REWARDS OF AGRICULTURE 449 



of the globe where hard labor in agriculture has been essential 

 to support life : not a single one of the glorious acquisitions of 

 human skill, and intelligence, and inventiveness has originated 

 in the tropics. More than this : where the hardest labor has 

 been necessary, there, precisely there, has been the most of 

 thrift, and happiness, and virtue. Holland, which by incessant 

 industry reclaimed its soil from the sea and banked out the 

 ocean from her rich meadows ; Switzerland, where the flocks 

 and herds have to find their sustenance in three ranges of ele- 

 vation in the course of a year; England, with her splendid 

 agriculture : and New England, with her rocks, and bogs, and 

 barrens, are proofs of this, that, the harder the conditions 

 of toil, the richer and more various the blessings that spring 

 from it. 



I recently overheard in a railroad car the conversation of two 

 young- men, one of whom — perhaps both — was evidently on a 

 visit here from the "West. It was when the drought of the last 

 summer was doing its worst. They were looking out from the 

 windows of the car upon the successive patches of sand, gravel, 

 rock, scrubby woods, and mullein through which the road wound 

 on. It must be confessed that the region wore rather a hard 

 aspect, and that even the cattle which we occasionally passed 

 seemed to be meditating upon the poverty of the soil ; while 

 the chickens were making the most of the grasshoppers, run- 

 ning off what little flesh they had in the effort to get a little 

 more. The travellers made themselves merry over these 

 scenes, where the very ribs of the starved earth seemed to have 

 broken through its lean skin, and they uttered their sharp criti- 

 cisms accordingly. At last one of them flatly affirmed that he 

 would rather own a ten-acre lot in Wisconsin or Illinois than 

 the land of the whole State. At this point, feeling a little dis- 

 turbed by their reflections on my native soil, I wanted to ask 

 the youth what brought him here. What was he after here ? 

 As I did not put the question to get an answer, I imagined 

 what his answer would be. Perhaps he came to see his par- 

 ents — a noble motive, and probably a welcome visit to them 

 if he was a steady youth, even though he may have needed to 

 receive from them the money to come and go. Perhaps he 

 wanted a wife ; and if he was worth having as a husband, he 

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