174 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



tion ? " And after balancing the " pros and cons " as well as I 

 was able, I could not yield to an inclination, natural to gray 

 hairs, to pronounce the " former times better than these." ^nd 

 in this I was glad to be sustained by my venerable neighbor Dr. 

 Todd, whose writings have found their way into many New 

 England homes, and have served to make them happier and 

 better. And I believe it is good logic to infer that if the church 

 has gained tlie family cannot have lost. 



It would have done this convention good, to have looked out 

 from that meeting-house in the hill country, whose eves on the 

 one side feed the Connecticut, and on the other the Housatonic 

 — a house of goodly proportions, and yet shingled from one pine 

 tree, cut early in this century by the hardy yeomen, and con- 

 verted into a roof which has weathered the winds of that high 

 outlook, and shed the rains of more than sixty years. The 

 sons of these hardy, industrious, intelligent men were present, 

 to listen to our discussion. Their houses might be seen, nearly 

 half a mile apart, on points sufficiently bleak, leaving us to 

 imagine what work there would be, in a few weeks, on those 

 cross roads. What blinding snow storms and deep drifts, what 

 digging out to get to school and to church, and what filling in 

 to call out again the men and the boys and the teams. Yet 

 those dwellings, sparsely scattered over a high, bleak, windy 

 region, owned by their occupants, and free from incumbrance, 

 within difficult, yet possible reach of the post-office, the school 

 and the church, were homes, if not of affluence, yet of com- 

 parative plenty, — homes of intelligence, where the sons and 

 daughters, of a winter's evening, could read together Snow 

 Bound — that beautiful idyl of Whittier, and read it appreciat- 

 ingly too ; appreciating, no doubt, better than some of us, how 

 true to nature are its descriptions of a wild, wintry night in the 

 country. 



We might not covet a home so high, so windy, so bleak in 

 the winter, or fields yielding a return so grudgingly to the hand 

 of toil. But if we found under those roofs, as we should, intel- 

 ligence, a familiar acquaintance with our best authors, if we 

 found young ladies who would recite poetry, yes, and write it, 

 and why not, in sight of| Bryant's birthplace, and young men 

 well read in the history of their own and other times, young 

 men, some of them, who have made history hj their heroism, if 



