212 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



find time to learn the penman's art. — The old well-sweep, with its long, bent 

 back, showed near the house and swinging upon tlie pendant pole hangs the 

 famous " moss-covered bucket," that sometimes brought up a live frog or a 

 dead toad from the stone-lined well. At the end of the house stood the great 

 rain trough, and near by a bench, where on a summer morning ranges of tin- 

 ware shone in the sun. Two rows of sweet pinks bordered in summer the 

 straight foot-path that led from the door down to the bars at the road. A bush 

 of lilac sweetened the air in spring, and in June a rose bush or an eg'antine 

 smiled with fragrant blossoms into the front window to cheer the brisk-stepping- 

 mother in her homespun and to call from her throat now and then a snatch of 

 old-fashioned song. This was a plain, simple, laborious mode of life, but tiiose 

 who lived it were pleased with simple joys. They loved their homes and their 

 God and they were ready to defend their country or their faith, and the chil- 

 dren they bred and reared became a stalw .rt generation. Tnere is a sore of 

 halo about the picture which attracts us like a painting or a story or a song of 

 the olden times; but none of us would be long satisfied to return to those early 

 ways. 



iSTow let us look at the reverse ])icture. Those old pioneers who settled Michi- 

 gan between the twenties and forties are mostly passed away, and their children 

 and grandchildren are in their places, perhaps on the same old farm that was 

 reclaimed from the forest by so many sturdy ax-strokes, so much of hard- 

 ship and of privation. 



The plowmen of to-day may ride a sulky plow, or at least turn the even 

 furrows with improved chilled iron and steel plows that the inventor and the 

 mechanic have provided. Jethro Tull, a Berkshire farmer of England, a 

 hundred and eighty years ago invented a seed drill, and as a reward both he 

 and his son after liini died impoverished in a debtors' prison. With one of 

 these drills improved and at last in common use, the farmer of to-day sows his- 

 fields. Eighteen centuries ago a grain reaper, or "header," was pushed by a 

 harnessed ox in the grain fields on the plains of Gaul: this machine revived and 

 improved and brought into general use by the Virginian McCormick our modern 

 farmer rides, as an ancient hero upon his war chariot, over ten to twenty acres 

 a day, where- our grandfathers toiled slowly and wearily with sickle or graia 

 cradle. Instead of beating out his wheat with the slow flail and winnowing it 

 with the Mirch winds our farmer of to-day threshes and cleans a thousand 

 bushels in a couple of days by the aid of one of those inventions which the 

 Scotchman, Meikle, thought out just a hundred years ago. And this machine 

 is turned by the tireless iron arms of the steam engine, perfected and rendered 

 practicable by James Watt scarcely more than a hundred years ago. Instead 

 of carting his wheat to market, as of yore, over long and heavy roads, the 

 freight car, drawn by the locomotive, which Stevenson invented sixty years ago, 

 comes almest to his door and carries away a whole crop at a single load. The 

 grain is ground into flour by the new patent roller process and is hurried off to 

 the hungry mouths of Europe on one of those steam-ships which Fulton set 

 afloat in 1806. 



Instead of bending wearily while he hacks and hoes among the weeds and stones 

 of an acre of "squaw corn" as our grandfathers did, this farmer of to-day cultivates 

 his fifty acres with less manual labor by means of one of those horse cultivators 

 which that same p( ov Tull died in prison for inventing. Instead of shelling out a 

 little corn for meal by the aid of a fork tine and a shovel blade, he makes use of a 

 machine given forty years ago by the inventor and the mechanic and which will 

 do the work a hundred times as fast. He has horse barns and cattle and sheep 



