12 



the cold embrace of merciless machinery, from which he 

 shall emerge, by the turning of a crank at the rate of so 

 many revolutions per minute, resolved into such elemental 

 factors as sausages, glue, hams, bone-meal, souced feet and 

 scrubbing-brushes ; we cannot compete witli a virgin soil 

 that asks no nutriment and only waits to be broken up and 

 planted — a flat, vegetable deposit left by some inland sea 

 that has escaped its confines — a rich alluvial mould nine 

 feet deep, it is said, in spots, and innocent for miles of such 

 a feature as a scrub-tree or a pebble. 



The farmer under all these influences becomes a trades- 

 man. He is helped by his wits as much as by his bone and 

 sinew. He is no longer the husbandman pure and simple, 

 living on his acres, — driving his grist to mill, — doing his 

 heavy work with the steers he bought this spring to beef 

 them a little later, — hauling his heavy fertilizers about from 

 mussel-flats and peat-meadow to muck-heap and compost- 

 bed, and tramping to Boston with his bulky night-loads at 

 the tedious pace of a double team of oxen. He buys hi& 

 fertilizer by the barrel in fine powder, and flings it about as 

 he would salt and pepper on an omelette. It may force 

 and overtax his soil, but he must quicken up his methods. 

 He ploughs and mows and reaps by horse-power. He rides 

 to market behind a pair of cheerful steppers and, as 1 heard 

 a witty agriculturist once remark in recounting the new 

 methods, — instead of swinging the scythe or flail or plod- 

 ding behind the plough through the heat of the solstice, he 

 trots out briskly in the morning, as though on pleasure 

 bent, for his mowing and reaping, and has a chilled plough 

 to use when the heat is unendurable. Thus, I take it, is to 

 be ultimately extracted the ray of sunshine that is latent 

 in the cucumber. He lives by what he buys and sells 

 rather than on what he sows and reaps. He watches the 

 market. He raises the crop that is merchantable. He fol- 

 lows the price-lists as closely as he follows the weather 



