14 FARM ECHOES. 



CHAPTER II. 

 CITY AND COUNTRY. 



If city men who undertake farming would only realize 

 their ignorance of such work, and keep this fact con- 

 stantly before them during the first four or five years of 

 country life, they would be greatly benefited by so doing. 

 It would guard them against ten thousand mistakes, and 

 be a saving to them of quite as many dollars. They would 

 thus be ever learning, and would probably have more 

 sound knowledge of practical farming at the end of the 

 period named, than many who have spent a lifetime upon 

 their farms, and who have never, for an instant, been out 

 of the ruts in which their forefathers for generations back 

 have travelled ; said ruts having been made considerably 

 deeper by each generation that got into them. 



Whether it be the " greenhorn " from the city, or the 

 equally green one, country born, he who thinks that he 

 knows all that need be known of his particular calling, be 

 it tilling the land, or any other pursuit, gives unmis- 

 takable proof of lamentable ignorance. It is the barren 

 fruit tree which proudly stands erect. Such as are fruit- 

 ful are humbly bowed by their own productiveness, em- 

 blematic of those whose knowledge humbles them, and 

 makes them thirst for more. It not unfrequently happens 

 that city men who commence farming make themselves 

 ridiculous by aping the country laborers in their attire, 

 etc. As well might the "farm hand," who drives his 

 employer's herd of cattle to a city market, through mud 

 and dust, do so in fashionable city costume as the "city 

 farmer," so-called, and often not inappropriately, don old 



