“Well,” I said, “the gang is part of me now and I wouldn’t quit if I were worth a million. But we’re in a position where we can afford more elbow room now. Of course we can move back into the suburbs again, if we want to.” She shuddered a little at that. “Not back there,” she answered. “Then the only other thing is a farm,” I said. “And if you want, you can think of it as a farm for the whole gang. What a place it will be for the kiddies; your own and the others!” That was all the cue Ruth needed. On the spot she hatched plans enough to keep her busy all her life. It looked to me as though we’d need a Carnegie endowment to carry out all her schemes, but I didn’t say anything. I’d felt that way before about her projects and seen her end by putting them through on a few dollars. If Ruth had put into business the same amount of thought and brains and energy that she put into her philanthropies she would have made a fortune. I went to a real estate dealer and there I received my first surprise. It wasn’t my last, however. Before I was through with this business I discovered that I had as much to learn as I had during those first years as an emigrant. And I may as well say right here that my experience wasn’t the kind I’ve read about in the “Simple Life” and “Back to the Farm” stories. And because it was different is the reason I’m writing this. There’s been just as much nonsense written about the farm as about the slums. One man makes it out a hell on earth and another man makes it out a paradise on earth, and both of them are wrong and both of them are right, but neither of them seems to me to have got at the heart of the matter. In “One Way Out” I learned to my own satisfaction that if an emigrant succeeds where an American fails it proves there’s something wrong with the American. And there is. True as you’re living, there is. Something is lacking in him that his ancestors had; something lacking that the emigrant has to-day. I thought that I had learned this once for all but when I got back into the country I had to learn it over again. The conditions were different, but the same facts held good. I received a surprise, I said, at the very beginning. It came when the real estate man handed me a list of almost a hundred places for rent and for sale--all within easy reach of the city. I had my choice of anything from one acre to a hundred acres. Not only this but they were offered me almost at my own figure and my own terms. I found I could buy a farm as easily as a set of books. I don’t think the agents would have refused a dollar down and a dollar a week.