Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 215, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1914 — Lure of the Country Grips Young Farmer [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lure of the Country Grips Young Farmer

Hears Passenger In Suburban Train and Then Spends Day In Chicago—Farm Lassie and Home For Him.

A farmer boy from Dekalb, 111., was en route to Chicago the other morning when a group of suburban passengers entered the car In which he was riding. These suburbanites began talking about their gardens, and the farmer boy heard what they said. Of course they were more or less anaemic, but they were the remnants of live beys, and on this fine spring morning the old call of the open, the field, the song bird and the living tree, was in every mind. The farmer boy overheard their talk about patches “six by eight feet,” “three by nine feet,” etc., their poor little back yards. It appealed to him, and he felt sorry for them. And then, like Moses, Socrates and Walt Whitman, he began to my to himself: “This thing that I am about to do is unworthy of me. Here are these men whose lives are blighted.

They live in the city under the arc lights and in the dust of the streets and the heat of them. They are pale faced, nervous men. They all peer through glasses and wear their clothes like the models in the stores. These are not men. These are the shadows es men. I wonder what would happen if these men were to wander down the long lane and out into the field where the birds are mating and the flshworms wriggling as the plow slips through the soil, instead of breathing the dust and smoke of the suburban train and hiding away some place in a skyscraper and calling that work.” So this young man went on to the city and wended his way through turmoil and rush and hurry and was hustled and pushed about in the ill than-

ners of the street When the day was oyer and he walked through the dusk toward his farm home he had decided that the "Lureof the Country, with its perspective and its prospect and its assurance of plenty and its wonderful girlhood and its open roads,” was far more worth his while than is this thing which he has read about, called the “Lure of the City.” The Lure of the Country is deep, genuine and rich to this boy. The Lure of the City is artificial, unnatural and disappointing. The city smells are those of mixed breath—the heated odors of a thousand unkempt basements and alleys. Its noises are the noises of waste and killing speed; its shadows shut out the sunlight and protect the rat and cock roach. But one thing lingers in the mind of this young man. and that is the enter-

tainment of the city. It is the music of the theater, the action, the suggestion, the Interpretation, the delight of hearing gifted people of the earth gathered in the entertainment centers of the city. If he could but satisfy his desire for sweeping music, stimulating drama, public speech extraordinary and some fine social occasions, there would be no Lure of the City in the mind of this typical countryman. And he must be provided for at home. That is why the Lincoln Chautauquas are appearing this summer, with their wonderful aggregation of entertainers, lecturers and musicians, in this city under the local management of the leading business men. The Lure of the Country is made complete by thia event