THE INTERESTS OF AGRICULTURE. 27 



clmrclics and schools, the lectures and libraries, neighborhood 

 gatherings and village fairs, sleigh-rides, singing schools, and 

 the old-fashioned huskings, paring bees, quiltings and merry- 

 makings, all have their places ; no one of them is beneath 

 parental interest. It is a bad time when fathers and mothers 

 forget they once were young. 



Let the young people feel that they lose no substantial privi- 

 leges by living in the country — that their schools are as good, 

 their opportunity to get acquainted with the world about them 

 as good, and their general prospects at least as good as though 

 they lived anywhere else. 



I know that it isn't necessary nowadays to urge people 

 much to be easy with their children. The chief trouble many 

 of the latter have is to govern their parents, who try to be sub- 

 missive, but, occasionally forgetting, compel the young folks to 

 enforce discipline. But, in that period to which every man is 

 fond of alluding as an era of perfection — to wit: "When I was 

 a boy" — it wasn't so. When I lived on a New Hampshire farm, 

 the Fourth of July was hardly known, and the work on many 

 homesteads often went on the whole of Fast Day, and till 

 dinner-time on Thanksgiving. The only full holiday boys gen- 

 erally had, was glorious, never-to-be-forgotten muster-day. Is 

 it strange they were anxious to leave the farm, and go where 

 play days came oftener and recreations were more abundant? 



Though faring much better than above described, I know / 

 felt so one cloudy day, when, seeing the village boys on their 

 way to the river, I leaned for a moment on my axe,* remarking 

 in a suggestive manner — " They say lish bite to-day," and 

 received the comforting answer — " Stick to the wood-pile, and 

 they won't bite you! " 



While country youth are allowed to live more easily, care 

 should be taken that they enjoy constant intellectual improve- 

 ment — that, with their privileges, they learn the philosophy as 

 well as the practice of their art, and appreciate its independence 

 and dignity, becoming more and more interested* in it as they 

 approach the mile-stone of one-and-twenty. 



Thus, with the subduing of our waste lands and the sub- 

 division of our farms brought about by higher cultivation, 

 there will be no lack of young enterprise to fill the new fields 



