Adventures in Contentment

Ray Stannard Baker was an American journalist who used the pen name David Grayson. After law school he worked as a journalist in 1892 with the Chicago News-Record, where he covered the Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army in 1894. He wrote a nine-volume series of stories about rural living in America, the first of which was titled "Adventures in Contentment" under the pseudonym David Grayson. The narrator describes his stifling life in the city before he moved to the country. His life changed for the better when he left the buried life behind. "It was as though, concerned with plow and harness and furrow, I had never known that the world had height or colour or sweet sounds, or that there was _feeling_ in a hillside. I forgot myself, or where I was. I stood a long time motionless. My dominant feeling, if I can at all express it, was of a strange new friendliness, a warmth, as though these hills, this field about me, the woods, had suddenly spoken to me and caressed me. It was as though I had been accepted in membership, as though I was now recognised, after long trial, as belonging here."