Adventures in Contentment

He looked at me in astonishment, and with evident impatience at my consummate stupidity. "I am serious," I said. "I really want to make the best I can of my life. It's the only one I've got." "See here," he said: "let us say you clear up five hundred a year from this farm----" "You exaggerate--" I interrupted. "Do I?" he laughed; "that makes my case all the better. Now, isn't it possible to rise from that? Couldn't you make a thousand or five thousand or even fifty thousand a year?" It seems an unanswerable argument: fifty thousand dollars! "I suppose I might," I said, "but do you think I'd be any better off or happier with fifty thousand a year than I am now? You see, I like all these surroundings better than any other place I ever knew. That old green hill over there with the oak on it is an intimate friend of mine. I have a good cornfield in which every year I work miracles. I've a cow and a horse, and a few pigs. I have a comfortable home. My appetite is perfect, and I have plenty of food to gratify it. I sleep every night like a boy, for I haven't a trouble in this world to disturb me. I enjoy the mornings here in the country: and the evenings are pleasant. Some of my neighbours have come to be my good friends. I like them and I am pretty sure they like me. Inside the house there I have the best books ever written and I have time in the evenings to read them--I mean really read them. Now the question is, would I be any better off, or any happier, if I had fifty thousand a year?"