HINDRANCES TO SUCCESSFUL FARMING. 79 



gives a note and mortgage for the remainder, assuming at 

 once a load of interest money, which clings about his neck 

 like "the old man of the mountain" in the Eastern story, 

 never to be shaken off. 



How often have we seen a young man with a laudal)le am- 

 bition, but beyond his means, taking his father's fiirm, — 

 the old homestead endeared to him by every tie of family, 

 birth-place, home, and boyhood's life and pleasures, — prob- 

 ably a good deal run down ; perhaps already encumbered with 

 a mortgage, or Avith brothers or sisters to pay off or support ; 

 and often with other encumbrances and expenses, manfully 

 struggling for years, never able to keep quite up but every 

 year falling a little behind, only occasionally cheered by the 

 sale of a tract of land or cutting off an ancestral wood lot. 

 In both these cases the superadded common afilictions of 

 life ; the failing health of an ambitious, overworked wife ; 

 sickness in the family ; a disastrou,s season ; loss of animals 

 and crops ; these, all or in part, often breaking the spirit of 

 the man, change his whole nature, making him morose, petu- 

 lant and stingy in the house, and mean and grasping without ; 

 and he is often tempted to curse the day when he left the 

 careless, aimless life of a hired man, and with bright antici- 

 pations of a happy future not to be realized, gradually 

 enveloped himself in the gloom of these hindrances to suc- 

 cessful farming. 



Cultivating too much land. — One item in our subject is 

 the very common attempt of farmers to cultivate more land 

 than they can thoroughly work. The great secret of Euro- 

 pean agriculture is stated to be, much labor on compara- 

 tively little land. Now the tendency of Massachusetts hus- 

 bandry, from the first settlement of the country, has been little 

 labor on much land ; and it is not wonderful that success 

 should be uncertain when our conduct is in direct violation 

 of the principle on which success depends. 



There is a natural desire in every farmer's heart, — only 

 controlled by want of means or an unusually strong will and 

 sound judgment, — to own all the land which joins him ; and 

 there is really no more unfortunate condition for a farmer to 

 be in than to be "land poor;" to hold the possession of 



