THE FARMER'S ERRORS. 357 



If yoTi please, sir,— I mean you over there, — don't turn away, 

 or cock up your nose, and look just as though you wanted to 

 say, " Ridiculous ! What fools ! Why don't they use ploughs ? 

 Have they no carts to carry their grain ? " Go right home, sir, 

 and look in the glass, and say, " Who is the fool — the stuhborn, 

 unimproving dolt, that is just as far behind his neighbors as the 

 South Carolina negro is behind me V" Put that question to 

 yourself. Acknowledge your own errors. You were cutting 

 your rye and oats this very year with a cradle — a very poor one 

 at that — while your neighbor's reaping machine swept down 

 his fields one after another, cutting acres faster than you, cut 

 rods. You did not cut wheat, because you did not sow the 

 seed ; and you did not sow, because " they say" — noted author- 

 ity with you — that wheat won't grow any more in Massachu- 

 setts. " They say," is a great liar. Plant it, sir, and feed it, 

 and it will grow. You cut your grain with a cradle. It is ten 

 chances to one that you intend to thresh it with a flail. I sup- 

 pose you will winnow it in a machine, but it will be a borrowed 

 one. 



You were half frightened, half perplexed, and wholly vexed, 

 a dozen times this summer, and scolded not a little about the 

 intolerable noise of your neighbor's mowing machine ; and de- 

 clared — just as the fox did abou-t the grapes — that you would 

 not have one upon your farm ; that is what you wouldn't. So 

 you ground your scythes — the boys in their hearts cursed the 

 grindstone — and went to your mowing, declaring that no mow- 

 ing machine could work upon stony ground ; and yet you dulled 

 your cutter twice to its once; and finally, because you did not, 

 for you would not, cut your grain and grass in good time, you 

 lost nearly enough to pay for a machine, by the long rainy sea- 

 son that came on too soon for you. 



Still you are not quite so stupid as the hoe-digging slave, or 

 so wilfully unimproving as the shovel-ploughing cotton planter ; 

 because you have come here to-day to see how far ahead of you 

 your neighbors are in improvement, and you sit tolerably pa- 

 tient while you are told of your errors, and by and by you will 

 begin to acknowledge your faults, and then you will correct 

 them. I am aware that it is not a very pleasant thing to be 

 told of our faults, particularly by a stranger. But I beg to say, 

 that I did not come here to find fault : I am not finding fault 



