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.