132 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



once were cornfields and orchards, and houses that have been 

 honored homes, now dishonored and deserted, — k is well to 

 go to the root of the matter, uncover our mainsprings, find 

 out the why and wherefore, make a new survey of the road 

 we are travelling, and see whether our guide-posts are in 

 truth lamps of wisdom kindled by experience, or will-o'-the- 

 wisps of fasliion and indolent conservatism. 



To be logical and explicit, I assert that our farm-buildings 

 are pitifully below their present possibilities. 



How to give a fresh impulse, an upward and onward lift 

 toward changing this, is the question. 



Before setting out upon the hard, uninteresting turnpike 

 of practical details, let me refer to a familiar and most sig- 

 nificant fact. 



We read of people who awake some fine morning and find 

 themselves famous. 



We Americans awoke a short time ago, and found our- 

 selves artistic, or at least enthusiastically determined to 

 become so. Cheap chromos led the procession, and now fill 

 the air as the painted leaves fill the woods in October. 



Dados and draperies demand our admiration. The stork 

 is abroad in the land; Eastlake corners and angles assert 

 their rectitude; white china is dismissed in disgrace, not 

 because it shows dirt, but because it does not show peacocks' 

 plumes, butterflies, and poppies. 



House and sign painters are exhorted to compound impos- 

 sible hues for the outside of our buildings. Freehand draw- 

 ing has become a part of public instruction ; and the boy, 

 who, when we Avere young, would have been whipped for 

 making pictures on his slate in school-time, and caricaturing 

 the master on the fly-leaf of his " Webster's Speller," is the 

 favorite pupil, specially detailed to embellish the blackboard 

 for examination-day with his sketches. 



What is more to the point, the "fine art" department 

 in the country fairs no longer consists solely of monochro- 

 matic drawings in leather-work frames, but ranges from 

 original landscapes in oil to antique vases modelled in native 

 clay. 



Some of us are sceptical of new things, remembering how 

 the latest and best runs through the land like a breezy flame 

 through a field of stubble, leaving a handful of useful ashes 

 behind it, — blue glass, Colorado beetles, "Pinafore." 



