254: CHRONIOLIiS OF A CLAY FARM. 



severally discarded, the one to the garden, the other 

 to the road, where locomotion from place to place 

 is a real and primary object of the power and 

 mechanism employed. 



The infinitely graduated varieties of soil that exist 

 between the lightest sand and the stiifest clay, 

 preventing as they have done that marked line of 

 different treatment that a more rigid contrast of the 

 opposed qualities of sand and clay would have 

 suggested together with the further variations of 

 "temper," alternating with the conditions of wet 

 and dry have been too much perverted to the 

 result of making the agriculturist a Jack-of-all-trade. 

 He goes out of a light-soil farm into a clay, or vice 

 versa, and plunges his share into the new element 

 with as much unconcern as his wife puts her duck 

 eggs under a hen to be hatched and educated. 

 Plump goes the little brood of changelings into the 

 first pool of water, incontinently bent on their native 

 mud, to the consternation of their astounded mother, 

 who vainly plies her claw in scratching on the sandy 

 shore for unsuited food, croaking out her frantic 

 warnings to the contumacious family of webfoot. 

 "With about as intelligent a philosophy as she exhib- 

 its under such distressful and hopeless circumstance, 

 has many a plow been stuck into the clays. But 



