68 STATE POMOI^OGTCAI, SOCIETY. 



up a store of knowledge and learn to love the farm. City life 

 will not have such overwhelming attractions. We are often told 

 that the best way to "keep a boy on the farm" is to give him a 

 lamb, some poultry or other live stock or some share in the fruit 

 whereby he may earn some money for himself. But I say, begin 

 back of that, before a child is old enough to learn the love of 

 money he can be taught to love nature. 



SAVING A FARM. 



H. W. COLLINGWOOD, N. J.* 



There are two things in this world for which no measure has 

 ever yei been found. One is the possible crop that can be grown 

 on one acre of land. I don't think any man was ever foolish 

 enough to say that he had grown in any crop all that can possibly 

 be produced on one single acre. That crop has never been 

 measured and I doubt if it ever will be. In like manner no one 

 has ever yet measured the possibilities for good or evil of a full 

 blooded Yankee. The impossibility of measuring the possible 

 crop an acre of land can produce and the impossibility of show- 

 ing that a Maine Yankee has ever done all that he could ! I 

 want to put these two things together and see what we will get. 



I never was in Maine but once before. Twenty-one years ago 

 I ran through the corner of the State. I look back twenty-one 

 years and it seems something like an old story. I went through 

 New England on a flying trip. I was one of the boys w^ho made 

 up their minds that there was not a living to be made in New 

 England. I went through bound for the west. 



At that time thousands of your best young men and women 

 complained that New England no longer furnished any oppor- 

 tunity for them, and they were going west to Kansas and 

 Nebraska. I know the cars were crowded and at every station 

 young people got on the train all bound for the west. They 

 were going away from New England because they could not 

 ''make a living on these old hills.'' They were going where land 

 was not ''played out." I have come back to the east to end my 

 days on a farm, and perhaps the story of why I turned back from 

 the west, why I changed my mind, why I now know that there 



