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> "The first sign of spring here is when the ice breaks up in the inkwell at the post office. A month later the ice leaves the lakes. And a month after that the first of the summer visitors shows up and the tax collector's wife removes the town records from her Frigidaire and plugs it in for the summer."
> About his own status as a farmer, White has no illusions: "I have been fooling around this place for a couple of years, but nobody calls my activity agriculture. I simply like to play with animals." "A good farmer," he observes, "is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus."
Over & over, in the context of world war, these essays shift from an easy equability to the sort of fierceness with which gentle men sometimes astonish bullies.
Some of Author White's more "sophisticated" friends make him rather sick: "I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. ... I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up. ... I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. . . ."