THE COUNTRY HOME [chapter 



notice. It is not diflScult for my boys to make a new 

 chisel or some similar tool, to help us through a 

 hurried job. Here is our saw for cutting wood, our 

 bone-grinder, and a cider press for utilizing waste 

 fruit. We sometimes grind one hundred barrels of 

 apples in a year into cider and vinegar. All this, or 

 nearly all this, is material that is allowed to go to 

 waste on large farms. If a chair or table be broken, 

 it goes to the shop ; and so it is with all those forlorn 

 happenings that generally stock a storeroom with 

 useless rubbish — that finally finds its way into bon- 

 fires. But construction is even more important 

 than repairing. A shop leads a boy to try his skill. 

 He thinks, he invents — he and the tools think to- 

 together. The chiefest of drawbacks with recent 

 farm life has, next to isolation, been its sharp alien- 

 ation from all industries but land tillage. The fac- 

 tories stole from us, one by one, all the industrial 

 arts, out of doors and indoors. The mothers gave 

 up their spinning, their weaving and their knitting; 

 and the fathers gave up their building, their shoe- 

 making, and their cheese and butter making. The 

 farm was left to the duller work of every-day drudg- 

 ery. Science had not come in to teach the charm of 

 comparative culture, and agricultural tools had not 



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