400 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Of all bores, the worst is he who brings his pills, and plasters, and powders 

 into the family room ; who expects the world to stop and listen when he sneezes, 

 and who thinks his rheumatism a national concern. How much better to keep 

 one's trouble to himself ! If a husband is not kind a wife frets; the home is 

 not pleasant ; friends are not cordial ; corns ache and joints creak, and things 

 seem to be going generally wrong ; just bury your sorrow. The place for sad 

 and disgusting things is under ground. A sad man, full of sorrow and grief, 

 and dying for sympathy, poured his tales of woe into the ears of a tender- 

 hearrted druggist. "This will drive thoughts of sorrow and bitter recollection 

 from your mind," said the tender-hearted vender of cures, and put him up a 

 little dose of quinine and wormwood, and rhubarb and Epsom salts, and a dash 

 of castor oil, and that man forgot his sorrows and couldn't think of any thing 

 in the world except new schemes for getting the taste out of his mouth. 



But even if pater familias is generous, jovial, genial; is willing to recognize 

 woman as his equal, and all that poetry about man's being the oak and woman 

 the ivy, as stale, flat, and untrue ; never showing his teeth when he is asked 

 for ten cents for hairpins or a new gum-ring for the new baby; — if the wife and 

 mother is tidy, industrious, welcoming home tired workers with a smile full 

 of sunbeams, and a table full of good victuals; able to make her toilet with- 

 out decorations of oxydized spiders, crabs, tarantulas, horsehoes, crocodiles, 

 bees, dragon-flies, garter-snakes, shrimps, snails, grasshoppers, graceful eels, 

 and pale-eyed oysters ; — if the younger ladies are well versed in farm-house 

 economies; radiant in unconscious beauty, the result of no cosmetics; no eyes 

 brightened by belladonna, nor cheeks reddened by rouge, nor neck and shoulders 

 whitened by pearl powder, nor hands dipped in amandine ; beauty not of puffs, 

 patches, ready-made blushes and artificial lightening, but the roseate beauty 

 of useful employment of a father's tenderness or a mother's love, and of inti- 

 mate converse with nature, beauty unadorned adorned the most; if their hap- 

 piness does not demand 



" Dentine, coaline, bandoline, vaseline, 

 Grenadine, bombazine, cosmoline, gasoline;" 



if they know chicken from turkey, and butter from oleomargarine ; if they 

 avoid onions, or after partaking of that wholesome, nutritious, but strongly 

 flavored vegetable, seek for a time the solitude of their private apartments ; 

 if the boys are models of manliness, never grunting at mother or sisters, nor 

 assuming superiority, nor getting mad if they aren't praised, nor being so 

 mean as to fill the parlor wood-box with green black-ash wood Sunday night, 

 nor telling your beaux what you've said about them, and always showing a 

 profound reverence for petticoat government, and feminine intelligence, — with 

 all these, home education, and a reasonable attention to the finer amenities, 

 may make marvelous improvements in the quality of home. 



Some of the most precious parts of education and development are not 

 acquired from books. How do men acquire that practical wisdom called 

 experience, or develop that shrewd, solid, practical faculty called common- 

 sense? Not so much by books, academies, and the appliances of study, as by 

 intercourse with others, and the training of everyday life ; by the indirect 

 culture and discipline of the street, store, market, church ; the constant com- 

 munication with the many-sided world; but especially, is this poured by home 

 influences into the heart and intellect. 



Mary A. Livermore in a recent address said: "The boy of to-day is not 

 receiving the proper home culture. Children slip away from paternal care. 



