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Show HE MISSED THE "NEIGHBORS" - "Why did you come back?" I asked a Westerner who returned to a prairie town after two years in New York. Jt seemed incomprehensible that he should leave the excitement of lower Broadway for the monotony of the broad plains. - "Neighbors!" was his response. "Would you want to spend your life where the people twenty feet away do not know your name or care whether you live or diet We are brought up with neighbors and when ins uauy uieu ana not a person in the blessed town came near us, when we went alone to the cemetery, It was too much. We packed up and started for home what's the use of living that way T" Does nelghborllneos exist, like our old geometry problems. In Inverse ratio to the square of the distance? Perhaps. One day last summer, away out In the western Kansas wheat lands, where distances dis-tances are magnificent and the per capita of population to the square mile Is expressed ex-pressed in decimal fractions," a settler became be-came 111. He had fifty acres of fine wheat already turning yellow In the sun. He had no hired man, nor had he the means to engage harvesters He had counted on "changing -work" with some one and thus getting his grain to market. Day after day he tossed In pain and worried wor-ried over the prospect. Neighbors? The nearest was three miles away and the Whole township had but seven families. One morning three self-binders with full complement of helpers came rattling over the prairie. The drivers did not ask for S emission, but went boldly Into the field, ound and round the machines hurried, reaping the ripe grain and leaving shocks of gold dappling the level lands. The sick man heard the buss of the reapers and tried to get to the window but his wife told him what was happening, and he fell Into a deep, sweet sleep. . : It Is no slight thing to give up a day In the midst of pressing harvest that a farmer miles away may save his crop, but It Is a pretty good sort of sentiment that prompts the action. It may be that It will count for something sometime. t "Would the average city street show an act such as marked a far frontier community com-munity In which I spent a night recently?" recent-ly?" asked the former New Yorker, then went on: "We had stopped at a little town of less than a doxen houses, and spent the evening listening to pioneer stories In the dingy office of the only ho-, tel. As we were preparing to go to bed. In came three men. carrying a. violin, a banjo and a guitar. , They were ranchers from the Pawnee valley, and had been out twenty mllea on the plains to enliven the evening of an old friend who was sick and nearly blind, with no one to read to him and no music except that of the ceaseless winds. - They did not 'realise that they had done much they simply did what they could without thinking. The leader of the trio started In the West a poor boy. ' Now he owns 2500 acres stocked with horses and with registered cattle so good that' they take prises' at every royal stock show In Kansas City. 'Yet he found time to go twenty miles to cheer up an old friend in misfortune. Why shouldn't he prospen?" Why not. Indeed? Charles M. Haryer In the Outlook. Out-look. : ;'.-- t . ,V . -. . , |
