COMMON SENSE IN FARMING. 31 



ket, does any one doubt that he would get price enough addi- 

 tional to repay him for this expense an hundred fold ? 



Let him do more. Let him, in the early spring, or along 

 during the autumn, now and then dig up and bring from his 

 wood lot a graceful young elm, or ash, or maple, and plant it 

 in front of his house, or by the road-side against his own lands, 

 and after a few years, when nature shall have done the rest, 

 and its branches shall have sprouted and spread, and it shall 

 have put on its summer livery of green, and the birds come 

 and sing and build their nests in its top, let him sit down in its 

 shade and carefully count up its cost, and then ask himself if 

 he would allow it to be cut down for the paltry sum he may 

 have expended in the labor of rearing it ? But I pass from 

 being a neat and tasteful farmer, to the importance of being a 

 common sense one. 



In no department of the business of the country is this qual- 

 ity of sound common sense more needed than in that of 

 husbandry. It is by no means opposed to what is called 

 " book-farming," nor hostile to the theories and experiments of 

 the fancy farmer. It furnishes the only sure test by which to 

 try and see how many of these are worth pursuing. 



Suppose we test it by the article of neat stock — one of the 

 great and leading staples of husbandry in New England. The 

 notions of men upon this subject have been, and still are, 

 singularly unsettled. There have been treatises enough made 

 upon Short Horns and Long Horns, about Durhams and Devons 

 — Ayrshires and Alderneys — how one excels in flesh, another 

 for draught, another for milk, another for all these combined — 

 of the red color of the one, the light color of another, and the 

 pied and parti-colored spots of the third, to confound the judg- 

 ment of any ordinary man, and to have put old Jacob himself 

 had he been obliged to listen to them, to doubting whether 

 his ring-streaked and speckled flock were worth the trick they 

 cost him. 



Now no man can have all these races, and breeds, and varie- 

 ties upon any one of our moderate sized farms. Amidst such 

 conflicting testimony no one knows which to choose, and so the 

 farmer either keeps on in his old way, or mixes a little of one 

 new kind this year, and a little of another the next, till his 

 stock is made up at last of good, bad, and indifferent, just where 



