I30 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



Native New England men and women of today, whose parents 

 settled in the woods a century or two ago, come from a founda- 

 tion stock of which any man may well be proud, for they had 

 no superior on earth. 



During the last half century times have changed. The old 

 environment has gone. The ox has given place to the horse. 

 All the world has moved forward. The New Englander is 

 better fed, better clothed, better housed, and better educated than 

 ever before. He has learned how to spend, but he has not 

 learned equally well how to earn. This will be more true as the 

 years go by, for as he develops, his wants will increase and those 

 wants must be supplied from the old farms which his fathers 

 wrested from the forest and upon which they grew crops at little 

 cost until the brown soil rebelled at the robbery practiced upon 

 it. Many of our brothers sought fresh soils or other vocations 

 with the promise of better returns for their expenditures of 

 brawn and brain. Those of us who remained at home groped 

 in the dark for many years. We labored and studied and tried 

 to regain the lost fertility, but with indifferent results. This 

 was the first period of self-imposed agricultural education among 

 the farmers of the East. It was not a matter of choice, but of 

 necessity. 



Agricultural literature was crude and limited. The text-book 

 which the farmer's necessities prompted him to study more than 

 any other was the living cow. For many years she was for the 

 most part a sealed book to him and he was barely able to read 

 her beyond the title page. The binding was not of morocco but 

 of raw hide, and it was generally thicker and firmer during cold 

 weather, when food was coarse and dry, than when succulent 

 pasture grasses abounded in the summer's sunshine, for this boot 

 of ours was a living creature, and she had been a constant com- 

 panion of our fathers — in different editions — ever since they 

 landed at Plymouth, at our beginning. 



The cow, brought into the wilderness by the first settlers, was 

 subjected to all the hardships endured by her master's family. 

 To a great extent she was her own caretaker. In winter the 

 New Englander tied his cow in his cold barn during nights and 

 stormy days, and fed her on straw, corn fodder and dry hay, 

 and watered her at the running brook, or ice bound trough. She 

 naturally brought forth her young in spring, as had her wild 



