22 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



THE COUNTRY BOY. 



By President F. S. Luther, of Trinity College, 

 Hartford, Conn. 



Mr. Mayor, Mr. Secretary, and ladies and gentlemen : I 

 think the last speech that I heard on this subject of " The 

 Country Boy " was one that was delivered some years ago, and 

 not very many years ago either, on grounds then leased, but 

 now belonging to the Windham County Agricultural Associa- 

 tion. It was at their annual fair and cattle show, held in 

 Brooklyn. I do not mean Brooklyn, New York, but Brooklyn, 

 Connecticut. The fair was held there at that time, as it has 

 been held, I believe, every year but one since somewhere about 

 1850. That speech was delivered by the Honorable Lafayette 

 Foster, a distinguished citizen of our commonwealth, and after- 

 wards, if not then, a Senator of the United States. I wish I 

 could remember the whole of that speech. If I could, and could 

 repeat it to you here, you would have a good one this morning. 

 But I do remember one sentence that appealed to me very 

 powerfully. He said, and I had to be lifted up to see him over 

 the crowd, " I know what it is to drive the cows to pasture on 

 a cold morning." And I recall, with a feeling which I know 

 many of you here will share with me, how my mother looked 

 up into my face and said, "There, do you hear that?" One 

 thing more he said, that also appealed to me, and to which 

 neither my mother nor my father did call very special attention. 

 Speaking of the goings on of the farm day in that time, and 

 telling how, after dinner, the men loafed awhile under the trees 

 in the yard, if it was summer, having their nooning, he spoke 

 of how somehow the boy upon the farm never got any nooning. 

 I wish I had had nerve enough to turn to my mother and say 

 then, " There, did you hear that ? " But after all, nooning or 

 no nooning, the boy upon the farm usually managed somehow 

 to have a good deal of fun in the old days on the Connecticut 

 farm. And as a distinguished Hartford citizen, who died about 

 four years ago, said in what has always seemed to me the very 

 best of his writings (and I refer to Charles D. Warner), in his 

 little volume " Being a Boy," it is undoubtedly the case that 

 any farm would come to grief pretty quick that did not have the 

 boy on it, for he is the one that does everything that nobody 

 else is willing to do. How many of the things that the boy 



