THE FARMER AND HIS AIDS. 17 



it will not produce, although it receives many hints from pro- 

 jected stones and sticks, that fruit is desired to come down, and 

 though it has heen swallowed crude into the robust bowels of 

 small boys. But draw a low fence about it to keep out the cow 

 and pig, and for thirty, forty, perhaps a hundred years, it ripens 

 peacefully its delicate fruit, every pear, every nectarine, every 

 cluster of grapes, inviting you to have its picture taken, before 

 being sent to the Horticultural Fair. 



Nature drops a pine cone in Mariposa, and it grows three or 

 four centuries, producing trees thirty feet in circumference. 

 How was it done ? They did not grow on a ridge, but in a 

 basin, where they found a deep and dry soil, and Avhere they 

 could protect themselves from the sun by growing in groves, 

 and from the winds by the mountain shelter. The planter who 

 saw tliem, remembered his orchard at liome, where every year 

 a destroying wind made his pears and peaclies look as bleak as 

 suffering virtue. So he went iiome and built a high wall on 

 the exposed side of his orchard, and his peaches grow to the 

 size of melons, and his vines ran out of all control. 



Nay, the chemist declares that he will have a whole farm in 

 a box a rod square ; that is to say, he will take the roots into 

 his laboratory ; the vines and stems and stalks may be sprawl- 

 ing about the field outside ; he will attend to the roots in his 

 tub, and gorge them with food that is good for them. If they 

 have a fancy for dead dog, he would let them have it, sure that 

 the fruits would never reveal the secrets of tlieir table. Such 

 men we need to bring out a greater degree of cultivation of our 

 soil, which is capable of as great and increased productiveness 

 as that which England has attained. Concord is one of the 

 oldest towns in the country, — far on now in its third century. 

 The selectmen have once in five years perambulated its boiuids, 

 and yet in this year a very large quantity of land has been dis- 

 covered and added to the agricultural land, and without a 

 murmur of complaint from any neighbor. By drainage, we 

 have gone to the subsoil, and we have a Concord under Con- 

 cord, a Middlesex under Middlesex, and a basement story of 

 Massachusetts more valuable than all the superstructure. Tiles 

 are political economists. Tliey are so many Young Americans 

 announcing a better era, and a day of fat things. Tliere has 

 been a nightmare brought up in England, under the indiges- 



