FARMING REMINISCENCES. 3 



medicine, and a larger, longer lived growth of men and women 

 than in these degenerate days of luxury and " progress." 



Success attended agricultural labor, and the farmers were 

 aware of their dominant position — a position their numerical 

 strength always enables them to maintain when they will. 

 When in 1633, the all potent magistrates declared it " lawful 

 for any man to kill any swine that comes into his corne," the 

 yeomen raised their backs. A convention of two delegates 

 from each town, (the first convention which ever met on this 

 continent,) assembled and called for a sight of the royal charter. 

 Examining it, they resolved that the right to make laws rested 

 not with the magistrates, but with the freemen ; nor did they 

 cease their exertions until they established the law-making and 

 money-raising power of the general court, in 1634. The sacred 

 flame of Massacluisetts freedom was thus first fed by lard oil! 

 It was probably some offending porker which had taken liberties 

 with Governor Endicott's garden, or had damaged Mr. Win- 

 throp's lawn with his insinuating snout, which thus formed the 

 germ of our popular institutions, and the parent of that august 

 body which has so ungratefully adopted a cod-fish as its 

 emblem ! 



At the first session of the " general court," (which only 

 lasted three days,) " the regulations respecting trespassing 

 swine — the immediate cause of the late political change — were 

 repealed, and this matter was left to the several towns. It 

 proved, however, an embarrassing subject and was often after- 

 ward before the court. The next year — 1635 — the practice 

 of impounding stray animals was introduced, much the same as 

 exists at present. The year after, a special officer, called a 

 ' hog-reave,' was ordered to be elected in each town, to look 

 after those animals ; but frequent changes afterward in the law 

 upon this subject, showed how difficult it was to reconcile the 

 conflicting interests of the corn growers and the pig owners. 

 A small matter this for history, but why smaller than other like 

 conflicts of interest, of which so much of our politics consist." 



One of the first, if not the very first agricultural patent 

 issued in this country, was granted by this general court, over 

 two hundred years ago, for " an engine for the more speedy 

 cutting of grass," which is undoubtedly the first mowing 

 machine on record, though there is no record that it was of any 



