THE INTERESTS OF AGRICULTURE. . 25 



make his brief summer call and one blind is for a few moments 

 set ajar, while he rests himself in a luxurious but mouldy chair. 

 At length comes Tlianksgiving, and the parlor is fairly opened, 

 the only day in the year, perhaps; and when the mould is 

 rubbed off, the dampness dried out, and the moist chimney has 

 done smoking and begins to draw, the room for that short day 

 seems like a habitable and even cheerful place, but on the 

 morrow relapses into grim solitude. 



To think of such a room is melancholy. But how much 

 more melancholy is it to think of the deserted second and third 

 stories of the farm, just spoken of — the spacious and valuable, 

 but never visited parlors of the soil. Into their moist darkness 

 no parochial visit introduces a chance ray of sunshine, and no 

 festival, even once a year, cheers the richly furnished recesses 

 with warmth and life. 



Now there are a few subsoil ploughs owned by members of 

 this society, and there are some as good farmers present to-day 

 as can well be found. When our friends, the clergy, rebuke the 

 evil of staying away from church, they have to address them- 

 selves to the faithful few who have come to church, and to 

 whom therefore the censure does not apply. So in decrying 

 poor cultivation, I have to speak to you^ who are mostly right 

 already, and to whom my remarks may seem like a last year's 

 almanac — old news and dry reading. Still, it does not seem to 

 be generally realized that it is easier to raise sixty bushels of 

 corn on one acre than on two, provided the land is worth 

 planting at all, and what is true of this crop is true of others, 

 corn being a convenient type. The last returns showed that 

 the average yield of corn in Massachusetts was twenty-eight and 

 a half bushels, and in Middlesex County twenty-nine. Good 

 farmers say that twice as deep ploughing, with more manure and 

 cultivation, would certainly double this. Thus, our farmers can 

 get as large crops from half their land as from the whole, and 

 save much in hoeirig, carting, <fec., and raise better hay crops 

 afterwards. 



If Dr. Loring, by freely using muck-compost, gets seventy- 

 five bushels of corn to the acre; if James Day, of Haverhill, by 

 ploughing a light sandy field deep into the subsoil and working 

 three cords of manure into sixteen cords of compost, gets ninety 



