COUNTRY CHRONICLE

...There was still warmth in the air, and still a sense of the south, but this came and went with the fugitive appearances of the sun...

...Readers may recall her farm novel, Here I Stay, and the beautiful Prayers For A Farm Family...

...MY chimneys need cleaning...

...WINTER came this year in- something like a long five minutes...

...At Lenwood Palmer's grocery, the daily papers lie spread before an open window, and I see the headlines and read them willy-nilly as we go about our buying...

...The whole sky was now but one vast turbulence of cloud, Autumnal cloud no more but Winter cloud iron-black and cold, and out of this darkness came an icy northwest wind from Alaska and the Pole, loud with a wild and hollow-roaring...

...The checked shirts, the heavy underwear, the high-cut boots, the knitted and the leather mittens—their turn is drawing near, in a week or two...

...At the gift auction upstairs, two things I particularly liked, a box of clams from "the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean" and a Plymouth Rock cockerel in a wooden box who crowed lustily through the bidding and the social din...

...Working in and out of the shed, now in the warmth and light, now in the cave of the shed, I built my stacks, laying down good, honest billets of beech, maple, yellow birch, and a little oak, all cleanly sawed to stove length and ready to use...

...Henry Beston is known to the ivorld of letters as a writer deeply interested in nature in America and in the history which has moved across it and is still in the making...

...A change had come over the day...

...For those who like the world of scholarship and ideas, there is a pleasant old-fashioned attic, full of books, sunshine, and...

...They often stay with us into early Winter, and it is amusing to see them scratch up a light snow...

...Beston lives in a comfortable, rambling farmhouse with his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth, a gifted poet and writer for children...

...The stacks raised, I went down the mowed fields to start the gasoline pump at the pond which supplies us with water in the open season...

...What is the matter with these people and indeed, with our whole way of life ? There are mam-answers but to my mind there is one essentia] clue...

...Civilization has lost its sense of reality because of an alienation from nature, unexampled in human history...

...Life at Chimney Farm," he writes, "is about equal parts hard rvork and good fun...

...at a neighboring farm they have worn a narrow, well-marked path into a great corn-patch planted to supply a cannery...

...From now on, though Autumn will return with an air of never having been away, it is Winter...

...The penalty of losing our awareness is what is now upon us—a world turned "cloud-cuckoo land," at once destitute *of commonsense and humane warmth of emotion...

...The whole farm household came out to see the fun...

...Here are the various things Henry Beston says he especially likes: "Morning breakfast with my wife by the November open fire, corn-bread fresh from the oven and well buttered, the constellation Orion sta?iding at midnight over the snoiv, the sound of rain on the attic roof, a swim in the lake after a long, hot afternoon pitching hay, old, wise books on agriculture, the return of the wild geese on a bright March day, and a new issue of The Progressive in the mail...

...on the earth below "all was Autumn and the mild silences of Autumn, and the pond was blue...

...Stacking is a kind of rustic art for the country hand, and a neat woodshed is a pleasant sight when the last sere leaves have fallen from the basswood by the door...

...Yes, guess we're going to get something...

...I like to stack wood...

...Almost as we talked, the squall struck and the season changed...

...But what came was a furious and wintry rain which reunited us in the farmhouse by the open fire...

...Cloudlets that wrere but ravellings of southwest vapor were sailing in company over the pasture hill and the great pines...

...MY wise and lovely "Mrs...

...Violence everywhere, and an appalling callousness, together with a cynical complacency which is a kind of a very corruption of the spirit...

...Now and in the early night, someone will open the kitchen door, and call us to see the first and quiet-falling snow...

...We called out to each other in the country way...

...quiet: for those xcho like the earth, there wait the big woods, the ploughed fields, and the hay slopes, the orchard and the cherished kitchen garden...

...Few books have so established themselves as his beautiful study of nature called The Outermost House, and the critics have unanimously placed his St...

...Man is not something outside of nature but a part of it, not an abstract monster but a being of flesh and bone—"men who live by bread," as says ancient poetry...

...When I set to work this morning stacking wood, the air above our northern land had a strange humidity and warmth for a Maine Autumn ; it had known Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico...

...Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON EDITOR'S NOTE: The Progressive proudly presents the first installment of a new, regular feature—• "Country Chronicle" by Henry Beston, distinguished naturalist and author...

...There, in the "downeast" country, near Noble-boro, where the snow lies deep in Winter and everybody wears bright colored woolen shirts and a hidden splendor of red flannels, Mr...

...I think I'll work in the woods this afternoon...

...We all stared up from the potato field, expecting a flurry of snow...

...Lawrence at the head of the "Rivers of America" series...

...MY neighbors, Elwell Oliver and his married son- Irving, were in the new potato-field, pulling up the withered plants and throwing them into the usual small heaps...

...He ran around the roofs and ridgepoles as debonair as a mountain goat, and grasping the top of a five-foot chimney, leaped to the top of it like an acrobat, landing on his feet...

...Clouding over...

...Farm Diary CHURCH and Grange supper last night at the Grange Hall, everybody hungry, all seats filled at the long tables, the big woodstove doing its duty, and the usual wonderful old-fashioned brown-bread and butter...

...It interested me to see how seasonal color vanished from the earth as well as from the sky...

...The russet grass turned wan and dead, the yellow leaves to leaves one might come upon in December, the pond to a blackened slate scourged with the wind...

...RACCOONS were on a rampage last Summer, coming out of the woods to raid the sweet corn...

...the last chimney sweep who called arrived at the farm in a Model T truck stowed with his brushes and ropes...

...It was two decades ago that Mr...

...Beston, a tall lean veteran of World War I, forsook the Boston editorial sanctum of the Atlantic Monthly for the fields and ivoods and streams of Maine...

...There is plenty to do...

...has just called me out to see some Foy sparrows in the flower garden...

...young, small, and lithe, and with a neat black moustache...

...The southwest vapor was covering the sky, cloud joining to cloud, and had piled up in a mass to the north and west...