【英文原著类】HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER(小农场主哈兰姆).pdf

HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER
HIRAM THE YOUNG
FARMER
BY BURBANK L. TODD
1
HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER
CHAPTER I
THE CALL OF SPRING
"Well, after all, the country isn't such a bad place as some city folk
think."
The young fellow who said this stood upon the highest point of the
Ridge Road, where the land sloped abruptly to the valley in which lay the
small municipality of Crawberry on the one hand, while on the other open
fields and patches of woodland, in a huge green-and-brown checkerboard
pattern, fell more easily to the bank of the distant river.
Dotted here and there about the farming country lying before the youth
as he looked westward were cottages, or the more important-looking
homesteads on the larger farms; and in the distance a white church spire
behind the trees marked the tiny settlement of Blaine's Smithy.
A Sabbath calm lay over the fields and woods. It was mid-afternoon of
an early February Sunday--the time of the mid-winter thaw, that false
prophet of the real springtime.
Although not a furrow had been turned as yet in the fields, and the
snow lay deep in some fence corners and beneath the hedges, there was,
after all, a smell of fresh earth--a clean, live smell--that Hiram Strong had
missed all week down in Crawberry.
"I'm glad I came up here," he muttered, drawing in great breaths of the
clean air. "Just to look at the open fields, without any brick and mortar
around, makes a fellow feel fine!"
He stretched his arms above his head and, standing alone there on the
upland, felt bigger and better than he had in weeks.
For Hiram Strong was a country boy, born and bred, and the town
stifled him. Besides, he had begun to see that his two years in Crawberry
had been wasted.
"As a hustler after fortune in the city I am not a howling ess,"
mused Hiram. "Somehow, I'm cramped down yonder," and he glanced
back at the squalid brick houses below him, the smoky roofs, and the ugly
factory chimneys.
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HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER