HINDRANCES AND HELPS 



It seems hardly necessary to urge a necessity 

 for this direction of effort A certain stark 

 neatness, confined mostly to kitchens, pantries, 

 and such portions of the door-yard as are 

 under the eye of the goodwife, mostly limits 

 the accomplishment of New-England farmers 

 in this direction. It may be that a staring coat 

 of white paint upon the house completes the 

 investiture of charms; while, at every hand, 

 heaps of rubbish — cumbering the public road 

 — and piles of straggling wood, dissipate any 

 illusion which a well-scrubbed interior, or the 

 fresh paint, may have created. 



Here and there we come upon a certain 

 neatness and order in enclosures, buildings, 

 and fields; but ten to one the keeping of the 

 picture is absolutely ruined by the slatternly 

 condition of the highway, to which, — though 

 it pass within ten feet of his door, — the 

 farmer, by a strange inconsequence, pays no 

 manner of heed. He makes it the receptacle 

 of all waste material, and foists upon the pub- 

 lic the offal, which he will not tolerate within 

 the limits of his enclosure. And the highway 

 purveyors are mostly as brutally unobservant 

 of neatness as the farmer himself; nay, they 

 seem to put an officious pride into the unseem- 

 liness and rawness of their work; and it is 



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