40G STATE BOAKD OP AGRICULTURE. 



HOW SHALL THE BOYS BE KEPT ON THE FARM? 



E. J. MAC EWAN. 

 [Spoken at Armada, Farmington, Jeddo, and Trent Institutes.] 



To the professor whose regular work does not demand that he shall go 



"Poking his nose into tliis thing or that, 



At a gnat, or a bat, or a cat, or a rat. 



Or great ugly things, all legs and wings, 



With nasty long tails armed with nasty long stings. 



Or pore by the hour o'er a weed or a flower. 



Or the slugs that come crawling out after a shower," 



the selection of a suitable subject and the preparation or the process of turn- 

 ing sauerkraut into cheese or cornstalks into cookies, of a lecture for the 

 annual institutes seems like the oppression of a dreadful incubus; or, as Dick- 

 ens puts it, "an overwhelming pen-and-ink-u-bus.'^ However, from the 

 bombardment of interrogatives by old men and young men, old women and 

 young women, wise and otherwise, directed against a presumptuous young 

 writer on ''Home Life," at some of the last year's institutes, it is evident that 

 a question of general and never failing interest to the farmers, born social 

 creatures, with an abounding love for home and family is, "How shall we k ep 

 our young people on the farm?" And although I have no boy to keep on a 

 farm, and no farm to keep a boy on, yet, in the light of extended observation 

 among farmers and the experience of a few years of pioneer farm life, I shall 

 not hesitate to discuss a few points in answer to this question. 



In discussing this question, it may be assamed that if the boys can be kept 

 on the farm, the girls will stay there too ; and if the girls stay on the farm 

 husbandry will present attractions unequaled by any other occupation. If 

 any nice young man from Detroit or Muskegon, with a blue neck-tie, cellu- 

 loid collar, and horse-shoe cuff-buttons, tries to hold your daughter's hand on 

 the balcony, she'll tell the dandy jack, clothed in a gilt vest-chain and some 

 credulous tailor's coat, that her regular beau, who wears linen collars sewed on 

 his shirt, has promised "to save his money, and buy a farm, and take her for 

 his wife;" and she's promised to him for the next waltz, and that any male 

 biped who parts his hair in the middle of his marble cocoanut, blacks his 

 moustache, and is in debt to his washerwoman, never was ordained by Provi- 

 dence to board with her father and mother at the farm-house in Armada. 



Oh, I am on]y a farmer's girl. 



And John is only a farmer's lad, 

 But I'd rather be his in his humble life 

 Than be a "lady" as a Senator's wife, 



With a restless heart and sad! 



And your son, so long as your neighbor's sensible daughters are content to 

 stay on the farm, and he knows that life is made up of use, work, service, will 

 never run away from the farm and run the risk of pulling in double harness 

 with the compound double-and-twisted starched, comical, artificial-touch-me- 

 not curiosity, that doesn't know a wash-tub from a butter-bowl, mistakes the 

 bread tray for a baby's cradle, and sews licorice lozenges on her brother's coat 

 for buttons, — a deformed, half-breathing ornament, found in town, and by 

 courtesy called a young woman. 



