FAEMERS' CLUBS. 255 



one hundred fair days' work each per annum. One 

 of this class never takes a periodical devoted to farm- 

 ing; evinces no interest in county fairs or township 

 clubs, save as they may afford him an excuse for 

 greater idleness ; and insists that there is no profit in 

 farming. As land steadily depreciates in quality 

 under his management, he is apt to sell out when- 

 ever the increase of population or progress of im- 

 provement has given additional value to his farm, 

 and move off in quest of that undiscovered country 

 where idleness is compatible with thrift, profits are 

 realized from light crops, and men grow rich by do- 

 ing nothing. 



The opposite class of wanderers from the golden 

 mean is hardly so numerous as the idlers, yet it is 

 quite a large one. Its leading embodiment, to my 

 mind, is one whom I knew from childhood, who, 

 born poor and nowise favored by fortune, was rated 

 as a tireless worker from early boyhood, and who 

 achieved an independence before he was forty years 

 old in a rural New-England township, simply by 

 rugged, persistent labor in youth on the farms of 

 other men ; in manhood, on one of his own. This 

 man was older at forty than his father, then seventy, 

 and died at fifty, worn out with excessive and unin- 

 termitted labor, leaving a widow who greatly prefer- 

 red him to all his ample wealth, and an only son who, 

 so soon as he can get hold of it, will squander the 

 property much faster, and even more unwisely, than 

 his father acquired it. 



