FOURTH DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 283 



half enough farmers. I advise you to produce potatoes rather than 

 pills or pleas." The Lord deliver you from boys and girls who are 

 ashamed of the farmer's vocation and afraid to work. The rearing 

 of such a family is a worse speculation than Mr. Beecher's hogs were 

 on his model farm at Peekskill. He bought the original hog for a 

 dollar and a half, fed him forty dollars worth of corn, and then sold 

 him for about nine dollars. He said that was the only crop he ever 

 made any money on. He lost on the corn but made seven dollars 

 and a half on the hog, and as for the corn, he didn't expect to make 

 anything on the corn anyway; and then he had the excitement of 

 raising the hogs whether he made anything on them or not. So of 

 these ornamental sons and daughters who think a professional or 

 city life superior to that of the farm — all that is made by rearing 

 them is the excitement of the thing, and it is terribly exciting too 

 sometimes when the farm has to be mortgaged to pay their tailor or 

 millinery bills. 



One way it seems to us to induce the boys to stay on the farm and 

 the girls to be attached to farm life, is for every rural_ home to be 

 made as attractable as possible. How many farm houses in California 

 stand out white, glaring, and ghastly as a heap of bones on the desert, 

 with no shrub, shade tree, lawn, or flower garden to remove its 

 barrenness. Let not the farm be a mere workshop with only sordid 

 associates. Make your home too beautiful and too sacred and too 

 permanent to be tempted from you by a stranger's money. 



Build up homes that you and your children will never part with, 

 houses around which shall cluster a thousand dear associations, 

 making them to you and to them the dearest spots on earth. Li such 

 homes will all the domestic virtues blossom and bear fruit, and from 

 them blessed streams of influence flow out through whole commu- 

 nities. I close with the sentiment of a poet farmer: 



" No dread of toil have we or ours; 

 The more we work the more we win ; 

 We know our worth, we weigh our powers. 



Success to trade, success to spade, and the wheat that's coming in. 

 And joy to liim who o'er his task 

 Remembers toil is Nature's plan, 

 Who working thinks, and never sinks 

 His independence as a man." 



