12 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



to be their natural employment. The first farmer was the first 

 man, and all nobility rests on the possession and use of land. Men 

 do not like hard work very well ; but every man has an excep- 

 tional respect for tillage, and a feeling that this is the original 

 calling of his race ; that he liimself is only excused from it by 

 some circumstance which made hiiu delegate it for a time to 

 other hands. If he has not some skill which recommends him to 

 the farmer, some product which the farmer will give him corn 

 for, he must himself return to his due place among the planters 

 of corn. The profession has its ancient charm of standing 

 nearest to God, the First Cause. Then the beauty of nature, 

 the piety, the tranquillity, the innocence of the countryman, his 

 independence, and all the pleasing arts belonging to him, the care 

 of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, 

 of fruits, of trees, and the reaction on the workman, in giving 

 him a strength and plain dignity, like the face and manners of 

 nature, all men are sensible of. All of us keep the firm in 

 reserve as an asylum where to hide our poverty and our solitude, 

 if we do not succeed in society. Who knows how many 

 remorseful glances are turned this way from the competitions 

 of the shop and counting-room, from the mortifying cunning of 

 the Courts and the Senates. After the man has been degraded 

 so that he has no longer the vigor to attempt active labor on 

 the soil, yet when he has been poisoned by town life and drugged 

 by cooks, and every meal is a force-pump to exhaust by stimulus 

 the poor remainder of his strength, he resolves ; " Well, my 

 children, whom I have injured, shall go back to the land to be 

 recruited and cured by that which should have been my nursery 

 and shall now be their hospital." 



The farmer is a person of remarkable conditions. His office 

 is precise and important, and it is of no use to try to paint him 

 in rose-color. You must take him just as he stands. Nothing 

 is arbitrary or sentimental in his condition, and tlierefore one 

 respects in his office rather the elements than himself. He 

 bends to the order of the seasons and the weather and the soils, 

 as the sails of the ship bend to the wind. He makes his gains 

 little by little, and by hard labor. He is a slow person, being 

 regulated by time and nature, and not by city watches. He 

 takes the pace of the seasons, of the plants, and of chemistry. 

 Nature never hurries, and atom by atom, little by little, accom- 



