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farm was a small one. He expected more from it than even 

 with the best management it could be made to yield ; and I 

 took leave to remind him of a bachelor friend in the ministry, 

 who being asked by a kind spinster in his parish, whose heart 

 was full of compassion for the forlorn, why he did not get mar- 

 ried — replied with great simplicity, that "his salary would 

 not carry double." 



In another case, a farmer undertook to catechise me for other 

 men's sins, if sins they were, and for which I was no way re- 

 sponsible. You, said he, make extravagant statements of farm- 

 ing products, which none of us realize. I find farming poor 

 business. I have been a farmer these thirty years, and I am 

 now deeply in debt. You induced the Trustees of the Massa- 

 chusetts Agricultural Society to give such a man a premium for 

 his improvements — (in which most certainly the Trustees judg- 

 ed for themselves) and what has he done — nothing but what 

 any of us could do ; drained his meadow, and put on loam and 

 sand, and applied compost manure and sowed grass-seed. Any 

 body could do this. I knew how this was to be done twenty 

 years ago, and T have thirty acres of jast such peat meadow, as 

 easily drained and reclaimed as his. Well, I replied, why have 

 you not done it? Why, said he, because I had no money to 

 work with. But had this man reclaimed one acre a year in 

 his leisure hours, he would long since have had ample means 

 of reclaiming the whole. Bnt " he could not find the means 

 of doing it ; " though he could borrow money to purchase 

 Eastern lands and Texas scrip, which, and not the farm have 

 laid him flat upon his back, and tied him down with bands if 

 not as numerous, much stronger than those which fastened 

 Gulliver down in the island of Lilliput. 



Another farmer complains that farming has irrecoverably in- 

 volved him in debt. But how is this ? He has one of the best 

 farms in the country. His fixtures are of the most expensive 

 and improved character ; and even the horns of his working 

 oxen are carefully filed, and the brass-balls upon them kept 

 bright with rotten-stone. Besides this, he has an excellent ag- 



