STOCK-HUSBANDRY IN MASSACHUSETTS. 179 



as in any State further west. He will find in all these States 

 men who left the East to find land that would produce crops 

 with less labor, or with less manure than was required on the 

 eastern farms which they had first impoverished and then 

 abandoned. These States which I have named are, undoubt- 

 edly, among the best, agriculturally, of any in the Union, 

 but the farmers there, as here, have to pick for the good land, 

 and the desirable locations, and when they find both land and 

 location that suits them, they have to pay high prices there 

 as everywhere else. The lands which will continue to yield 

 fair crops year after year, with the application of little or nq 

 manure, are the lands in river valleys that are overflowed 

 every spring, and farming on these lands is not without its 

 drawbacks. You all read in the newspapers of the freshets 

 in Ohio last spring, but you cannot possibly fully realize 

 what a mad current of water from ten feet to thirty feet.above 

 its usual level means, till you have seen it running across 

 your own farms, carrying away your fences, drowning and 

 floating ofi'your cattle, sheep and swine, and, perhaps, soft- 

 ening the mortar and undermining your best brick houses, 

 so that they must be taken down and rebuilt. On one of the 

 best farms in the Muskingum Valley I saw about eight acres 

 of good land entirely spoiled by the last spring flood, the 

 soil in some places being scooped out to the depth of from 

 five to twenty feet, in others, deposited in such quantities as 

 to ruin the land it covered. A river valley farmer may not 

 get wholly discouraged by such freshets ; he may even enjoy 

 setting monuments of stone to mark the high-water line that 

 he may astonish his friends with statements they can scarcely 

 believe ; but it would take some time for the farmers on these 

 Berkshire hills to get used to such uncertain methods of en- 

 riching their fields. Perhaps there was nothing that im- 

 pressed me more during my rambles than the fact that the 

 best farmers are not by any means surely to be found on the 

 best lands ; I mean those lands which nature seems to havq 

 done the most for. We have heard a great deal about the 

 famous " blue-grass " regions of Kentucky. They are about 

 four degrees south of the latitude of Massachusetts, and have 

 a climate so mild that cattle can feed in the pastures all but 

 about two months in the year, and sometimes all the year. 



