260 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



SO busy poring over them and lending to my neighbors that I have 

 rather delayed acknowledging their receipt, 



A young neighbor just beginning the charge of his father's 

 farm is very anxious for the ownership of three or four of your 

 latest volumes — for the last published one at the very least. Can 

 he be accommodated ? If so, please send whatever you may have 

 for him to our express office. 



May I make a suggestion, or, rather, ask a favor ? That is, 

 when the agricultural savants make their next report, will they 

 try to inspire such as we. who live on leachy — "thankless'' — so 

 called, soil ? Could they not find a few shining examples of 

 success on land located in some "Poverty Lane"? Examples of 

 those who have succeeded, on small farms perhaps, by a little 

 poultry-raising, bee-keeping, and the like, sticking to their legiti- 

 mate business, and not giving up the contest by going into the 

 shops, crying out that " farming don't pay ! " 



A neighbor who, I argue, don't appreciate his calling, has just 

 come in with one borrowed volume. He says that the reports of 

 '■Farms and Farming" from Woodstock, Middlesex, and other 

 counties, are all taken from " these big farms,'' telling what men 

 with means have accomplished. 



This friend's father, who lives next to us (a man over seventy, 

 of thrifty, energetic habits, and his wife of the close, calculating 

 sort), has always insisted that "no one about here can get rich 

 farming." Yet he raised nine of his eleven children, and gave 

 farms, as I have always understood it, to his two farmer sons, be- 

 sides nicely educating his two daughters and also a third son, now 

 a physician. 



"Oh ! Mr. 's children had some money left them," cries 



out one man in , who, because he failed to carry on his 



father's farm, claimed that farming is unprofitable. 



The youngest son, whom I referred to as wishing reports from 

 small farmers, jusc said to me : "Pa always said that he never 

 could have got along but for going into the wood business." 



In my opinion, he had unusual success ; whereas the calculat- 

 ing, wise, and wifely wife of the most progressive farmer in our 

 neighborhood begs him not to get so'deep into that business and 

 into tohacco, year after year. *S'Ae can see the poultry and other 

 farm leakages, in his vain attempts to shoulder too much. Nor 

 would she speak but for the sake of their boys, whose young lives 

 (but for their mother's efforts) would be one unbroken round of 

 toil — grinding work. 



Mr. Gold, I would not write so at length, but I have lived in 

 Connecticut over twenty-two years only to see our choice young 

 men driven oif to become ciphers in the city, or, finally, to lose 

 their health for working in the heated shops. The few who stay 

 tread in the old ruts of hard, grinding toil. The sons of the noble 

 mother just referred to never will follow the example of others — 

 groaning and growling over their poverty ; " too poor " for a little 



