TEACH AS TO FARMING. 5 



of thought than lack of knowledge. They plod on in the path 

 beaten out by their grandfathers, not reflecting that a course which 

 might have been advisable, or at least excusable, when a farm of 

 three, hundred acres was worth but a thousand dollars in cash, 

 has Ijecn rendered utterly indefensible and suicidal by a gradual 

 advance in the value of that farm to five or perhaps ten thousand 

 dollars. He who can buy land at ton shillings per acre may afford 

 to leave it. unfilled and unfenced for years, until its timber or its 

 urass shall have become decidedly valuable ; but when that tim- 

 ber shall have disappeared, the grass become the watched-for 

 prey of droves of other men's cattle, and the land worth fifty 

 dollars per acre, it is flagrant ainl culpable waste to blunder on 

 as though it were still worth but ten shillings. 



I once went to look at a farm <>f fifty acres that I thought of 

 buying for a summer home, some tl-rty miles from the City of 

 New York. The owner had boon born on it, as I believe had his 

 father before him; but it yielded only a moagor subsistence for 

 l:is family, and he thought f srlling and going West. I went over 

 it with him late in June, passing through a well-filled barn-yard 

 which had not been disturbed that season, and stepping thence 

 into a corn-field of five acres with a like field of potatoes just 

 beyond it. " Why, neighbor !" asked I, in astonishment, " how 

 could you leave all this manure so handy to your plowed land, 

 and plant ten acres without any ?" " O, I was sick a good part 

 <f the Spring, and so hurried that I could not find time to haul it 

 out." " Why, suppose you had planted but five acres in all, and 

 emptied your barn-yard on those five, leaving the residue un- 

 touched, don't you think you would have harvested a larger crop f 

 " Well, perhaps I should," was the poor farmer's response. It 

 seemed never before to have occurred to him that he could let 

 alone a part of his land. Had he progressed so far, he might 

 have ventured thence to the conclusion that it is less expensive 

 and more profitable to raise a full crop on five acres than half a 

 crop on ten. I am sorry to say we have a good many such farm 

 ill left at the East, though the advanced prices of land 

 and the impoverished condition of the soils they inherited, with 

 their slovenly modes of cultivation, have driven the greater share 



