ADDRESS. 



I AM not insensible, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the 

 Bristol County Agricultural Society, how adventurous a 

 thing it is for one who has had so little personal acquain- 

 tance with agriculture as myself — for one who was born 

 and brought up in a city of paved streets, in which it is our 

 special boast that not a blade of grass is ever permitted to 

 grow — to undertake a formal address to a society of prac- 

 tical farmers. 



There are those within hearing who know, however, — 

 and none better than yourself, sir, — that I am no volunteer 

 on this occasion and in this service ; that I am not here 

 with any presumptuous proffer of information or instruc- 

 tion, either to practical or to theoretical farmers; but that 

 I have come in simple deference to the repeated solicita- 

 tions of friends, and because I have never learned that great 

 art which the fairer portion of my audience understand 

 how to prize and how to practise, when teased by the im- 

 portunity of admiring suitors, — the art of saying no I 



Seriously, my friends, I am here with a deep sense of my 

 own insufficiency for these things, and with a full con- 

 sciousness that there are hundreds around me to whom I 

 might far better offer myself as a scholar, than as a teacher, 

 upon any subject connected with the cultivation of the soil. 



