ABANDONED FARMS. 6l 



none of them give any assurance that the disease is not 

 to become general among the typical farms of America. 



Through the Boston Advertiser, a rather conservative 

 journal, we have the following graphic picture of the 

 desolation which already reigns over portions of Massa- 

 chusetts, once the settlements of happy and prosperous 

 farmers : 



" Throughout the State of Massachusetts, away from 

 the cities and from the large towns, may be met, besides 

 oral reports, traces of farms once yielding a support 

 to their occupants, but now abandoned. The signs of 

 former tenancy are to be found in conditions varying 

 from the indications of recent occupancy to those of a 

 generation or longer ago. Sometimes the dwelling-house 

 has a look of neatness, in its white paint and green blinds, 

 not yet yielding much to the weather. The barns, wagon 

 sheds, corn-cribs, and other out-buildings Avill be black- 

 ened, of course, from exposure of their unpainted surface, 

 but yet have in them wear and utility. But the stillness 

 of a solitude haunts the place, and the sign, affixed to a 

 tree, ' For Sale,' stirs in the practical observer the sus- 

 picious question, Why ? He glances over the undulating 

 fields, where now the grass is growing thinly, and thence 

 back to the stone wall, so carefully laid as to suggest that 

 at some inspection by a committee of an agricultural 

 fair, it must have won a prize. What labor the red- 

 dened and wearied hands must have expended here, and 

 yet the sons have not stayed to reap any profit from the 

 father's toil ! 



'' Again, the house is not so trim. The storms of several 

 decades have worn the paint away. The clapboards are 

 darkening in the weather. The mortar has crumbled 

 from between the bricks in the chimneys, so that you 



