THE FARMERS WAR AGAINST MONOPOLIES. 3o9 



the East, a few apple trees and some straw sheds to 

 shelter the stock in the Winter, were all that the 

 owner had been able to add to the place to promote the 

 comfort of his family, or increase the value of his farm. 

 Mr. Smith has enlarged the house, though it is still 

 very unpretentious and far from modern in its appoint- 

 ments, planted trees, ditched the land in the low places, 

 and placed the whole under a very high state of culti- 

 vation. His barns are still of logs thatched with straw, 

 but his stock is in good condition, and everything about 

 the place bespeaks the thrift as well as the good taste 

 of its owner. Mr. Smith himself is past sixty years of 

 age, though time has touched him rather lightly arid 

 left him all the energy and enthusiasm of a young man. 

 A great lover of books, his well-selected library is about 

 the only luxury in which, as a farmer, he has been 

 able to indulge himself and his family, and, of all his 

 books, he prizes most highly a complete bound file of 

 Mr. Greeley's New Yorker, for which, as Mr. Greeley 

 afterward assured him, he raised the first club. From 

 that day to this the New Yorker, the Jeffersonian, the 

 Log Cabin, or the New York Tribune, has been constantly 

 read by Mr. Smith and his family. The truth is, I 

 hardly find a farmer in the West, who reads or thinks 

 for himself, and who does not speak of Mr. Greeley as 

 having been his personal friend. You will find the 

 portrait of the founder of the Tribune hanging in almost 

 every farmer's parlor. 



" In one corner of the apartment which serves as the 

 farmer's dining-room and the family sitting-room, Mr. 

 Smith has a table covered with letters, documents, and 

 newspapers; and here, between the intervals of farm 

 labor, and assisted by wife and son, a lad about 14 years 



