The Abandoned Farmers. His Humorous Account of a Retreat from the City to the Farm

I should have said that there is one fad to which all our Westchester County colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one agricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception the members of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You meet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience with Polled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they have been highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter him again he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners or Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.

One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopes and disappointments during which he first hired and then for good and sufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commoner varieties – plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls and mavericks – decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employment agencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places. He procured the address of such an establishment and repaired thither – simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he entered the place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, was a shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather than the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. He tried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in so doing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobs offered to him – one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on Long Island and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut. He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants that they’ll hire almost anybody without requiring references.

None of us will ever be rich; we’re all convinced of that, the cost of impractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none of us would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor’s lot – the word landed being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., a landed sucker – for the life of a flat dweller again. It’s a great life if a fellow doesn’t weaken – and we’ll never weaken.

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