52 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



more profitable to sell your farm thau to work it in a " bed- 

 room town." Indeed, how can the man who pays city rates 

 of taxation upon almost a city valuation of his barren hill- 

 side, compete with him whose best arable land pays a tax not 

 exceediug one dollar to the acre ? How can you pasture your 

 cows upon land valued and taxed by the foot? What general 

 crop so profitable as a dwelling-house? Indeed, we may 

 almost state it as an axiom, that when land comes to be sold 

 off the principal streets of a village by the foot, the day of 

 general farming is done in that vicinity. In a word, then, 

 the land in a considerable part of Norfolk County has become 

 so much more valuable for cutting into small homesteads than 

 for use in the broad fields and wide ranges, required for what 

 I call, for want of a better name, the old, general, ample- 

 skirted farming, that no one, solely as matter of gain, cares 

 to undertake it. 



The old familiar, homely ways, familiar to our boyish rec- 

 ollections, may, to be sure, linger here and there in some se- 

 cluded or favorable nooks, for farming is a good conservative 

 pursuit ; but we of the metropolitan circle, if I may be per- 

 mitted the term, must soon go further afield to refresh the 

 rustic reminiscences of those pleasant summers when we were 

 young. For in the old-fashioned methods there seemed, at 

 least, to dwell something of sweetness and poetry which 

 lends a certain touch of sentiment even to grave agricultural 

 addresses. 



You are all familiar with the picture, — its golden lights, — 

 its cool, gray shadows, — its mellow, tender tones. You see 

 the old brown farm-house, overshadowed by the giant elms in 

 the door-yard ; you catch a delicious glimpse of the cool, 

 shady orchard behind it, — there yonder is the great barn, 

 with its red doors, its dusty, cob-webbed beams, and deep 

 haymows, and the swallows flittering and twittering back and 

 forth. There, too, is the rocky hill-side pasture, with its 

 patches of short velvet turf, and the calm, contented cows 

 winking and chewing lazily in the shade, or dozing peacefully 

 as they stand mid-leg deep in the brook, taking their noon- 

 tide rest. How familiar it is to us all, and how pleasant ; 

 but it is not business. The fact is, that the poetry and the 

 charms, the fascinations and the loveliness, are becoming too 



