80 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



when I was eighteen years of age I had about as many dollars 

 in the savings bank as I was years old. Between the ages 

 of twenty and twenty-five I cleared about a thousand dollars 

 by taking a farm on shares and keeping school in the winter. 

 When I was twenty years old I raised thirteen hundred 

 bushels of potatoes, carrying them into the cellar, taking 

 them out and marketing them myself for about twenty-eight 

 or thirty cents per bushel, having only one-half of the crop. 

 At twenty-five I was married, and married a farm with my 

 wife ; and, although I say it, she was beautiful as a rose, as 

 smart as a whip and as neat as a pin. She has been the 

 making of me. When I used to go courting Sunday nights 1 

 found her milking, and after we were married she used to 

 help me about the milking, and sometimes even turn the 

 grindstone and help me rake up the salt hay. The next 

 morning after I was married the man who was on the farm 

 said to me, "John, you have here one horse, a few sheep 

 four cows and a heifer ; you had better sell the heifer, for foui 

 cows are all you can summer on this place and all you ca 

 winter." I made no reply to it, but thought I might improve 

 upon that. I am now upon the same place, having added a few 

 acres to it, and we can keep from forty to fifty cows, ten horses, 

 a dozen or fifteen young creatures and fifty hogs ; and those 

 animals are all kept a great deal better than those four cows 

 were when I went there. They are all kept clean and nice 

 as a stable of horses ; and instead of having a barn sixty 

 feet long two-thirds full of a poor quality of hay, I now fill 

 a barn one hundred and fifty feet long to the ridge-pole 

 every year with the first quality of hay. I have laid some- 

 thing like three miles of drain tile ; so that, instead of raising 

 water-soaked grass, I now raise the best of grass. We 

 have cellars under all our buildings, and we manufacture 

 some four hundred two-horse loads of manure a year. 

 Xow, I have frequently said, although there are so many 

 drawbacks to farming, that a man who owns a good, 

 compact farm, substantially enclosed and under good culti- 

 vation, with convenient buildings, in good repair, and imple- 

 ments of husbandry kept well housed and bright, good farm 

 stock that is well tended and taken care of, is in the enjoy- 

 ment of good health, is happy in his family relations, and 



