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and high prices, to u<^ his sceptre or dream of his grow- 

 ing power. But there is a grand distinction between 

 the farmer and he who merely owns or lives upon a farm, 

 or, as I might better say, between the true and real 

 farmer and the farmer by courtesy, or by calling only. 

 Between the man who generously and thoroughly tills 

 his productive, joyful acres, and him, who, with unwil- 

 ling and begrudging toil, scarcely scrapes from the worn 

 out surface of his impoverished soil a scanty and miserable 

 support, and in starving his sorrowful fields also starves 

 in the end himself. Oh, many such men are there merely 

 living on farms, a burning shame to the farmer's noble 

 calling, to his glorious mission of transforming this fair 

 earth by the power of culture into an Eden, and making 

 this world a Paradise. 



We will suppose ourselves visiting farms, my friends, 

 and here is one of the kind we mention. We come first 

 to the barn. It is of mere boards, its great cracks open 

 to the winds of heaven, or perhaps shaky and rickety 

 when in winter the poor cows shiver as they devour a 

 double portion of the sedgy hay, striving in vain to 

 supply undue warmth ; and underneath it there is no 

 commodious paved cellar, where the well-fed swine may 

 fatten, and in which to economize the manures, both 

 liquid and solid. But there it lies, thrown out in slov- 

 enly heaps, through storm and sunshine, heat and cold, 

 sending a stench up into the pure air as its precious 

 gases are swept away by the robber winds, while the 

 rains wash its rich fertilizing juices into the roadside 

 gutter, whence tall pestilent weeds and great burdocks 

 shall by and by flourish in a useless and shameful luxu- 

 riance, while our friend, the farmer, by courtesy and 

 name only, carts mere refuse straw and useless stubble 

 out into his fields, under the pretence of manuring his 

 starving farms. The fertile phosphates and the fruitful 



