208 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



eral hard, giving but little real enjoyment and gist to life, 

 and certainly very little culture. 



The pleasant things remembered about the old farm are so 

 remembered because it is the habit of the human mind, I am 

 glad to say, to remember the pleasant things of life ; and few 

 places can be so hard that we shall not have for them some 

 attachment. It is said that old sailors grieve to leave their 

 miserable quarters in the forecastle of the old ship in which 

 they have long sailed ; and Dickens brings out this same 

 trait of human nature when he represents Oliver Twist as 

 crying when he left the miserable place where he had spent 

 a squalid babyhood as a parochial pauper. Meeting one of 

 my old boyhood friends this fall, and referring to the old 

 modes of life among our fathers, he replied, "• It was a mere 

 struggle for existence." I replied, " Yes, but a much harder 

 struggle than there was any need of." My friend owns the 

 same acres where his father lived. The soil is by nature no 

 better ; the same skies are over him : but he lives a very 

 different life from what his father lived. On the same old 

 farm he can have around him, and does have around liim, 

 the luxuries of life even, which give to farm-life an entirely 

 different status for a man of thought and heart from what it 

 had when he was a boy. The same change in kind, though 

 not always in the same degree, I notice on all the old farms. 

 The sons, as a whole, have advanced upon their fathers in 

 the art of living. The physical, intellectual, moral, and 

 social life are better cared for than either was at that time. 

 Houses are better, and better furnished. The farmers and 

 their wives do less exhausting labor than they did in those 

 old times. Their food is better; their houses are better 

 supplied with papers and books ; their help is better paid. 

 Where the Yankee girl fifty years ago worked for fifty 

 cents a week, or a pound of wool, she wants and gets two 

 or three dollars a week, or six pounds of wool. (She takes 

 her wool, however, now, only in the form of cloth, such as 

 no farm-born Yankee girl fifty years ago ever thought of 

 wearing.) The farm-hand who used to work for fifty cents 

 a day, or half a bushel of corn, now wants and gets his dol- 

 lar or dollar and a half; and a bushel of corn would not 

 satisfy him. So wages have advanced for farm-laborers 

 much more than the cost of living. This shows that farm- 

 ing pays all better than it did. 



