26 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



castles that we built on those old days, lying there in the grass. 

 Do you remember that old game, when, with a little girl or a 

 playmate, you sat in the grass and you and she each pulled the 

 stalks over and put a thumb and finger at the bottom and ran 

 it up towards the end until there came one little drop of sap 

 upon the end of the grass, and then you and your friend touched 

 the two ends together, and the one that got both drops won? 

 What a foolish little game, and yet how pleasant it was, 

 especially when you won, if you had nerve enough to under- 

 stand and take what you were entitled to afterwards. You 

 cannot play that any more, now that the lawn mower has come. 



We have in almost every village a fine gymnasium. Was 

 there ever a gymnasium like a barn floor? Is there any ap- 

 paratus that can compare in effectiveness with that which we 

 had there? We have now, in gymnasiums, carefully knotted 

 ropes, or ropes with pegs put into them, at convenient intervals, 

 up which the youth may climb. There were no knots or pegs 

 in our ropes. If we needed anything like that we had a tight 

 rope, or a rope extending from a beam, and the climber had 

 no such assistance in going up, and if he fell, in case of acci- 

 dent, he always fell upon the hard barn floor, and not in some 

 friendly net. But now, gentlemen, those days are gone, not 

 only for you and me, but for everybody. That particular kind 

 of village life, that particular kind of country life, that special 

 form of farm life, is not coming back. It is idle to think of 

 recalling it. It has passed away. We see nothing today but 

 the beauty and the glory. We think of the poetical side of it. 

 We read with a lump in our throats and moisture in our eyes 

 that beautiful poem already alluded to, that sweet song of 

 Whittier's, for we can realize its beauty, for many of us have 

 had that same experience when we were " Snow Bound " in the 

 long ago. 



But there was something beside beauty. There was a lot 

 of hard work in those days. It was hard to get up in the morn- 

 ing, and hard to go out into the fields on frosty days and not 

 fall. Machinery did not do so much for man in those days 

 as it does now. Good or bad, sweet or bitter, easy or difficult, 

 it has gone and gone forever. The best kind of New England 

 life disappeared, as it always seemed to me, with the civil war. 

 There are not many of us here who can remember that, except 

 as boys, and I imagine that there are but few here who were 



