Letters from an American Farmer

A chair is bolted to the beam of the plough so that the farmer's small son can ride along the furrow, and this, the letters insist, is what happiness looks like: bees in the orchard, swallows in the barn, a poor European turned landholder in a single generation. Farmer James writes it all down for a gentleman in England, and no one has ever made the American promise sound so much like an actual life rather than a slogan, or asked its famous question, what is an American, with such open wonder. Then he walks out to dine with a planter near Charleston and finds a cage hung in a tree with a living man inside it, blinded by birds, begging for water. He gives him water and can do nothing else. Nothing in the book recovers from that cage, and nothing is meant to. By the last letter the war has reached the farm, and the happiest man alive is preparing to abandon it and take his wife and children to live in an Indian village.