348 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



If any of you are still in your grandfather's furrow, you are 

 more intent upon planting two acres more than you are of 

 planting one acre better. 



It is no mark of respect to your very respectable grandfather 

 that you still stick to the same old routine of farming. I know 

 it is a fact — at least I shall assume it so to be — that many of 

 you do; and there is the error I want to show you, and I don't' 

 want you to be too proud to acknowledge it. Though I like 

 pride — I would foster pride — I could take pride for a text, and 

 preach a sermon that you and I might be proud of ; and above 

 all things, I would have a farmer proud — ^very proud — and all 

 his family proud. What would a country be, without pride ? 

 What would a farmer be, without pride enough to improve? 

 What would the house be, what would the town be, if no one 

 took pride in altering, improving and keeping up with the on- 

 ward progress of the age? Without such pride, a man would 

 be as useless as a mushroom, which, if not plucked and eaten 

 at the nick of time, would rot upon the spot where it grew, and 

 sink back into the earth without leaving a mark of its existence. 

 We infer the character of a man from the appearance of his 

 premises. We form an opinion of the authorities of a town, 

 whether they belong to the Rip Van Winkle or Jabez Doolittle 

 family, by merely riding through the streets. The first, you 

 may recollect, slept away twenty years of his worthless life ; and 

 the other built the first locomotive, which, for aught we know, 

 is running yet, a.nd in time will run over old Rip, and waken 

 him from his second nap. I would therefore foster pride in the 

 farmer's breast, that he should not merely try, in a year of 

 famine like the one that threatened us last year, to plant one 

 more acre, but to plant all his acres better — to improve them so 

 that they would produce greater crops — to improve his premises 

 so that they would be the noted feature of the road. 



Wherever we see the fields badly tilled, the fences broken, 

 the buildings dilapidated, the dirt in heaps before the door, the 

 garden a wilderness of weeds, and the orchard an untrimmed 

 mass of brush, we turn away in disgust, and say to ourselves, 

 there is no pride ; that man, like a beggar, has got used to a 

 draggled skirt ; his mind is past repair ; his children are like 

 the weeds in his garden, growing up to scatter pernicious seed 

 over a fair land. That man may plant one acre more ; he will 



