sechetary's budget. 333 



MANHOOD. 



The most profitable industry the farm affords is the development 

 of character, of manhood in your boys and womanhood in your girls. 

 No farmer ever raised a crop half so valuable as a larg^ number of 

 sons — honest, intelligent, industrious, fond of home and all its endear- 

 ing associations, avoiding, as though a crime, the race-course, the dram- 

 shop, the gambling den and allied places of infamy. The richest 

 mother is the one that has the largest number of affectionate daugh- 

 ters — daughters that know of no place so dear as home and no 

 name so sweet as that of mother. Here let me say that I am a farmer 

 simply because the farm affords more real pleasure than any other 

 pursuit for which I am fitted. My pleasures do not evolve from what 

 I make from the farm but from what the farm makes of me. I do not 

 cultivate cereals, vegetables, fruits or flowers wholly for what they will 

 bring in the market, but rather for what they will make me worth in 

 the market. It is not the number of gladioli, the bushels of corn, or 

 the barrels of apples that I have harvested in the year, but it is the crop 

 of manhood, the yield of domestic happiness, that shows the true pro- 

 ductiveness of the farm. 



C. L Allen, in Ladies' Floral Cabinet: 



^ BOOK or NATURE. 



The book for every farmer's boy to read is the open book of na- 

 ture. There was none ever written that contains one-half of the infor- 

 mation, none other half so facinating, none so perfect and pure. Na- 

 ture teaches us to dwell as much as possible upon the beautifnl and 

 good, and to ignore at all times the evil and the false. 



Let us take a single tree for an object lesson and see what it will 

 teach us. Time will not permit of our discussing the phenomena of 

 plant life, and we will only say that vegetable and animal lives in no 

 way differ in principle : there is a perftct analogy between the two. 

 But in order to show you the pleasure there is to be derived from the 

 Btudy of the tree, we would say that all plants possess a real life — they 

 eat, drink, feel and think ; they sleep, breathe and secrete — in short, 

 perform all the functions of supply, repair, development and repro- 

 duction. The intelligence they manifest in searching for food is sim- 

 ply wonderful, while the actions of climbing plants in search of sup- 

 ports are equally strange. All these wonderful peculiarities of plants 

 are but little seen or appreciated. In fact, not one man in ten ever 

 saw the true roots of a tree, or knows that they are put forth in spring 

 simultaneously with the leaves and are shed with them in autumn. 



