AGRICULTURE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 15 



is not more acres, but better crops. We must acquire posses- 

 sion towards the centre, not towards the circumference of 

 the earth. Cut feed and roots from a few acres will do it. 

 "A little farm well tilled," — to say nothing of the remaining 

 line, so admirable, — is better than a large one poorly scratched. 

 The desolation of the old way of tillage has starved to emigra- 

 tion the rising generation. One son remains, perhaps, on the 

 homestead ; the other three, more or less, are away, seeking 

 their fortunes. One has gone to Pike's Peak, to return as 

 peaked as a pike. Another is distributing hand-bills of menage- 

 ries, holding stirrups for circus riders, or cleaning harnesses in 

 hostelries. The third, most pitiable of all, with white kids, 

 French boots and ratan, submits to the perplexed barber the 

 thinly scattered down on his white cheeks and lips, in the pre- 

 sumptuous hope that a respectable beard can be made to grow, 

 or a tolerable moustache sprouted on his thin soil ! The old 

 farm should rather .have been divided into three or four, and 

 improved culture would have made each new third or fourth, 

 better than the old whole. My observation, and it has not been 

 limited, from the great wheat fields and cornfields of the West, 

 in which 1 have ridden from morning till night, at the rate of 

 twenty-five miles an hour without reaching the other side of 

 them, to my own farm sixty feet by ninety, — my observation has 

 convinced me that the evil of New England farming is that 

 there is too much soil tormented, I will not say tilled. Ten 

 acres well tilled, under the guidance of intelligence, would be 

 more productive than some one hundred and fifty acre farms 

 now are. It is better to raise one hundred and sixty bushels of 

 corn from two acres than from ten. Or ninety-two bushels of 

 oats, (like Mr. Henry Kendall, of Barre,) from one acre than 

 from three. It is pleasanter to do it, as well as less labor. It 

 is as well to raise twenty-five or thirty -bushels of wheat on an 

 acre as to so timidly distribute the crop that you may shoot 

 quails in it without hitting or hazarding a stalk. Diminish the 

 quantity, increase the quality of your soil. 



I know it is expensive to purchase fertilizers, but it more 

 than pays. Once commenced, the more you spend the more 

 you obtain. It is poor economy to diminish the expenses which 

 enrich the soil. Indeed, improved soil, not money at interest, 

 is what the farmer should seek. In ten years, if you please, he 



