AGRICULTURAL APHORISMS. 1211 



Have a home. The home is above the farm. If your wife's 

 lips are not so sweet ten years after marriage as ten days be- 

 fore, something is wrong, and you should seriously consider if 

 you are not that something. There is a large number of farm- 

 ers' wives in the insane asylum, and not one of them was driven 

 to insanity by labor-saving appliances in the kitchen. The best 

 products of your farms are your sons and daughters, and they 

 should receive ten times the care bestowed upon other crops. 

 Books, papers, pictures, and games in the home are good anti- 

 dotes for the cityward longing. Money spent to make the farm 

 and home attractive bears good interest. A damp cellar and a 

 slop-hole at the back door are good luck to the doctor. Neg- 

 lect of house drainage is an invitation which disease always ac- 

 cepts. Well and wood-shed near the kitchen door makes wife 

 smile. The farm should yield more than money, and the fam- 

 ily more than work. The farm-house is for use before orna- 

 ment, but comfort need not sacrifice beauty. Begin the plan of 

 your house at least a year before you begin to build. Make air 

 and sunshine the first items in the specifications for the house. 

 An elm is a good annex to the house. Make the garden, pump, 

 wood-house, smoke-house, and kitchen close neighbors. The 

 good farmer or his wife or his children or his man-servant or 

 his maid-servant does not chop stove-wood during the hot sea- 

 son. Man may be a diamond, but he is in the rough till society 

 polishes him ; this the farmer, whose vocation sentences him to 

 not a little solitary confinement, should never forget. If Solo- 

 mon had been a farmer he would have organized a farmers' club 

 for his own benefit, and made a signal display of his wisdom by 

 so doing. Clean implements, clean harness, clean animals, clean 

 fence corners, clean fields, clean garden, clean orchard, clean 

 yard, clean pasture, clean seeds, clean stables, clean shelters, 

 clean troughs, clean food, clean water, clean litter, clean sleep- 

 ing quarters, clean granaries, clean cellar, clean house, clean 

 children, clean conscience, clean profits. 



