FARMERS* HOUSES. 313 



Farmers need a hint or two in another matter, also. As a class they are far 

 more niggardly and close with their boys than any other. They keep them 

 more rigidly at work without recreation, allow them fewer holidays, fewer home 

 pleasures, and less spending money to seek variety elsewhere, than the sons of 

 parents in other employments have. Most others, it is true, live in towns, and 

 have recreations at command which cannot be reached in isolated country life ; 

 but even those that do offer to farmers are yielded to, if at all, in a grudging 

 and surly manner that takes half the pleasui-e from them by damping boyish 

 enthusiasm with sordid calculations of time and money wasted. If fathers could 

 only remember their own boyhood, and make up to their sons the privileges 

 and pleasures that were denied to themselves, there would be much gained to 

 each successive generation. 



First of all, then, parents should not pervert Nature by trying to make farmers 

 of their boys when she intended them for something else. But having once 

 settled the fact that they are to be farmers, or, at least, that their early years 

 are to be spent on the form, let the home they there help to make be theira 

 jointly with other members of the family, to adorn, to enjoy, to honor, and to 

 look back upon from the distance of years with pleasant memories. Here is 

 where the true woman's rights movement should have begun, and must begin : 

 in educating and training up a race of men attached to home, and loving and 

 honoring woman in her relations as mother and sister. The most tyrannic and 

 illiberal men are those who have once been tyrannized over, and debarred from 

 the enjoyments and privileges that nature told them should be theirs. When 

 power does come into their hands they are inclined to use it to excess. Their 

 rights have been disregarded, their pleasures abridged, their desires made light 

 oi"; why should they consult the wishes, pleasures, or rights of others 1 



Begin, then, by making home happy for the boys. If it is a happy home for 

 them, it will be for all. Mothers and sisters hold the destinies of men in their 

 hands, and through them the destinies of future wives, mothers, and sisters 

 also. By the sweet influences they may throw around the fireside and the 

 homestead, they may begin and carry to perfection a grander scheme of moral 

 reform than has ever yet originated in the brains of the loudest-mouthed and 

 strongest-minded women of the age. Woman at home is the true reformer, and 

 boy, the incipient man, is the true starting point, from which, if she turns her face in 

 the right direction, she may read success in a brighter and not very distant future. 



FARMERS' HOUSES 



BY DR. W. W. HALL, OF NEW YORK. 



Where to build and what shall be the plan of the house are questions 

 which have to be decided every year by thousands and thousands of enter- 

 prising farmers all over the country — either young men just married, who are 

 about "opening" a farm in the boundless west, or by men more advanced in 

 life, who, having done well, have decided to treat themselves and their faithful 

 wives to a new and better house than the one in which they have lived and 

 Bti'iven 60 long and so well together. In either case it is of the first conse- 

 quence, and is necessai-ily the first step to be taken, after having decided to 

 build, to fix upon an answer to the question — 



WHERE SHALL I BUILD? 



Upon the wise decision of this important inquiry depends to a greater or less 

 extent -the health, the consequent happiness, and eventual success in life of 



