4 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



without a fling ; and if now present, he is expecting to hear us 

 justify them ; but we never advise too much of a good thing ; 

 the unhicky- farmer is ah-eady in for it, too much for our 

 liking. 



If you will observe his fields about the 25tli of June, you 

 will see them overspread with flowers — perhaps one entire mass, 

 according to the most recent floral instructions for display. 

 Not satisfied with our indigenous flowers, he prefers an exotic, 

 but why this to any other, must be for its association with some 

 of his stock, its common name being bull's eye. He has the 

 fever for embellishment so high, and cultivates this so exten- 

 sively, that he can raise nothing else with it ; his hay is there- 

 fore flowers, and he feeds his cattle on flowers ; he is in fact, in 

 a perfect elysium of flowers — such a degree of sublimated 

 embellishment and felicitous enjoyment that we should not 

 think of, lest we might overdo the subject and lose sight of 

 profit. 



For another variety of natural embellishment peculiar to the 

 anti-improvement farmer, he is indebted to tlie caterpillar. 

 The traveller often observes some half dozen of their clustered 

 festoons upon each wayside apple or cherry tree, and as if to 

 make their domestic arrangements more conspicuous, the trees, 

 in many instances, are suffered to be entirely denuded of their 

 foliage. The adjoining neighbors, satisfied perchance with the 

 natural beauty of the trees and their fruits, and not able to 

 afford the extravagant waste attending this species of decora- 

 tion, are nevertheless annually infested with an army of volun- 

 teers from our hero's premises, adding greatly to their labor of 

 extermination, with no legal remedy.* 



Still another cause for various ornamental devices is the dep- 

 redation of the crow. The future historian of American art 

 and taste may expatiate largely upon the cornfield statuary, 

 from the man of straw supplicating Ceres, to the threatening 

 aspect of the Roman gladiator, down to images more hideous 

 than those of Nicholas Nickleby and all the designs of Cruik- 

 shanks. The antiquarian will also find this a fruitful field in 



* " In Flanders," lladcllffe says, " when the caterpillar commences its 

 attack upon the trees, every farmer is obliged to destroy those upon his own 

 premises, to the satisfaction of the mayor of his particular commune, or pay 

 the cost of having it done for him." 



