12 ' BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



must keep our cattle on hemlock browse. Our down-east friends, 

 accustomed to granite and silicious soils, have been a little in- 

 credulous as to the reports we have made of our premium crops. 

 They could hardly believe that we could raise a hundred bushels 

 of corn on an acre, and the same amount of oats, sixty bushels 

 of rye, and four hundred of potatoes ; and a few years since the 

 Secretary, with one or two members of the Board, came up to 

 Berkshire, in the summer, to spy out the land, to see the crops 

 growing, and to ascertain whether we told big stories, or did 

 actually raise big crops. I took the Secretary and his com- 

 panions to one of my neighbors who owns a farm of good 

 strong land, and who had reported a crop of one hundred and 

 nine bushels of oats to the acre. We found my neighbor in the 

 hay field, and the Secretary asked him, " How do you know 

 that you raised so many bushels on an acre ? " The farmer 

 stretched himself up at full length and replied, " I measured 

 the land and weighed the oats myself." I never knew whether 

 the Secretary was convinced or not, but if he was not, I was. 



It is said that dwellers among mountains are always fond of 

 their home, and are a little inclined to boast about it. The 

 Swiss are proverbially homesick when absent from their moun- 

 tain homes. You will excuse us, therefore, if we indulge in a 

 little self-glorification. It is a trick we learned more than 

 twenty years since, when we celebrated the centennial settle- 

 ment of the county by a Berkshire jubilee, and called home the 

 sons who had emigrated.- We never knew till we heard the 

 speeches of these wanderers, that we lived so near heaven on 

 these Berkshire hills. We knew the scenery was good, but we had 

 thought the soil a little rough, rocky and barren ; but they told 

 us there was no place on earth so good to live and die in, as 

 Berkshire. They probably thought so just at that moment, for 

 it was a fair day in August, and we had had a good dinner, and 

 were comfortably seated in a tent, with a good look-out upon 

 the mountains, which were round about us, as they are round 

 about Jerusalem. The pilgrims felt the associations of their 

 youth called up, and their hearts burned within them as they 

 spoke ; but I noticed that few of them ever came back to live 

 and die in Berkshire. You have no such associations, and I 

 fear may have a worse impression of our mountain home, as seen 

 tlu^ough the gloom of winter, than it deserves. We feel that 



