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think of it oftener as a means than an end. They want it 

 for what it brings. On the farm, very frequently, are 

 rooms without books, walls without pictures, manners 

 without grace, clothes without fitness, and grounds with- 

 out shaping or decoration. On the contrary, the city 

 merchant buys a library and works of art, sends his 

 children to schools where they learn to move with elegance 

 as well as to ci[)her and parse, gets garments that are 

 finer and fit, and is not so exhausted physically at night- 

 fall as to prefer sleep to any company or book. He comes 

 back into the country, and lays out a beautiful estate, 

 sometimes with statelier animals, and selector fruits, and 

 tidier fences and hedges, and more blooming gardens on 

 it, than his neighbor, who has all the while been staying 

 there and making farming the business of his life. Now, 

 it would be a hard task in persuasion to convince most 

 young men that these things are not good, not desirable, 

 and that the dollars which command them are not of the 

 nature of an advantage. I confess 1 should be a bad 

 subject for such persuasion myself Besides, these things 

 are all of the nature of picture-work ; the boy cannot help 

 seeing them; they work upon him while he stops on his 

 way from pasture under the fragrant shrubbery, or peeps 

 through the pickets at the mellow peaches and pears. 



I know perfectly how apt his sanguine blood, and his 

 ignorance of the ninety-odd failures in a city for every 

 single success, are to put a fallacy into his plans and cheat 

 his choice. But none the less is it true, wliat he goes to 

 the city for is a chance, though but a chance, for certain 

 means of refinement, liberality, and width in the whole 

 style of life, such as scarcely a mere farmer about him, in 

 the old way of farming, has displayed. Who ever knew a 

 confident and chivalrous youth to doubt he should be one 

 of the five that succeed, though five hundred fail 1 And, 

 moreover, many young men at that aspiring period of life, 



