FARM LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 41 



same stock as ourselves. We have been bred pure for generations, 

 and show the results all summed up in one comprehensive word, which 

 I admire because it is the synonym for energy, push, determination, 

 general good character, and crowning of patriotism in the term 

 Yankee. 



Farm life here presents many advantages over other sections that 

 -should determine the future of many who are seeking to enhance 

 their benefits. Let us arrange them in position and see if they will 

 he overthrown. In the first place we have what is called '"a natural 

 grass country," and if stock feeding is the basis of agriculture, grass 

 is the basis of stock ; 30U may say New P^ngland has literally gone 

 to grass, but as long as she derives a profit from it, it is all right. 

 We have the advantage of an abundance of pure water, none better 

 anywhere, — and in these temperance days in Maine this fact ought 

 to be appreciated. If the law which has had such a good effect 

 here should be enacted in many sections of the West, it would fill 

 the people with perplexity and mineral salts, for in many places it 

 is so highly charged with them, as to render it distasteful and in- 

 jurious to both men and animals. We present the evidence of older 

 settlement, roads are laid out and constructed, and streams bridged 

 and paid for, school houses and churches erected and paid for, hos- 

 pitals and other elemosynaiy establishments in systematic opera- 

 tion, and paid for, buildings required by civil forms of govern- 

 ment long ago erected and paid for. New countries must construct 

 these for themselves, they cannot go without. There is no other 

 way of obtaining them than by a total new construction, and no 

 other way of paying for them excepting through taxation. This 

 tax for roads and bridges, tax for school houses, contributions for 

 <3hurches, tax for hospitals, dispensaries, orphan, deaf and dumb, 

 aud insane asylums, court houses, jails, state prisons, &c., &c., is 

 to my mind a complete offset to cheap lands and imperfect shelter, 

 and I assure you that my mathematical education was not neglected 

 in my early years ; had it been, I should have been a dweller in the 

 West rather than the East. 



Our rugged hills, which we. as farmers object to, are in reality 

 blessings, for all Yankees are not farmers, and in the search for 

 maintainance thej' have caught the boisterous streams as the}' come 

 bounding and hurr3iag down the steep valleys and confined them in 

 stout dams, compelling them to turn huge water wheels as the priee 

 of freedom, and thus endow with life the curious machinery that 



