Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time.... The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture, and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two. Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country people and the meshes of possession. In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children in school—the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and physical—the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child. We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of their struggle. It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher…