THE FARMER'S CALLING. 47 



Allow niG, my friends, to congratulate you in your useful, 

 honorable, and profitable employment — you, wlio have assembled 

 to exhibit your products, your cattle, and your fine horses. You 

 may well be proud of your exhibition. You have not only 

 gratified yourselves, but have pleased, and I hope profited us 

 who come to see, but who had nothing to exhibit. You, too, I 

 trust, have profited by this exhibition. This fair and exhibition 

 has been a splendid success. Our Society is yet in its infancy, 

 but the display here since the organization has shown that the 

 farmers were in earnest. The ladies of this Society, too, have 

 fully perfornfied their part. The exhibition of their work is 

 highly creditable to them, and pleasing to all. By the exhibition 

 of the beautiful work of their own hands, they have shown their 

 skill and ingenuity too plainly to be misunderstood. Ladies, 

 you have shown that taste, skill, and industry which justly 

 entitles you to the high position which you occupy, and you 

 have abundant reason to be proud and rejoice that you are 

 farmers' wives and farmers' daughters ; that you have a home 

 you can call your own — a home, quiet and undisturbed, free 

 from contention and strife, free from the noise, dust, and tlie 

 plagues of a city life — where you can look out upon, and roam 

 in, the open green fields, and invigorate in that bracing pure 

 air, which sweeps across the broad meadows, the grove, the 

 orchard, and the pasture at the brook side. 



At a time like this, when manufactures and commerce are 

 crippled, when all kinds of business is depressed, when financial 

 ruin stares the whole business community full in the face, when 

 the factory spindles are still, when merchants have closed their 

 stores, the farmer, the most independent and happy of all men, 

 can rejoice that he is a farmer — that the house he lives in is his 

 own, and should every man in the village fail he will still 

 survive. He is affected by the panic, it is true ; he cannot sell 

 for cash, and get high prices, yet he can live. The farmer 

 remains but little affected by the financial crash. He hears the 

 noise, but is affected but slightly. Such is your position to-day, 

 as farmers. 



A rebellion, which has ripened into a war, is upon us — a war, 

 terrible in its effects, uncertain in duration — a war which must 

 prove disastrous to us, and worse than a disaster to those who 

 have forced it upon us ; and as dark clouds lower about our 



