43 PLAIN AND PLEASANT TALK 



tific knowledge as shall throw light upon every operation 

 of the farm, the orchard and the garden. 



The other class who rail at book-farming ought to be 

 excused, for they do not treat book-farming any worse than 

 they do their own farming ; indeed, not half so bad. They 

 rate the paper with their tongue ; but cruelly abuse their 

 ground, for twelve months in the year with both hands. I 

 will draw the portrait of a genuine anti-book-farmer of this 

 last sort. 



He plows three inches deep lest he should turn up the 

 poison that, in his estimation, lies below ; his wheat-land is 

 plowed so as to keep as much water on it as possible ; he 

 sows two bushels to the acre and reaps ten, so that it takes 

 a fifth of his crop to seed his ground ; his corn-land has 

 never any help from him, but bears just what it pleases, 

 which is from thirty to thirty-five bushels by measurement) 

 though he brags that it is fifty or sixty. His hogs, if not 

 remarkable for fattening qualities, would beat old Eclipse 

 at a quarter-race ; and were the man not prejudiced against 

 deep plowing, his hogs would work his grounds better with 

 their prodigious snouts than he does with his jack-knife- 

 plow. His meadow-lands yield him from three-quarters 

 of a ton to a whole ton of hay, which is regularly spoiled 

 in curing, regularly left out for a month, very irregularly 

 stacked up, and left for the cattle to pull out at their pleas- 

 ure, and half-eat and half-trample underfoot. His horses 

 would excite the avarice of an anatomist in search of osteo- , 

 logical specimens, and returning from their range of pasture 

 they are walking herbariums, bearing specimens in their 

 mane and tail of every weed that bears a bur or cockle. 

 But oh, the cows ! If held up in a bright day to the sun, 

 don't you think they would be semi-transparent ? But he 

 tells us that good milkers are always poor ! His cows get 

 what Providence sends them, and very little beside, except 

 in winter, then they have a half-peck of corn on ears a foot 

 long thrown to them, and they afibrd lively spectacles of 



