HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS. 65 



G. W. MINIER. 



MINIER, TAZEWELL COUNTY. 



A Grood Farmer — Happy and Prosperous — Tree Planting — 

 Orchards — Vineyard — Farm Teams — Mules the Best for 

 All Work — Fowls — Drainage — Farm Buildings — Mixed Hus- 

 bandry — Management of Stock — Dairying — Land — Sheep 

 the Most Profitable. 



My farm in Tazewell County, Illinois, is in section three, 

 N. E. quarter, town twenty-three, west of the third prin- 

 cipal meridian, containing one hundred and sixty acres. In 

 addition to this I purchased five acres adjoining my farm on 

 the west. 



I bought my quarter section from the United States 

 government in 1850. It was prairie, with a skirt of hazel copse 

 of some ten acres on the west side. 



Myself and family, unaccustomed to country life, eagerly 

 engaged in farming. It doubtless would have been amusing, 

 and probably was, to see us at our work. For myself, I well 

 recollect that I found some things about the harness of my 

 horses that I could find no use for. So many useless straps, 

 buckles, and superfluous rings. They were neither prose nor 

 poetry. Schoolmaster, civil engineer and preacher, as I was, 

 or rather had been, I could not engineer the " tackling," as I 

 called it, on the horse's back. Despite all my efforts, the har- 

 ness would flop crosswise of the animal's back and become 

 annoyingly entangled ; and not unfrequently when hitching to 

 the plow, I would, to use a sailor's phrase, get the " larboard" 

 horse on the "starboard" side. And then such jerking of lines, 

 and such thinking of nnministerial language. The poor 

 horses, meantime, saying as plainly as they could speak, 

 " Hadn't you better go back to the city ;" or, in the words 

 of the girl, when the shoemaker's boy was measuring her 



