FOR PROMOTING AGRICULTURE. 89 



them to be worse than useless. He urged that pasture 

 land should be separated by a sufficient fence from the 

 cultivated land, and that the condition of the separated 

 areas should be a permanent one ; that no beasts should 

 be permitted to range upon the soil destined for the plough 

 and the scythe ; that nothing is gained by pasturing mow- 

 ing-land, because any apparent gain is offset by the labor, 

 cost of building and keeping in repair interior fences, by 

 loss of time in ploughing through frequent turning about 

 of the team, and loss of crops at the " head-lands," where 

 barberry bushes, nettles and injurious weeds grow, and 

 field mice, wood-chucks, skunks, and squirrels inhabit; 

 that surplus stones may be disposed of by thickening the 

 outer walls, or by building them into pyramids and cov- 

 ering them with grape vines; and that, while pasture 

 land may profitably be divided by interior walls, arable 

 land, though it were a hundred acres, should be in one 

 lot, for then the plough runs clear in a long furrow. 

 Upon the topic of building farm houses he said : 



"The fault is not peculiar to farmers it is true of men in 

 almost every rank and condition of life that when about 

 to build they often exceed their means, and almost always 

 go beyond the real wants of their families, and the actual 

 requisition of their other relations in life. But let not the 

 sound, practical good sense of the country be misled by the 

 false taste and false pricle of the city, where wealth, ferment- 

 ing by reason of the greatness of its heaps, is ever fuming 

 away in palaces, the objects of present transitory pride, and 

 too often of future long- continued repentance. 



Now what do we sometimes see in the country ? Why, 

 a thriving farmer, touched with this false taste, will throw 

 up a building thirty or forty feet square, of two or two and 

 a half stories height, four rooms on a floor, with an im- 

 measureable length of outbuilding behind. And what is 

 the consequence of all this greatness ? Why, often, for 

 years the house will not be wholly glazed ; or if glazed, not 

 clapboarded ; or if clapboarded not finished ; the destined 

 portico never put up ; the destined front step never put 

 down ; and the ragged clapboards on each side of the front 

 -door, there they stand, year in and year out, staring and 



