50 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



The farmer of the present time is noticeable as coupling with 

 the weightier works of his profession an idea of the tasteful and 

 bi autiful, to an extent far beyond his predece sors. This may 

 b,' seen in the architecture of his buildings; the paint that 

 covers thorn: the trees and shrubb tv that shade them, and the 

 grounds that surround them. The barns of many a man in our 

 Commonwealth arc better than the house in which he was born, 

 and his good father died. He has come to consider it more 

 respectable as well as pleasant, to look from his front door upon 

 the highway and his fields beyond, beneath a row of maples or 

 elms which woo the breeze and splinter the sunbeam, than 

 formerly, when the broad lawn lay unshaded and shimmering 

 in the heat of noon. 



Moreover, his front prospect has been greatly improved by 

 the removal to the rear, of the barns, sheds, and manure heaps, 

 that once constituted the frontispiece of the view from his parlor 

 windows ; and a tidy, gravelled walk, bordered by heliotropes, 

 verbenas and geraniums, conducts the visitor to the entrance 

 beneath the honeysuckle and the woodbine. He feels a conscious 

 pride, as he walks among the well-pruned and duly nursed trees 

 of his fruit-yard, whose grateful burden welcomes his gaze and 

 gratifies his palate. Nor is it at all disagreeable, when his day's 

 work is over, to feed his imagination with the prospect of many 

 barrels of the choicest products of his grafted orchard, whose 

 presence in market is to tempt the townsman's pockets and line 

 his own. The stumps and stone-heaps that scarred and sprinkled 

 his meadows, have yielded to the purifying influences of his 

 taste, and the broad, smooth green of his grass-lands offers 

 now no obstruction to the clean sweep of the scythe. That 

 swamp, so scrupulously shunned by his ancestors, offends the 

 eye no longer; its dead-sunken hemlocks and mazes of under- 

 growth have capitulated to the axe, the bog-hoe, and the fire ; 

 and an efficient drain has showed its stagnant waters a decent 

 way out of the premises into a neighboring stream. The ancient, 

 rickety stun.' walls of the farm arc righted up, plumbed, and 

 largely reinforced by boulders from the surface ground adjoin- 

 ing. In short, wherever the nature of a work naturally rude 

 will admit an approximation of smoother touches, they are 

 bestowed, and even an extra finish occasionally volunteered, as 

 in case of a beautiful bird-house that overlooks his garden, 



