Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 88, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1917 — PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON [ARTICLE]

PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON

The husband, when waxing old, and well supplied with yellow- gold, remarks: “I’ll quit the farm; Ive had my fill of honest toil; this thing of wrestling with the soil has sort o’ lost its charm.” And so he buys a house in town, and thinks that he will settle down to soft and downy ease; but ere a year has gone its way, he’s yearning for the bales of hay, the piglets and the bee®. He finds the urban life a bore; his feet are cold, his soul is sore, time drags on leaden feet; so be resolves to travel back and build the tall alfalfa stack, and shock the bearded wheat. The farmer seldom learns to read; he is so buey sowing seed, and wielding shepherds’ crooks, and making hay in verdant vales, and combing burs from horses’ tails, he has no time for books. Sb when he moves himself to town, he cannot with a tome sit down, and read the stuff thait’s hot; he cannot lose himself in Pope, or wallow deep in Shakespeare’s dope, or soak up Walter Scott. Unhappy is that man, indeed, who thinks it waste of time to read, whose thoughts are all of hay, who’d rather mess around a churn than read a book by Laurence Sterne, or ode by Thomas Gray.