Now and
then we came to a deserted homestead, and I tried to make the Altrurian
understand how farming in New England had yielded to the competition of
the immense agricultural operations of the West. "You know," I said, "that
agriculture is really an operation out there, as much as coal-mining is in
Pennsylvania, or finance in Wall Street; you have no idea of the vastness
of the scale." Perhaps I swelled a little with pride in my celebration of
the national prosperity, as it flowed from our Western farms of five and
ten and twenty thousand acres; I could not very well help putting on the
pedal in these passages. Mrs. Makely listened almost, as eagerly, as the
Altrurian, for, as a cultivated American woman, she was necessarily
quite ignorant of her own country, geographically, politically, and
historically. "The only people left in the hill country of New England," I
concluded, "are those who are too old or too lazy to get away. Any young
man of energy would be ashamed to stay, unless he wanted to keep a
boarding-house or live on the city vacationists in summer. If he doesn't,
he goes West and takes up some of the new land, and comes back in
middle-life and buys a deserted farm to spend his summers on.
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