110 FARMS. 



because I saw when upon the ground and at the house, melons 

 enough for several more such days of picking ; onions enough to 

 make well nigh or quite four hundred and fifty bushels, and pota- 

 toes answering the manifest fully, when the hills were opened to me. 



The stock kept upon the farm consists of one cow, one heifer, 

 four oxen, one bull, two horses, two shoats ; from which it will at 

 once be seen that the manure must come chiefly from some other 

 source. The manure of Do ct. Boy den' s farm comes chiefly from 

 the sea-shore. This is the text — the farm itself the comment. Now 

 while it is obvious that but a small part of our farmers can have 

 access to this source of fertilization, it is nevertheless strange that 

 so little account is made of it when they can. The evidence to 

 my mind is inevitable that for resisting drought there are few ma- 

 nures, if any, like this. I do not pretend to have given the full 

 account of the crops upon this farm. As my visit was necessarily 

 short, I will close my account of it by expressing the hope, that 

 should the Society send out a Committee next year, they will make 

 it a point to visit Mr. Mason, and report his doings at length. 



My second visit was to the farm of Burley Smith, of Manchester, 

 the aged but vigorous gentleman,who showed me the only house in M. 

 that was painted when he settled there,and that was painted with fish 

 oil and Spanish brown ! I ought to say that with all the beauty of 

 Mr. Smith's farm, he would not probably claim for it the title of a 

 fancy farm any more than would Doct. Boyden for his. But for 

 'profit few will compare with either — the one or the other. 



Like the West Beach farm last described, this is manured mostly 

 from the sea. Mr. Smith thinks he gets about 500 tons of eel 

 grass and rock weed from his half mile of beach, annually. For- 

 merly his inner shore abounded with muscle-bed mud, but he does 

 not choose to draw too freely upon that, in hopes to have it extend 

 itself. Yet he takes up from fifty to one hundred loads a year of 

 that fat manure. Only seven acres of this noble farm of two hun- 

 dred acres, is in salt marsh, and seventy in pasture, all the rest is 

 tillage and mowing, with some woodland. Formerly, one man 

 (himself) carried on the whole ; but recently he has divided it 

 into three parts, thus making three pretty distinct farms. Nearly 

 one-third of all the tillage land is in gardens. Two acres are in 

 onions — probably four hundred barrels on these two. The grass 

 land shows the strength of sea stuff. Mr. Smith informed me that 



