Summary
A cash-strapped couple, suffocating beneath the smothering tariffs of urban indulgence—eggs at a king’s ransom, butter gilded in usury, milk ladled out like liquid debt—barter their brick-and-mortar cage for a patch of earth advertised as Eden. What they inherit is a slapstick crucible: a recalcitrant cow with the timing of a Buster Keaton prop, hens orchestrating mutiny at dawn, and soil that opens like a bad novel, page after page of pratfalls. Their agrarian dream, sketched on the back of a grocer’s receipt, collapses into a carnival of leaking pails, wayward feathers, and bills still arriving by mail, proving that the cost of living is not a place but a contagion.
Synopsis
The Brewsters are at their wits' end to solve the problems of the high cost of living. In an endeavor to reduce their household expenses, they have discharged their cook, but somehow it costs them just as much to live. With eggs at a dollar and ten cents a dozen, butter at ninety cents a pound and milk at twenty cents a quart, the Brewsters find themselves slowly but surely being driven into bankruptcy. Brewster reasons it all out to his own satisfaction. He is paying three prices for his food- to the producer, the wholesaler and to the retail dealer. The obvious way to cut down expenses, according to the Brewster idea, is the farm. Why not be a farmer and live for nothing? It's a great idea, and Brewster proceeds to carry it out in a practical way. He trades his city home for a farm with a cow and chickens on it and begins operations immediately. What Brewster doesn't know about milking cows, raising chickens and doing farm chores, would fill a big volume. Mrs. Brewster's knowledge of farming is on a par with her husband's, so their attempt to make a self-supporting institution out of their farm ends in a fiasco, but a comical one nevertheless.
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