198 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



AGRICULTURAL FAIR 



OF THE WORCESTER COUNTY, Mass. AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



WitJi some Notice of tlie Men and Things. 



There is among New-England men an admirable spirit of persistence in what 

 they undertake to do, which it would be well if our countrymen generally could 

 imitate. Deliberate in undertaking, when they do resolve there is no looking 

 back. If they are slow, like their own noble oxen, like them also they are steady 

 to the draugiit, and what they do they do well. If they are inventive in genius, 

 they are not impulsive in action. If wary in making engagements, they are 

 faithful in fulfilling them. In every walk of New-England life, in every phase 

 of New-England society, you observe these characteristics. 



Invited by this ancient and most respectable branch of the oldest Agricultural 

 ■Society of the Union, to pronounce an Address on Agriculture at their late Fair 

 at Worcester, we did not feel at liberty to decline the honor ; but, deeming its 

 performance the least important among the occurrences of the occasion, we pro- 

 ceed to notice some others, such as would naturally strike the attention of a 

 stranger and a southern man, and the relation whereof may have some interest 

 for readers generally. 



Steamers from Ne-vfr-York to Norwich, Ct., and thence by railroad, offer a pop- 

 ular and easy conveyance to Boston ; but the traveler who can stop at Norwich, 

 and take the afternoo;i train eastward, may be well repaid for a few hours' delay 

 m a view of the town, and its environs and manufactories. This was the thea- 

 ire of the Last of the Mohicans — here repose the bones of Uncas. The only 

 manufactories which we had time to visit, under the polite guidance of Mr. God- 

 dard, were designed for very opposite purposes. One was Mr. Thurber's, for 

 snanufacturing revolving pistols ; the other, Mr. Waters's, where the models 

 are preparing for a contrivance of extraordinary ingenuity and power for making 

 scythes. Mr. Thurber exhibits also a curious ivriting-machine. It looks, for all 

 the world, like a piano-forte. On the keys are marked the letters of the alpha- 

 bet ; the paper is fixed, like a picture in a frame, sitting before the player ; near 

 the paper is a small, sharp-pointed, brass tube or bill, like a bird's bill. On 

 striking a particular letter, this bill of the bird, as we call it, pecks at the paper 

 moving along, to make one letter in a line with another — exactly as the reader, 

 when a boy, if not since, has seen a red-headed woodpecker " tapping a hollow 

 beech tree." By this machinery the tongue is protruded from the bill, and writes, 

 or rather prints the letters " as fast as a horse can trot." Of the pistols we say 

 nothing, because we hope the day is coming when nations will give up shooting 

 and stabbing each other, or give up talking about Christianity and civilization, 

 and sending missionaries to convert the heathen nations, who never do anything 

 worse, cannibals only excepted. 



Of Mr. Walter, and his invention for scythe making, we hold it to be a sort of 

 duty, and that in " our line," to make more particular mention. 



Mr. W. is decidedly of a scythe making family, for that honorable and useful 

 handicraft was the business of his own father and grandfather. His mother's fath- 



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