MASSACHUSETTS FARMER. 



latcd wealth that is ready to seek investment; he finds men 

 wise enough to prefer the security which a young man offers, 

 in his manly frame, industrious habits, and good morals, to 

 the venturesome speculator or artful schemer; and by the 

 aid of these he is soon able to become the most independent 

 of created beings — a young, hopeful master of his own acres, 

 with a roof to shelter himself and the wife who in the confi- 

 dence of woman's love has joyfully embarked with him on the 

 ocean of life. 



It is not indeed to the spot where he plants himself that he 

 owes this sense of independence which lie feels. He may ei 

 it here ; he cannot lose it altogether, let his home be ever so 

 remote. It springs up within him from the seed that is sown 

 and the germ that starts in the home of his childhood. Who, 

 while travelling through the great West for instance, on stop- 

 ping at the hospitable door of a farmer, has been told, in answer 

 to his inquiry, with that ready alacrity that marks a generous 

 pride in giving it utterance, that its master had emigrated from 

 the county of Worcester, has not seen stamped upon every 

 thing around that farm house something to mark the origin of 

 its owner ? Years may have passed away ; his name may have 

 been forgotten in his native village ; but in and around that 

 western home which he has planted for himself there will be 

 that which a practised eye cannot mistake; and the trees that 

 shelter it, the school house by the roadside, and the modest 

 church in the distance that marks where a village is clustering, 

 arc but counterparts to the features in the landscape on which 

 his young senses first opened. 



And yet these are not the fruits of the wealth he carried out 

 from the paternal roof, but of the training of his boyhood, of 

 the school house where he studied his arithmetic, and the 

 church where he sat by his mother's side and heard the solemn 

 but often rugged truths that settled deep in his memory, and 

 sometimes more deep from the very struggle which his own 

 young will held with such sturdy dogmas. Such men are ii 

 pendent where they are ; but they would have been no 

 independent had they never left the soil of New England. 



59* 



