INTRODUCTION. xv 



first and last to be encouraged, and the other to be 

 eradicated. 



After all, what is the wonderful science in farm 

 ing ? You put a seed in the ground, and it comes 

 up that is, if it does come up either a pea or a 

 bean, a carrot or a turnip, and, with your best skill 

 and greatest learning, you can not plant a pea and 

 induce it to come up a bean, or convert a carrot into 

 a turnip. As for planting, any fool can do that, and 

 as for making it grow, the wisest man in the land 

 can not effect it. These and a few other similar ar 

 guments were entirely conclusive, and soon visions 

 of the accomplished fact engrossed my mind. 



I should have a neat, modest, small, but cosy little 

 house ; square, for economy s sake, but surrounded 

 on all sides by a deep piazza ; the garden should be 

 filled with delicious vegetables, fruits, and berries, 

 the earliest and best of their kinds ; there should be 

 a magnificent bed of asparagus that king of the 

 kitchen garden a dozen long rows of strawberries, 

 with fruit as luscious as a young girl s lips ; Bartlett 

 pears, early peas, peaches and cream the latter only 

 indirectly vegetable cauliflowers, tomatoes, mush 

 rooms, lettuce every thing, in fact, that a gentleman 

 eats when he can get it, and nothing that he eschews 

 when he can do no better. The residue of the farm 



