I can be nice when I try. People have said so. We parted with only
a pressure of the hand, and I hope he won't get into trouble, but I
see The Berkshire Courier is going to be deprived of its prey. Dick
has just come in. He promises to talk when he has finished eating."
Dick's letter, for which Ethelbertha seemed to be strangely
impatient, reached us on Wednesday morning.
"If ever you want to find out, Dad, what hard work really means, you
try farming," wrote Dick; "and yet I believe you would like it.
Hasn't some old Johnny somewhere described it as the poetry of the
ploughshare? Why did we ever take to bothering about anything else--
shutting ourselves up in stuffy offices, worrying ourselves to death
about a lot of rubbish that isn't any good to anybody? I wish I
could put it properly, Dad; you would see just what I mean. Why
don't we live in simply-built houses and get most everything we want
out of the land: which we easily could? You take a dozen poor
devils away from walking behind the plough and put them down into
coal-mines, and set them running about half-naked among a lot of
roaring furnaces, and between them they turn out a machine that does
the ploughing for them. What is the sense of it? Of course some
things are useful. I would like a motor-car, and railways and
steamboats are all right; but it seems to me that half the fiddle-
faddles we fancy we want we'd be just as well, if not better,
without, and there would be all that time and energy to spare for the
sort of things that everybody ought to have.
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