372 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



my dining room, three times each day, I have an unbroken 

 visual feast of the fatness or leanness of the land, from the 

 southeast to the southwest, for forty or fifty miles, embrac- 

 ing the Blandford hills and village, with its tall-spired church. 

 At the east, three miles, a range of hills fifty feet higher 

 than I am just screens from my view the Holyoke and Mount 

 Tom ranges and the intervening valley, but from the summit 

 of these hills, to which I have driven scores of times, and, 

 without leaving my w^agon, I have seen at one outlook, in 

 the south, the dome of the capitol at Hartford, Wachusett 

 mountain at the east in Worcester County, and in the north, 

 ISIonadnock, near Keene, New Hampshire, wdth seventy-five 

 or eighty miles of the Connecticut River valley between. 

 Between Northampton and Pittsfield the highway leads to 

 many deep valleys and crosses many streams of considerable 

 magnitude, power and, of what is of importance to me, 

 trout. These streams all run to the south, and either to the 

 Housatonic or Connecticut River. In winter this region is 

 often a terrible place to live, but the summers are a little 

 the longer and they are charming. It is here that I have 

 located my theme, "The pleasures of farming." 



Does farming pay? how to keep the boys at it; sheep- 

 raising ; the dairy ; the care and management of horses ; 

 vegetables from the kitchen garden and for market ; or- 

 chards and their crops ; fertilizers, and can we alFord to 

 use them? and a large variety of kindred subjects are drawn 

 upon l)y the State delegates and other speakers for their 

 eloquence on such occasions as this, and I may extract some- 

 thing from them if anything is left, in my brief remarks to 

 you, but my wish is to draw your attention from the mere 

 profit to the pleasure of farming. 



The problems, Does farming pay? Is life worth living? 

 Is marriage a failure ? involve the same conundrum, and it 

 is not omitted in my contemplated theme, for I shall be con- 

 fronted at the outset with another problem. What consti- 

 tutes pleasure, or what is it? The miser attains it, or thinks 

 he does, by hoarding his money, while the prodigal imagines 

 he reaches the same result by squandering w^hat others have 

 saved for him. Many a sharp man, so termed, scrimps and 

 denies himself through life with apparent relish, in order 



