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Back to the Soil

From the Bisbee Daily Review, September 13, 1912.
By Roy K. Moulton.
 

 They’re urgin’ weary city men to go back to the soil,
 To tinker up their shattered nerves by good old honest toil.
 They say it does a feller good to live close to the ground
 With not a high-toned French cafe for fifty miles around.
 That may sound fine and dandy when a feller is town-bred,
 And doesn’t know a spring tooth harrow from a foldin’ bed,
 But to us fellers on the farm who’ve been agin’ the game
 All of our lives, that sage advice sounds purty doggone tame.
 
 It ain’t so gol dum dandy and it ain’t so gol dum fine
 To hop out of the hay at four instid of eight or nine.
 It ain’t so ‘tarnal cheerful to do three hours’ work before
 The farmer’s wife yells: “Breakfast” from the old farm kitchen door.
 It ain’t no sort of easy snap to work right through till night,
 And do back-breaking stunts as long as there is any light.
 They say it is a rest-cure and it possibly may be,
 But as a rest it never yet has quite appealed to me.
 
 The poets write quite purty of the everlastin’ hills,
 The wooded glens and lowin’ kine and little babbling rills.
 Of course, it is the only life that’s healthful right along,
 But still it ain’t what you would always call a glad sweet song.
 There’s plenty of the other thing, the hard, heartrendin’ toil
 And I guess that them city guys who go back to the soil
 Would about one good hot day with sun a-beatin’ down,
 And then they’d pack their grips and gladly yell, “Back to the Town.”

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