get the enjoy- 
 ment out of life which the mere sense of physi- 
 cal well-being gives. The doctors tell us that
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY. 231 
 
 the physical trend of people who live in great 
 cities is one of steady deterioration ; the cities 
 must be constantly recruited from the country. 
 To me the persistent city man who never goes 
 beyond the brick walls and paved streets is en- 
 titled to pity very much upon the same ground 
 as are the animals we see in our menageries. 
 Centuries of wrong living have evolved a people 
 who stand confinement and bad air wonderfully 
 well, but Nature takes her revenge in one way 
 or another. Nevertheless, we stand our arti- 
 ficial existence so well that most of us forget 
 that it is an artificial existence. As animals we 
 ought, by rights, to be in the sunlight from 
 morning till night. Our ancestors of a few 
 thousand years ago, who foraged the woods 
 and waters for birds and fish which they de- 
 voured raw, slept well in their caves after the 
 day's chase, and knew nothing of half the ills 
 we now live in dread of. When Thoreau notes 
 that the sports of civilized man were the labors 
 of uncivilized man, does he not indict civiliza- 
 tion ? Man has given up play as a means of 
 getting a living. To some extent we go back 
 to the rational life when we can. The rich 
 Wall Street gambler, the rich dealer in lard or
 
 232 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 leather sometimes goes back to the woods in 
 summer or ploughs the wave in his yacht. But 
 very few of us get rich perhaps one in a thou- 
 sand. Is there no way of getting back to a 
 rational life without first winning a fortune, 
 something which comes to so few ? 
 
 I am aware that here many a reader pro- 
 vided I am so fortunate as to have many readers 
 will say : " Oh, we have heard all this before ; 
 it is the old story of moving to the country in 
 order to raise cabbages for a living. It is one 
 more variation upon the ' Ten Acres Enough ' 
 idea." To some extent it is a variation upon 
 that famous book, but with a difference. The 
 hundreds of writers who have taken up the chief 
 idea of " Ten Acres Enough " the possibility 
 of earning a livelihood by out-door work, gar- 
 dening, fishing, etc., have, without exception, so 
 far as I know, begun with the assumption that 
 when life becomes impossible in town then the 
 country should be sought. In one case it is the 
 broken-down merchant, tired of meeting notes, 
 tired of the long struggle to ward off bank- 
 ruptcy, who finally says to himself : " I will sell 
 out my business and with the proceeds buy a 
 strawberry patch, upon which I can raise enough
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY. 233 
 
 i 
 
 fruit to support my family in comfort." And he 
 does it in the book. Again, it is the family of 
 the merchant who dies bankrupt who give up 
 their city house in order to find pleasure and 
 profit in keeping cows and selling butter at a 
 dollar a pound in the book. I have quite a 
 collection of books written by enthusiasts upon 
 country life, and I know some persons who 
 have acted upon the suggestions given, some- 
 times with very unfortunate results. But in- 
 variably this country life is considered as an 
 asylum. So long as a man can live in the city 
 and pay his notes and buy dresses for the fam- 
 ily, it is not for him to think of trying the 
 country. The man who falls behind in the 
 race is advised to retreat to the country and 
 take to strawberry raising. 
 
 I contend that the strawberry raising or 
 whatever outdoor work is chosen as a means 
 for making a livelihood should be preferred, 
 taken all in all, to the city life even if this city 
 life is fairly successful in a commercial sense, 
 and I hold this for the simple reason that it 
 offers emancipation from some of the worst of 
 city evils, while its drawbacks and there are 
 drawbacks are insignificant as compared to
 
 234 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 the advantages gained. Take half a dozen of 
 the most successful city men you know and 
 consider (i) How much healthy exercise in the 
 sunshine they have ; (2) How much of their 
 life is passed with their children and family ; (3) 
 How much intellectual exercise do they get out 
 of life, how many books worth reading do they 
 open in the course of the year ? 
 
 In olden times, and in fact in recent times 
 until the power press and cheap postage ap- 
 peared, the dweller in the country was largely 
 cut off from intellectual intercourse. He had 
 1 "; his few books, as a rule costly and therefore 
 
 T * 
 
 few, and that was all. To-day, no matter how 
 '-' distant the hamlet, the mail reaches it, and for 
 . . - a trifle the newspapers and magazines bring 
 due -him the best thoughts of the world together 
 I yU. with a record of what men who like the fuss 
 and the noise of towns are doing. It is no 
 longer necessary to live with the throng in 
 .order to know what is going on where crowds 
 meet, and all signs go to show that in the 
 future it will be still less necessary. The phon- 
 ograph, to speak of but one wonder of the near 
 future, offers extraordinary things to the man 
 / who wants to get away from the crowd. The 
 
