"Do city children have no similar opportunity for creating fancy?" "Perhaps they do, but their imagination is too quickly forced into the hard forms of adult experience. They feel all too soon the meaning of wealth, the punishments of poverty. They dream of more of this or less of that. They covet possession of the things they see from the store windows or in the yards of more fortunate children. The shadow of the money-magic of which you spoke falls too soon for their later good across their path. With the country boy and girl this is not likely to happen. Their experiences are more buoyant, more interpretive, more exploring. Fancy creates and reveals; it does not largely furnish the false pleasures of fictitious possession. This is to me the difference. The city may be the richest environment for the adult. That is a matter of opinion. But I cannot see how anyone can think of it as the best place for the child. I cannot believe that I would have gotten nearly so much of good from my early experiences if I had lived in the city. If I am right, this is another element to add to the great urban problem. If the experience of the city child suffers spiritual privations from the limitations of his environment, must this not show itself in social tendencies? In any case I had a motive in what I have said. You are interested in movements that attempt to enrich the experiences of country boys and girls. That is good, but you must not occupy all of the child's time or interest. Give him freedom to discover his own inner resources, the spiritual union between his cravings and the richness of nature. Don't exile him from nature's paradise by too much adult supervision, organization, or influence. In my day we had too little adult assistance in our games and recreation. I can imagine a condition where the country childhood would suffer from too much." It was this suggestion that I carried away with me from our conversation. THE MIND OF THE FARMER VIII THE MIND OF THE FARMER In discussing the mind of the farmer, the difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete facts into general statements that do violence to the opposing obstacles.