$8 THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY 



B. C. of his art. For the first letters of a farmer's alpha- 

 bet .are neatness, comfort, order. 



As we proceed to the farm we will stop one moment at 

 the barnyard. We shall say nothing concerning the ar- 

 rangements of the barn. They must include comfort, 

 -convenience, protection for his stock, his hay and his fod- 

 der, or they are little or nothing. We go thither for the 

 purpose only of looking at what the learned call the ster- 

 corary, but which farmers know by the name of the ma- 

 nure heap. Will our friends from the city pardon us if 

 we detain them a moment at this point? Here we stop, 

 the rather, because here, more than anywhere else, the 

 farmers of Massachusetts are careless and deficient; be- 

 cause -on this, more than on anything else, depends the 

 wealth of the farmer, and because this is the best criter- 

 ion of his present and the surest pledge of his future suc- 

 cess. What then is its state ? How is it located ? 

 Sometimes we see a barn-yard on the top of a hill, with 

 two or three rocks in the centre, so that whatever is car- 

 ried or left there is sure of being chiefly exhaled by the 

 sun or washed away by the rain. Sometimes it is to be 

 seen in the hollow of a valley, into which all the hills and 

 neighboring buildings precipitate their waters. Of con- 

 sequence all its contents are drowned or water-soaked, or, 

 what is worse there having been no care about the bottom 

 of the receptacle its wealth goes off in the under strata, 

 to enrich, possibly, the antipodes. The Chinese, for aught 

 we know, may be the better for it, but it is lost forever to 

 these upper regions. 



Now all this is to the last degree wasteful, absurd and 

 impoverishing. Too much cannot be said to expose the 

 loss and injury which the farmer thus sustains. Let the 

 farmer want whatever else he pleases ; but let no man call 

 himself a farmer who suffers himself to want a receptacle 

 for his manure, water-tight at the bottom and covered at 

 the top, so that below nothing shall be lost by drainage, 

 and above nothing be carried away by evaporation. Let 

 every farmer wanting such protection for his manure be 

 assured that he loses by the sun and rain ten-fold as much 

 as will pay all his taxes, state, town and national, every 

 year. 



The speaker next discussed the topic of interior fences 

 in the arable or cultivated part of the farm and declared 



