Privacy, the abstract blessing, is a lot bigger than the average-sized tub. And, like a tub, it can be irreparably marred by a blow from a blunt instrument, or law. I think that in small ways people do give up their constitutional rights without a murmur. One of the most surprising examples of this is the case of motorcar owners who of late years have remained docile while the State issued license plates that are one part identification and one part promotional advertising. When the 1939 plates appeared in New York State it was observed that they were adorned with an engraved invitation to Mr. Whalen’s dumbshow in Flushing, L. I. Only a handful of car owners squawked about this—millions carried the slogan, front and rear, advertising the Fair. I seem to remember that one conscientious citizen went so far as to take the matter to the courts and demanded to be released from the indignity. He got nowhere (except into the papers). Yet I believe that a motorist is quite within his rights to refuse to carry a slogan on his car, and I believe the state is misusing its power in issuing license plates that are inscribed with a bit of institutional hoopla. The custom is spreading. Maine has for the past couple of years produced plates bearing the word “VACATIONLAND” beneath the digits. Wisconsin, I believe, advertises itself as “AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND.” There are probably others that I don’t know about. I haven’t seen a California plate this year, but I presume it bears the inescapable legend “ROONEYMEDE.”

  In effect this seemingly harmless practice makes every motorist an advance agent, without pay. It also gives some of us a touch of nausea. I think undertakers in Maine can now procure, for their hearses, plates that do not include the word “Vacationland” but I am not sure. The last few hearses I have chanced to see were going so fast I couldn’t make out what the plates said.

  To me “Vacationland” is a particularly annoying device to be emblazoned on the bow and stern of my small overworked sedan. “Vacationland” is a loathsome word, assembled by a person of drab, untrustworthy mind. Furthermore, the residents of the State of Maine do not regard their state as a vacation land: they know from bitter experience that it is a place of hard work and long hours and tough weather. It is true that residents of other states come here in certain mild seasons to spend their vacation, but that is true of any state in the Union and is not peculiar to Maine.

  Quite aside from such objections, no citizen, under the constitution, can be compelled in his private life to assume a public burden and promote a cause, and a slogan on a license plate is without question pure promotion. It is conceivable that a comfortable majority of Maine citizens may approve of the publicity methods of their state and of the conventional Chamber of Commerce approach, but there are many others who do not, and even if there were only one person who did not, or no persons who did not, the state would still be exceeding its authority by slyly converting each motorist into an advocate and by turning a private vehicle into a public testimonial. I can’t even be sure that my state will not try to improve on its present form of advertisement. Next year perhaps I’ll receive a license plate equipped with a small wind-driven calliope, so that I may call attention to the circus in a more shrill and provocative manner.

  In the case of the census, I saw one statement that attempted to justify the inquisition by explaining that the findings of the census takers would be of inestimable value to American business men in their sales and promotion campaigns. This is an interesting bit of reasoning—the kind to examine closely. We are asked to believe that the Federal government is privileged to compel all citizens to answer certain give-away questions about themselves in order that a certain few citizens may with greater accuracy and craftiness plan campaigns to take money away from the remaining citizens. A manufacturer of an astringent, we’ll say, would be ahead of the game if he could discover which was worse in America, bad breath or dandruff. The census taker will oblige with the information, and your reply, naturally, will be used against you.

  Overcoming sales resistance is now an exact science, and consumers are asked to contribute to its exactitude. Selling and buying are a pitched battle: the consumer erects his sales resistance (as he might a stockade in Indian country) and the manufacturer tries to knock it down. The only alarming thing in the situation is that the Federal government proposes to take sides in the fight by gathering information to help the Indians. That seems hardly fair.

  We had our annual town meeting last week, in the old town hall next to the church and across from the cemetery. I see that Life Magazine calls the New England town meeting the quintessence of democracy; but one of my neighbors, who has probably attended more of them than the editors of Life, had another name for it. “Well,” he said, as he climbed into our car balancing a pot of baked beans wrapped in a paper bag, “here we go to the Chase & Sanborn hour.”

  It was a fine day for the meeting. About one hundred and twenty-five people turned out, or approximately one-seventh of the population. The hall is old and ugly—one of those Victorian mistakes with a mansard roof. The Masons, I am told, own the top floor, the town owns the rest. Neither can decide whether to tear the thing down or leave it up, but the question is academic because neither could get the consent of the other anyway.

  The meeting is held on the first floor, in a room whose walls are sheathed in tin with a decorative tin molding. The windows are curtained with strips of pink and white paper, à la Dennison. Near the door is a wood stove, and at one end, next to the dais, are four voting booths looking perilously like pay toilets. When we arrived the ladies of the church were upstairs preparing lunch. Others were taking their places round the walls on the wooden benches. The men were gathered round the stove, visiting, warming up, talking shop, girding for trouble.

  There are lots of people in town whom you see only once a year, at town meeting. They emerge from the back country and put in an appearance early; the meeting is a get-together for the town the same as Fair day is for the county. The front row of benches was occupied by a delegation from the senior class at the high school who had come to observe government processes in a free country.

