216 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



proper places instead of seedling apple-trees tliat never did 

 any good, and are now gone, the value of my place could 

 have been doubled to me by fifty or a hundred trees properly 

 placed. I have set them for those who are to come after me, 

 and have gone over my grounds with my pockets full of 

 nuts and aporns, planting them wherever I thought a tree 

 ought to grow. If too many come up, the axe can thin 

 them; and there is just as much need of cutting down a 

 tree that is in the wrong place as there is of planting one in 

 the right. 



Then let the inside of the house be pleasant. It may be 

 small and plain, but let it show signs of culture and taste. 

 This the wife will care for, if she is not overworked, and 

 is encouraged. INlake the home pleasant to your children. 

 Do not overwork them, but teach them to work. Dress 

 them as neatly as your means afford. Give them advantages 

 of school when you can. Allow them recreation ; and, while 

 you govern them, do not forget they are children, and that 

 they have innocent tastes and desires which jou. have out- 

 grown, and may therefore consider of no importance. 



Make a childhood for your children. It is a protection 

 ' against a hard and vicious manhood, — a source of joy and 

 delight to them as long as memory shall remain. 



It is superfluous, perhaps, for me to say more about the 

 education of your children ; but let me beseech you not to 

 educate off from the farm. After the simplest rudiments of 

 reading, spelling, and arithmetic, and even with those, see 

 that your children are taught to study nature, to delight in 

 plants and animals and stones and chemical changes, — all 

 the things that daily meet them on the farm. If they cannot 

 get these common, essential things in school, teach them 

 yourselves. If you do not know them now, learn them. 

 The farm furnishes the whole range of plants and animal 

 life upon which one can spend a lifetime of study, and 

 become an Agassiz in observation, if specimens alone were 

 needed. And the farm and kitchen are a laboratory ; and a 

 boy or girl wdio understands the comman changes going on 

 in these need not go to the scientific schools to see experi- 

 ments. Nature is making them daily ; and the daily opera- 

 tions of the household are a series of experiments, only they 

 are performed under the homely name of work, without 



