FARMING IN NEW ENGLAND. 335 



flower and the plant in the garden speak the language of ma- 

 ternal affection. The tree whicli grows up with tliem is a com- 

 panion not easily forgotten. The family joys, and it may be 

 the family sorrows, are associated with them all. 



These improvements so desirable to our community must be 

 left in a great degree to the individual. The public taste may 

 be improved, and to this end much is due to the efforts of our 

 horticultural societies. In this respect we have seen a most 

 wonderful change during the last thirty years. The exhibition 

 of to-day is the best evidence of it, comprising as it docs a 

 variety of fruits and flowers taken from your own gardens, 

 such as the whole county could not have furnished twenty years 

 ago. Many who hear me may recollect the horticultural 

 department of our exhibition at that time, whicli consisted 

 substantially of a few mammoth squashes, some overgrown 

 beets, and half a dozen long cucumbers. This is real and sub- 

 stantial progress, and creates a new cause of attachment to 

 the land we love and make our home. 



It is said that the New Englander, though fond of roaming 

 the world over, and trying his fortune in every land, yet always 

 retains a strong attachment to the land of his birth and her 

 institutions. It is natural that it should be so. It has always 

 been the land of the brave, and is now the home of the free — 

 and God grant that it may always be so. If during the two 

 hundred and thirty years since her settlement she has been able, 

 amidst all the obstacles which beset her path, to subdue the 

 wilderness and plant her institutions of learning and religion 

 upon every hill-top, what may we not hope for in the future! 

 The cultivation of her soil has hardly yet begun. Add two 

 hundred and thirty years more to her history, and her whole 

 soil will have become as a garden and her waste places will all 

 have disappeared. 



An early historian of Massachusetts informs us that the only 

 regret felt by the first settlers, at their approaching dissolution, 

 was that they could not live to see the future glory of New 

 England. May not we — nay, may not many generations which 

 shall come after us — express the same regret, and not live to 

 see its greatest and noblest triumphs ? 