 V
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY. 235 
 
 perfected phonograph, and there can be no 
 reasonable doubt as to its future perfection, 
 whether this is achieved a year or twenty years '*** Htn 
 hence, will not only give us books at a cost m-^*^- * 
 significant as compared to that of ink ancr^* ^ 
 paper, but in a far pleasanter form ; it will be a^.*^ 
 pleasant reader always ready to read by the 
 hour or the day. Not only this, but it will give,^. 
 us music of any kind the latest song or the^^f ^ 
 newest orchestral symphony in a manner to be 
 enjoyed even by experts. So much has been 
 accomplished with the phonograph that nothing 
 seems to be too extraordinary to claim for it. 
 It is no dream to say that as a means of com- 
 municating thoughts and words, the phono- 
 graph will do more for the world as an educa- 
 tor than printing. In the future, authors will/^*-*-' 
 not write their books they will read them, and ' Jl *n ' 
 phonographic copies of the result will be so " tu ' 
 cheap that our books of to-day will seem ex- 
 travagantly dear in comparison. With music 
 it will be the same thing, only that the phono- 
 graph will do in this field what it has never 
 been possible to do before. To provide for the 
 intellectual food of man was formerly more 
 difficult than to provide for his physical suste-
 
 236 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 nance. To-day it is the other way. In the 
 future, thanks to electricity, that great power 
 of coming ages by which the forces of nature 
 are to be harnessed, food and clothing and 
 every thing that machinery can make will be 
 inconceivably cheap. Some thinkers believe 
 that even by the year 2000 one hour's work a 
 day will suffice to give a man more comforts 
 fCc and luxuries than he now earns by eight or ten 
 hours' work. It will be argued of course, that 
 what man considers his necessaries will grow 
 faster than his means for supplying them : in 
 those favored days to come the day laborer 
 will deem himself unfortunate if he cannot 
 dwell in marble halls and eat off gold plate. 
 Nevertheless there is a point when we can say 
 that a man is well sheltered from the elements, 
 well clothed, well fed ; intellectual food in the 
 shape of books and newspapers will then be so 
 cheap as to be scarcely worth considering. It 
 is probable that in those days people will not 
 herd together at the sacrifice of sunshine and 
 quiet. 
 
 The workman of to-day earns by his day's 
 labor twice as much food and four times as 
 much manufactured goods clothes, tools, fur-
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY. 
 
 niture as his father did in the same time. 
 When we come to books and newspapers the 
 contrast is more astonishing. The average me- 
 chanic can now buy for one day's work more 
 books than a month's work would have brought 
 him a century ago, or a year's work would have 
 brought him in the Middle Ages. More than 
 that, thanks to cheap postage and circulating 
 libraries, books are to be had almost for the 
 asking. One of the things that the Govern- 
 ment could do for the intellectual growth of 
 the country would be to make the postage upon 
 books almost nominal. This is done in the 
 case of newspapers, which are sent through the 
 mails to subscribers for one cent a pound ; but 
 in the case of books, postage is still exorbitant. 
 That there are certain deprivations in living 
 in the country, especially in isolation, goes 
 without saying. First and chief my critics are 
 pretty certain to note the absence of all society, 
 certainly a loss if one's position in city life 
 is such as to give him the society of cultured 
 people and the time to enjoy such society. 
 Nor is the raising of cabbages or strawberries 
 for market by any means a life of luxurious 
 idleness. Even where, as in my case, the
 
 238 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 
 
 object is not to earn money, but to save it, 
 there are early hours, soiled hands, and .a tired 
 back ; some of my friends to whom I have 
 expounded the gospel of idleness, as they call 
 it, although I see nothing of idleness in the 
 raising of cabbages and strawberries, say that 
 just in proportion to my success as a straw- 
 berry grower will be my loss in other directions. 
 They say that a day of hard physical labor in 
 the fields will not end with the reading of a 
 good book or magazine article, but in dozing 
 off at eight o'clock. Farmers must keep 
 farmers' hours. I have made some experiments 
 in this field. I have found that whether or 
 not we go to bed at nine o'clock depends 
 wholly upon whether we accustom ourselves 
 to going to bed at that hour. It may re- 
 quire at first some exertion and many yawns 
 to get through a certain book or an article, 
 especially if it is a stupid one, before going to 
 bed. But it will get easier and easier until the 
 day will not seem to be properly wound up 
 without the two hours' reading. The family 
 circle in which reading aloud in not one of the 
 customary evening employments misses one of 
 the great enjoyments of life as well as a potent
 
 TOWN DRUDGERY. 239 
 
 means of educating the children. The boy 
 and girl who learns to know and love the best 
 books of Thackeray, Scott, and Dickens is pret- 
 ty sure to have an interest in good reading 
 through life. But the habit of reading for an 
 hour every evening and perhaps devoting half 
 an hour to some standard work not a novel, is 
 not to be cultivated without some effort, and 
 some sacrifice in other directions. One of the 
 most valuable gifts of a liberal education is the 
 ability to find an interest in books. Unfor- 
 tunately, but very few people know how to 
 read. The great number have never learned 
 when young ; when in middle life their time 
 has been too much taken up with money- 
 making ; when the money was made and there 
 was plenty of time, the faculty of finding 
 interest in things above every-day detail had 
 died for want of cultivation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Ttc Vt-to^w. fu. Ub^ 
 
 kXyCl Ut/A>lI~f 4d 
 
 TTT.y.^/ ftL 
 ^c f 
 
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 "A LITTLE WONDER." 
 
 THE POCKET ATLAS OF THE WORLD. 
 
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