No. 4.] COUNTRY EOADS. 255 



great deal of talk about field work, and why can we not have 

 demonstrations in the field of the practical work of road 

 building, to which the highway surveyors may be invited 

 and at which they can get the desired education? I 

 have listened with a great deal of interest to the paper 

 which has been read this afternoon, and, if we could have 

 had before us on the platform a section of a road built 

 as it ought to be built, with the required material shown, 

 and then alongside of it a section of road built as it ought 

 not to be built, it would have taught us more than page 

 after page of the lecture. That is the kind of practical 

 demonstration that we want in every department over which 

 this Board presides. 



Now, I want to make one reference to the roadsides, 

 because it is of interest to every citizen of the State who 

 owns a farm and who may some time want to sell it, and 

 especially if he owns a farm in one of our beautiful back 

 country towns. I happen to have a farm where I live in the 

 summer in a beautiful place away up on the hills. A real- 

 estate man came to me the other day here in Boston and 

 said, " I took a gentleman up to your town and showed 

 him some farms there for sale, and I should have sold him 

 one of them but that he was not pleased with the road- 

 sides." They had literally been ruined, and all because of the 

 thriftiness of the farmers ; for the town is a thrifty town, and 

 every roadside must be cleared of brakes and brush, as they 

 are termed. Some of those very brakes and brush are what 

 I saw this last summer in Europe, in some of the best green- 

 houses and gardens which I visited. They were carried 

 over there as rare specimens, and yet we are mowing them 

 down ; and then, as a gentleman who came from the other 

 side said to me, " We bring them back here and pay 

 high prices for them." I have always lived on a farm, more 

 or less, and have owned one for a number of years. I have 

 been guilty of recklessly mowing the roadside for eleven 

 years ; I shall never do so again. I am going to let the 

 little elms, the beautiful maples, beeches and birches which 

 have started up, and got such a start as only a natural tree 

 that comes from the seed can get, — I am going to weed out 

 the rest, — and let these saplings grow into beautiful trees. 



