Bed Letter Days 75 



an ox-team too; Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet, 

 philosopher and man of letters, that any nation 

 on earth would be proud of as a citizen, was in 

 his youthful days a ploughman, and later was 

 chairman of an Eastern States Ploughman's Asso- 

 ciation. And if there is a farmer reader who 

 hasn't read his fine poem, "The Ploughman," I 

 would say to such a one, better take an hour off 

 and do so and offer your young sons a worth- 

 while premium to commit those lines to 

 memory. 



They are better and likely to be more effective 

 than all the stay-on- the-f arm addresses you'd hear 

 in a quarter-century of Farmers' Institute ses- 

 sions. 



Let me present a few lines from that noble 

 poem: 



"Clear the brown path, to meet his colter's gleam! 

 Lo! on he comes behind his smoking team, 

 With toil's bright dewdrops on his sunburnt brow, 

 The lord of earth, the hero of the plough ! 

 First in the field before the reddening sun, 

 Last in the shadows when the day is done. 

 Line after line, along the bursting sod 

 Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod. 



*'0 gracious mother, whose benignant breast 

 Wakes us to life and lulls us all to rest; 

 How thy sweet features, kind to every clime, 

 Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of time! 

 We stain thy flowers — they blossom o 'er the dead ; 

 We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread; 



