270 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



ers always — like bell-wether sheep in a new pasture — will be con- 

 tinually pushing their noses into all sorts of unlikely places while 

 trying to get out of it. But the common people are beginning to 

 see — some think they always have seen — in a speechless way, how 

 " the kingdom of heaven is at hand." 



Where so much neglected land as there is in our country lies 

 begging a better owner, the proper size of a farm depends chiefly 

 upon the locality and the strength and method of its management. 

 A poor pasture stingily managed and poverty-stricken often seems 

 too small to the owner, while he might be far richer with the price 

 of one half sold to a good neighbor and spread in manure upon the 

 half retained. To sell the half of one's land to a bad neighbor 

 might leave the remainder, under the new and unpleasant condi- 

 tions, far too large for comfort. 



If we live by skinning land in " cultivation," so called, then we 

 should be glad of a fresh field for the plow every year ; or if we 

 skin a large part to intensify the production of a smaller part, we 

 may wish, if we have strength to skin much, to double our acreage 

 for skinning, in order to increase the acres under intense culture. 



Where skillful gardening enters, and land is dear while manure 

 is cheap, there the profit lies in deep acres — acres that are four 

 times as good because they are only one-quarter as thin as they 

 were before, and are now capable of two or three crops a year, 

 where skill — one form of strength — is plenty and the market is 

 hungry for produce. 



It is a hint for us who are not farmers and still wish well towards 

 agriculture, that farmers are not as generous as they used to be. 

 They have little to contribute for benevolent purposes. Some 

 pretend to think they are not as honest as they used to be. They 

 can't pay their debts, and the village dealer declares " their trade 

 don't amount to shucks." 



This is a true bill in some places. The. farmer don't give, may 

 be, because the beggarly land around him exhausts all his power of 

 giving. The intense farmer suffers intensely with the mute pov- 

 erty of his soil. Don't mistrust his honesty if he deals honestly 

 with that, for there, in the ground, is where honesty and dis- 

 honesty begins. We have raked together some shining cities and 

 villages in Connecticut during 200 years of occupation, and their 

 poverty-stricken surroundings show very often where the concen- 

 trated wealth came from. Not all the dishonesty of this abstrac- 



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