  This was my first town meeting (I missed last year’s) and I was surprised to discover that there was not much discussion on the floor. The warrant contained thirty-eight articles, covering election of town officers and appropriation of town moneys as well as other matters of policy. Most of them aroused no debate. There were questions involving the schools, the roads, the library, public health, yet there was no general discussion of any of these subjects. New Englanders are jealous of their right to govern themselves as they like, but in my town we have learned that town meeting is no place to decide anything. We thrash out our problems well in advance, working in small queues and with a long history of spite as a background. The meeting is just to make everything legal. For the assemblage the meeting virtually was concentrated in the first thirty minutes of bloodletting. It began when one of the citizens, who we all knew was loaded for bear, rose to his feet, walked to the front, drew from his pocket a small but ominous sheet of paper, and in soft pacific tones began:

  “Mr. Moderator …”

  This was when democracy sat up and looked around. This was the spectacle the townfolk had walked miles for. Half way through the speech, when the air was heavy with distilled venom, my neighbor turned to me and whispered: “I get so excited here it makes me sick. I’ll commence to shake by and by.”

  At the conclusion of the barrage the First Selectman rose and returned the fire. Both men held the floor without yielding. There was no motion before the house—this was just pleasure before business. It had the heat and turmoil of the first Continental Congress without its nobility of purpose and purity of design. Old echoes of twenty years ago were awakened, old fires flared up and burned with original heat. At intervals there were bursts of applause when somebody scored a direct hit. At last the Moderator rapped with his gavel. Immediately the meeting settled down to business; cheerfully the taxpayers took up in rapid succession each article in the warrant and without a murmur voted the distribution of the twenty-five thousand dollars that, by dint of much scraping, we had managed to contribute to our community in the form of taxes. We had got our money’s worth in the first half hour’s skirmish—the rest was routine. You had to have roads and schools; that was all there was to that.

  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.

  [ April 1940 ]

  A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

  This is a day of high winds and extravagant promises, a day of bright skies and the sun on the white painted south sides of buildings, of lambs on the warm slope of the barnyard, their forelegs folded neatly and on their miniature faces a look of grave miniature content. Beneath the winter cover of spruce boughs the tulip thrusts its spear. A white hen is chaperoning thirteen little black chicks all over the place, showing them the world’s fair with its lagoons and small worms. The wind is northwest and the bay is on the march. Even on the surface of the watering fountain in the hen-yard quite a sea is running. My goose will lay her seventh egg today, in the nest she made for herself alongside the feed rack in the sheep shed, and on cold nights the lambs will lie on the eggs to keep them from freezing until such time as the goose decides to sit. It is an arrangement they have worked out among themselves—the lambs enjoying the comfort of the straw nest in return for a certain amount of body heat delivered to the eggs—not enough to start the germ but enough to keep the frost out. Things work out if you leave them alone. At first, when I found lambs sitting on goose eggs I decided that my farm venture had got out of hand and that I had better quit before any more abortive combinations developed. “At least,” I thought, “you’ll have to break up that nest and shift the goose.” But I am calmer than I used to be, and I kept clear of the situation. As I say, things work out. This is a day of the supremacy of warmth over cold, of God over the devil, of peace over war. There is still a little snow along the fence rows, but it looks unreal, like the icing of a store cake. I am conducting my own peace these days. It’s like having a little business of my own. People have quit calling me an escapist since learning what long hours I put in.

  Lambs come in March, traditionally and actually. My ewes started dropping their lambs in February, reached their peak of production in March, and now are dribbling into April. At the moment of writing, thirteen have lambed, two still await their hour. From the thirteen sheep I have eighteen live lambs—six sets of twins and six single lambs. April is the big docking and castrating month, and since I have named all my lambs for friends, I wield the emasculatome with a somewhat finer flourish than most husbandrymen. Tails come off best with a dull ax—the lambs bleed less than with a sharp instrument. I never would have discovered that in a hundred years, but a neighbor tipped me off. He also told me about black ash tea, without which nobody should try to raise lambs. You peel some bark from a black ash, steep it, and keep it handy in a bottle. Then when your lambs come up from the pasture at night frothing at the mouth, poisoned from a too sudden rush of springtime to the first, second, and third stomach, you just put the tea to them. It makes them drunk, but it saves their lives.

  That peerless organ of British pastoral life, The Countryman, published at Idbury, recently printed a list of ancient Celtic sheep-counting numerals. I was so moved by this evidence of Britain’s incomparable poise during her dark crisis that I gave the antique names to my fifteen modern ewes. They are called Yain, Tain, Eddero, Peddero, Pitts, Tayter, Later, Overro, Covvero, Dix, Yain-dix, Tain-dix, Eddero-dix, Peddero-dix, and Bumfitt. I think Yain is rather a pretty name. And I like Later, too, and Pitts. Bumfitt is a touch on the A. A. Milne side, but I guess it means fifteen all right. As a matter of fact, giving numerals for names is a handy system; I have named the ewes in the order of their lambing, and it helps me keep my records straight. Peddero-dix and Bumfitt are still fighting it out for last place.

