HOW WE LIVED

The most common objection to country life is what is called its dulness.  When I used to suggest to my town acquaintances the advantages of a holiday in purely rustic scenes, I was always met by the remark:  ‘Oh, there would be nothing to do there!’ No doubt if a holiday is devoted to lounging, it is much more difficult to lounge at a solitary farm than at some crowded seaside resort.  But my holidays in the country had never been of this description.  I am constitutionally unfitted for a lounger.  I like to have my days planned out, and to live them fully.  A country holiday for me had always meant incessant occupation of one kind or another, fishing, climbing, boating, long cycling excursions, and an industrious endeavour to explore all scenes of interest within a reasonable compass.  Now that I had come to live in the country, I felt more than ever the need of incessant occupation, for I fully realised that the worst enemy of human happiness is ennui.

During the first three months, while I was busy in getting settled, there was no danger of ennui.  I was constantly interested, and I was constantly at work.  I learned how to do carpentering and joiner’s jobs with a fair proficiency; I dug nearly an acre of land at the back of my house with my own spade; made paths, and planted fruit trees; all the turf for my lawn I laid myself, with a few hours’ assistance from a farm-hand; and there was no night when I did not go to bed with aching muscles and often with bruised hands.  If my bill for labour was absurdly moderate, it was partly because I did so much myself.

For instance, I employed no one to hang papers or to whitewash ceilings or paint woodwork.  With the willing help of my wife and my boys this was done with complete satisfaction.  One result of these labours was the pride and love for our little homestead which they created.  In modern civilised life we get too many things done for us, and this is not merely an economical but an ethical mistake.  It is difficult to feel any real pride in a home which is the creation of other people.  In a true state of civilisation no man will pay another to do what he can do himself.  Not only does he preserve his independence by such a rule, but he creates a hundred new objects of interest for himself.  The paper which I had hung with my own labour gave me a pleasure which a much finer paper hung by paid labour could not have given me.  The lawn which I had laid with my own hands seemed more intimately mine than if I had paid some one else to make it.  The more I reflect upon the matter the more am I convinced that one of the great curses of civilisation is the division of labour which makes us dependent upon other people to a degree which destroys individual efficiency.  Thrown back upon himself as a dweller in a wilderness, any man of ordinary capacity soon develops efficiency for kinds of work which he would never have attempted in a city, simply because a city