YOU HAVE OFTEN HEARD of a deserted farm, but have you ever heard of a deserting farm? And yet there once was one. It lay in a hollow of land from which it could see nothing; the winds and birds passed right over it, and even the rain seemed to come to that farm less often than to others, while the dust blew about the fields, and there were too many rabbits burrowing in its soil.
The farm didn't like the farmer, either, or the farmer's wife, or
their little son, Bungo. The farm thought they were lazy and cross and didn't keep the farm looking as well as it could look. It grew more and more dissatisfied until ....
Well, one morning the farmer was awakened by a fly buzzing in
his ears. When his eyes opened, he forgot all about the fly, he was
so surprised. He was lying in his own iron bed with his clothes flung every which way on a chair beside it, but there was nothing else, no room, no walls, no ceiling, no floor, no orchard beyond, no hayfield, no barn, no cock crowing, no cow mooing to be milked, nothing but his wife in her own iron bed with her clothes on her chair, and Bungo asleep in his bed, with his clothes on the bare ground. All three of them had been deserted by the farm.
Nothing like it had ever before happened in the world. They hunted everywhere for some trace of their farm, but they could find only a post with a little broken barbed wire hanging from it, and one old hoe, and finally a pig that had always been known for its obstinacy, and had apparently refused to do whatever it was the rest of the farm had done.
No, there was no farm at all in the hollow, and when Bungo climbed a tree, his sharp little eyes could see no sign of their farm, and when the farmer's wife looked 'up into the sky, she saw only two crows passing overhead, cawing.
"This is your fault," said the farmer's wife to her husband. "You wouldn't mend the gate, and the barn roof was leaking terribly." "It's your fault," said the farmer. "You let a lot of dust get into
the milk, and half the time you forgot to feed the hens." "Anyhow, it isn't my fault," said Bungo.
It isn't easy to be a farmer, even a bad farmer, without a farm, so at last the man and his wife and Bungo hired an automobile and went to look for theirs. The trip was very unpleasant because at every crossroads the farmer wanted to go to the right, the farmer's wife wanted to go to the left, and Bungo wanted to go home.
"But we haven't got any home to go to!" his parents would shout at him together.
"That's your fault!" Bungo would shout back.
So they drove for weeks and weeks but they never found their farm, though twice they drove right by it, and did not recognize it, where it lay on a slope above a beautiful lake, in the place it had carefully selected.
The fields looked so green, the animals so contented, the house so newly painted, the view so fine that even Bungo's sharp little eyes never saw that it was their old farm come to flower.
But the farm recognized them and held its breath till they were gone. Then with a sigh of relief, it settled comfortably back to enjoy itself in the charge of the pleasant, hard-working and cheer• ful young couple, who had happened to walk up the road one day and found a farm lying in what had been a pasture the day before, a farm looking as though it needed to be taken and loved and cared for, in fact a farm that needed just them .
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