104 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



that lie got the lull proportion of bran to his bread and but- 

 ter ; for however independent or oven reckless a republican 

 citizen may be in the matter of diet, it stands your royal 

 family in hand to nurture the su]iply of muscles of the lusti- 

 est peasantry, or their royalty would soon come to an end. 



That there is a fine, lively spirit in rye is an old idea that 

 our forefathers were too full of, and the quack medicine vend- 

 ers have not forgotten. It remains for this generation to 

 prove that this spirit is best, every way, when extracted by 

 the natural processes of digestion. It is not necessary to stim- 

 ulate the growth of this grain because of any real scarcity. 

 How many thousand bushels of it we are worse than wasting, 

 the distillers know very well. And this sin of misuse is one 

 of those which has been well designated as unpardonable. Its 

 punishment has no atonement, cannot be avoided, and will 

 mainly assist in bringing us to repentance. There are not, 

 I hope, many old women left in the land now, who will con- 

 fess that they could " never bear rye as bread, but who can 

 manage to worry dowm a little of it when made into whiskey." 



That was a proud day when I was first set to plow for i-ye. 

 The " system" pursued on my father's farm in my boyhood is 

 not altogether in disuse yet, and may be worth describing. It 

 might fairly be called a "' four-course system." There were 

 four old fields, of from sixteen to twenty-five acres each — all 

 of which were liable to be seeded with pines, birches, or 

 moss — and one of which was plowed annually, in rotation, for 

 rye. The others atlorded sparse forage for a hundred sheep, 

 or so. Such a thing as applying manure to the land, or 

 grass-seed, was no more thought of than of scattering such 

 things upon the mill-pond in winter. Of course fertility was 

 at a low ebb, except under the shade of the great oaks that 

 attested the former strength of the soil, and upon the knolls 

 where the sheep left their droppings. The game was to take 

 from the land the cream that had risen, so to speak, in four 

 years' rest, and set it for cream again. Rye was the handiest 

 and surest skimmer to do it with. I never heard of harm 

 coming to a crop of rye upon our sandy old fields where the 

 subsoil is porous, but twice in sixty years. Once our rye was 



