The farms feed industry, professional service, and city life with muscle, intellect, and imagination. This is the romance, and there is not a word in it of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. This every-day function of the farm, often spoken of lightly, almost as if it were a poetic fiction, is the solid stratum of fact upon which the plot of my story rests. The annual editorial blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” never concerns this slowly moving stream of young adults cityward, for these are a surplus, an excess. And they must go, as sure as fate. A legion of editorials could not dam back this flow. We are not without some definite information, moreover, as to how this surplus of farm population works its way to the cities of the nation; for a unique study has been made by the United States Department of Agriculture--of the movement of 3000 young people from a thousand farms in one community--over a period of one hundred years--a community where (and this fits into my story) the God of the Puritans has been known by the children from the days of the first log cabins. We know just which farms sent their surplus crop of young folk away. We know exactly where they went in the United States. And, furthermore, we know what vocations they recruited, and what achievements in these vocations they made. In a nutshell, we know in some measure what the contribution of human force and influence was from these thousand farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding of the cities of the nation. The unfolding picture of this farm community’s impact upon the nation’s life during the century just passed is precisely the thing many persons have looked for to put national meaning into the daily disappearance from the farms of the surplus of young adults which every few years amounts to a strong small nation poured into city industry.