  When I invested in a band of sheep last fall (they cost seven dollars apiece) I had no notion of what I was letting myself in for in the way of emotional involvements. I knew there would be lambs in spring, but they seemed remote. Lambing, I felt, would take place automatically and would be the sheep’s business, not mine. I forgot that sheep come up in late fall and join the family circle. At first they visit the barn rather cautiously, eat some hay, and depart. But after one or two driving storms they abandon the pasture altogether, draw up chairs around the fire, and settle down for the winter. They become as much a part of your group as your dog, or your Aunt Maudie. Our house and barn are connected by a woodshed, like the Grand Central Station and the Yale Club; and without stepping out of doors you can reach any animal on the place, including the pig. This makes for greater intimacy than obtains in a layout where each farm building is a separate structure. We don’t encourage animals to come into the house, but they get in once in a while, particularly the cosset lamb, who trotted through this living room not five minutes ago looking for an eight-ounce bottle. Anyway, in circumstances such as ours you find yourself growing close to sheep. You give them names not for whimsy but for convenience. And when one of them approaches her confinement you get almost as restless as she does.

  The birth of a mammal was once a closed book to me. Except for the famous “Birth of a Baby” picture and a couple of old receipted bills from an obstetrician, I was unacquainted with the more vivid aspects of birth. All that is changed. For the past six weeks I have been delivering babies with great frequency, moderate abandon, and no little success. Eighteen lambs from thirteen sheep isn’t bad. I lost one pair of twins—they were dropped the first week of February, before I expected them, and they chilled. I also lost a single lamb, born dead.

  A newcomer to the realm of parturition is inclined to err on the side of being too helpful. I have no doubt my early ministrations were as distasteful to the ewe as those of the average night nurse are to an expectant mother. Sheep differ greatly in their ability to have a lamb and to care for it. They also differ in their attitude toward the shepherd. Some sheep enjoy having you mincing around, arranging flowers and adjusting the window. Others are annoyed beyond words. The latter, except in critical cases, should be left to work out their problem by themselves. They usually get along. If you’ve trimmed the wool around their udders the day before with a pair of desk shears, the chances are ten to one they will feed their lambs all right when they arrive.

  At first, birth strikes one as the supreme example of bad planning—a thoroughly mismanaged and ill-advised functional process, something thought up by a dirty-minded fiend. It appears cluttery, haphazard. But after you have been mixed up with it for a while, have spent nights squatting beneath a smoky lantern in a cold horse stall helping a weak lamb whose mother fails to own it; after you have grown accustomed to the odd trappings and by-products of mammalian reproduction and seen how marvelously they contribute to the finished product; after you’ve broken down an animal’s reserve and have identified yourself with her and no longer pull your punches, then this strange phenomenon of birth becomes an absorbingly lustrous occasion, full of subdued emotion, like a great play, an occasion for which you unthinkingly give up any other occupation that might be demanding your attention. I’ve never before in my life put in such a month as this past month has been—a period of pure creation, vicarious in its nature, but extraordinarily moving.

  I presume that everything a female does in connection with birthing her young is largely instinctive, not rational. A sheep makes a hundred vital movements and performs a dozen indispensable and difficult tasks, blissfully oblivious of her role. Everything is important, but nothing is intelligent. Before the lamb is born she paws petulantly at the bedding. Even this is functional, for she manages to construct a sort of nest into which the lamb drops, somewhat to the lamb’s advantage. Then comes the next miraculous reflex. In the first instant after a lamb is dropped, the ewe takes one step ahead, turns, and lowers her head to sniff eagerly at her little tomato surprise. This step ahead that she takes is a seemingly trivial thing, but I have been thinking about it and I guess it is not trivial at all. If she were to take one step backward it would be a different story—she would step on her lamb, and perhaps damage it. I have often seen a ewe step backward while laboring, but I can’t remember seeing one take a backward step after her lamb has arrived on the ground. This is the second instinctive incident.

  The third is more important than either of the others. A lamb, newly born, is in a state of considerable disrepair; it arrives weak and breathless, with its nose plugged with phlegm or covered with a sac. It sprawls, suffocated, on the ground, and after giving one convulsive shake, is to all appearances dead. Only quick action, well-directed, will save it and start it ticking. The ewe takes this action, does the next important thing, which is to open the lamb’s nostrils. She goes for its nose with unerring aim and starts tearing off the cellophane. I can’t believe that she is intelligently unstoppering these air passages for her child; she just naturally feels like licking a lamb on the nose. You wonder (or I do, anyway) what strange directional force impels her to begin at the nose, rather than at the other end. A lamb has two ends, all right, and before the ewe gets through she has attended to both of them; but she always begins with the nose, and with almost frenzied haste. I suppose Darwin is right, and that a long process of hereditary elimination finally produced sheep that began cleaning the forward end of a lamb, not the after end. It is an impressive sight, no matter what is responsible for it. It is literally life-giving, and you can see life take hold with the first in-draught of air in the freed nostril. The lamb twitches and utters a cry, as though from a long way off. The ewe answers with a stifled grunt, her sides still contracting with the spasms of birth; and in this answering cry the silver cord is complete and takes the place of the umbilicus, which has parted, its work done.