204 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



We meet in this Board in our home societies to discuss 

 the progress in agriculture, and to devise means for greater 

 progress in time to come. We raise every farm-product in 

 greater quantity and in greater perfection than we did fifty 

 years ago. But how is it about the men and women on the 

 farm, the children on the farm? Are we doing so much 

 better for them, that they shall love the farm, and that farm- 

 life shall be in reality what it ought to be, what it may be, 

 — the most satisfactory life of our people ? 



In order to emphasize this question, you will please bear 

 with me while I give a sketch of farm-life in New England, 

 mark something of its progress, point out what seems to me 

 to be some of its defects, and some of the means by which 

 it may reach its true place in the aggregate life of nature. 



I am satisfied that there has been great improvement in 

 farm-life within forty years since the time that I left the 

 farm. I have this fall returned to the place of my boyhood, 

 and have spent the last three months on the farm that has 

 been in the family over a hundred years, — a farm that I 

 bought, not because I was able to properly care for it, but 

 because it belonged to my ancestors, and held two genera- 

 tions of them beneath its green turf. Here I was surrounded 

 by the farms that I knew well when a boy, — farms still in 

 the old family name, though the fathers are gone, and the 

 sons, who were my schoolmates, rule in their places. It is 

 easy, then, for me to see the improvement, not in a single 

 place, but all along the line ; not simply the improvement 

 in cultivation of the soil, but in general methods of living. 

 I cannot mark the change better than by describing some of 

 the conditions of farm-life as long ago as I can remember, 

 by rehearsing some of the maxims that then prevailed among 

 farmers, — maxims that they thought came from Dr. Frank- 

 lin ; but, if he was the author of them in the crude, harsh 

 form in which they were applied to farmers' boys, he deserved 

 to be struck hard with that lightning he used to bottle up. 



In the first place, on the average farm of Maine forty years 

 ago they had not discovered dry wood. If they had dry 

 wood at all, it was simply for kindling the fire, — the dead 

 limbs of some old tree, or bits of broken boards ; but to burn 

 in the body of the fire regular, seasoned body-wood would 

 have driven some of the old farmers into frenzy. They 



