40 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



how your acres can be rendered more productive than a mine 

 of California gold. He relates how on a long voyage the only 

 volumes he could find in the cahin, were the Useful Knowl- 

 edge Society's two volumes on British Husbandry ; how he read 

 and re-read them, and became so much fascinated by the sub- 

 ject, that when he reached land, he was given over by the 

 faculty as a professed book-farmer ; how he became the owner 

 of a farm in a dismal clayey district, which one tenant after 

 another had left in despair, till it was at last abandoned to its 

 own rushes and sedges, a dreary, marshy waste. He proceeds 

 in a most humorous strain, giving us conversations between 

 himself and his practical neighbors, who laughed at him ; 

 firstly, for dreaming of making any thing of the old farm ; 

 secondly, for his outlandish mode of going to work ; — plain 

 men of common sense, they could not understand how any 

 thing good could come of analyzing soils and scientifically 

 repairing mud, " Men, who could not understand these books, 

 and so, 'twas no iise trying. A lot of chemistry and stuff — 

 they would back conunon sense against chemistry, any day." 

 He tells us how he attacked the lion in his den, and laid a sys- 

 tem of draining tiles at a depth varying from eighteen inches 

 to three feet ; how he subsoiled it, ploughing to the depth of 

 ten or twelve inches. Here is a page of the pleasant little 

 book : — 



" ' A queer lot, this, sir.' ' Well, it is queer,' replied I, as 

 the drainer threw out first a lump of blue clay, then a lump of 

 red, then a horrible spadeful of white, then a dripping mass of 

 yellow sand, then a kind of grey gravelly conglomerate, that 

 had puzzled the very pickaxe whose delicate style of dissection 

 had been brought to bear upon it ; then a few spadefuls of 

 beautifully veined red marl, and then broke into a carbonifer- 

 ous looking bed of black peat, and then — but let the old drainer 

 christen it, for my heterology is exhausted. ' A queer lot, this, 

 sir.' ' What shall I do with it ?' I stood for a moment melo- 

 dramatically silent, working up my courage to a great effort. 

 Out it came at last. ' Let it he spread over the land.'' He was 

 just raising his face to look up in mine. I knew what was 

 coming ; I caught one side of his mouth screwing into an agony 

 of contortion, as the idea loomed painfully, by degrees, upon his 

 pcrcej)tions. I waited for no more, but turned quietly round, 



