TEN ACRES ENOUGH

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PRACTICAL VIEWS SAFETY OF INVESTMENTS IN LAND

There was not a particle of romance in my aspirations for a farm, neither had I formed a single visionary theory which was there to be tested. My notions were all sober and prosaic.

I had struggled all my life for dollars, because abundance of them produces pecuniary comfort: and the change to country life was to be, in reality, a mere continuation of the struggle, but lightened by the assurance that if the dollars thus to be acquired were fewer in number, the certainty of earning enough of them was likely to be greater. Crops might fail under skies at one time too watery, at another too brassy, but no such disaster could equal those to which commercial pursuits are uninterruptedly exposed. They have brassy skies above them as well as farmers.

For nearly twenty years I had been hampered with having notes of my own or of other parties to pay. But of all the farmers I had visited, only one had ever given a note, and he had made a vow never to give another. My wife was shrewd enough to observe and remark on this fact at the time, it was so different from my own experience. She admitted there must be some satisfaction in carrying on a business which did not require the giving of notes.

Looking at the matter of removal to the country in a practical light, I found that in the city I was paying three hundred dollars per annum rent for a dwelling house. It was the interest of five thousand dollars, yet it afforded nothing but a shelter for my family.

I might continue to pay that rent for fifty years, without, at the end of that time, having acquired the ownership of either a stone upon the chimney, or a shingle in the roof. If the house rose in value, the rise would be to the owner's benefit, not to mine. It would really be injurious to me, as the rise would lead him to demand an increase of his rent.

But put the value of the house into a farm, or even the half of it and the farm would have a dwelling house upon it, in which my family would find as good a shelter, while the land, if cultivated as industriously as I had always cultivated business, would belie the flood of evidence I had been studying for many years if it failed to yield to my efforts the returns which it was manifestly returning to others.

We could live contentedly on a thousand dollars a year on the farm and we should have no landlord to pay. My wife, in pinching times, has financiered us through the year on several hundred less. I confess to having lived as well on the diminished rations as I wanted to. Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time worn coat, and how savory. the dinner table can be made without sirloin steaks or cranberry tarts.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print