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CHILD AND COUNTRY




BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

LOT & COMPANY
RED FLEECE
MIDSTREAM
DOWN AMONG MEN
FATHERLAND




GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK








 Child and Country

 _A Book of the
 Younger Generation_


 BY

 WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

 AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY,"
 "DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE
 RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.




 NEW YORK
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




 Copyright, 1916,
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




 TO THOSE

 WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS

 TO THE BUILDERS

 OF THE RISING GENERATION




FOREWORD


... 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 day by day in
the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could
possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after
chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if
I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the
children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the
title.

Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have
been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see
the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age
above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we
perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of
America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have
to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our
children and to every conception of home