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      Ptolemy Proudfoot was nothing if not a farmer.  His work was farming, his study and passion were farming, his pleasures and his social life occurred in the intervals between farm jobs and in the jobs themselves.  He was not an ambitious farmer - he did not propose to own huge acreage or to become rich - but merely a good and gifted one.  By the time he was twenty-five, he had made a down payment on a little farm that he husbanded and improved all his life.  It was a farm of ninety-eight acres, and Tol never longed even for the two acres more that would have made it a hundred.
-Wendell Berry, A Consent