PREFACE. 



one sailor's leg, with the help of a short, crooked, half-grown 

 academic sapling for a walking stick, might be expected to 

 carry a man along with a head and a heart of his own. 



And as it is especially for farmers and farmers' families that I 

 have written, I expect that all who try to read the book, will be 

 willing to come into a warm, good-natured, broad country kitchen 

 fireside relation with me, and permit me to speak my mind freely, 

 and in such language as I can readily command, on all sorts of 

 subjects that come in my way, forming their own views from the 

 facts that I give them, and taking my opinions for only just what 

 they shall seem to be worth. 



Some explanation of a few of the intentions that gave direction 

 to my movements in traveling may be of service to the reader. 



The wages, and the cost and manner of living of the laboring 

 men, and the customs with regard to labor of those countries and 

 districts, from which foreign writers on economical subjects are 

 in the habit of deriving their data, had been made a subject of 

 more than ordinary and other than merely philanthropical interest 

 to me, from an experience of the difficulty of applying their cal- 

 culations to the different circumstances under which work must 

 be executed in the United States. My vocation as a farmer, too, 

 had led me for a long time to desire to know more of the prevail- 

 ing, ordinary, and generally-accepted practices of agriculture than 

 I could learn from Mr. Coleman's book, or from the observations 

 of most of the European correspondents of our agricultural peri- 

 odicals ; the attention of these gentlemen having been usually 



