62 AMERICAN FARMS. 



see the light of the sky through the crevices. Some of 

 the panes in the windows are broken. The front door 

 hangs ajar. The winds sigh through the empty wood- 

 shed. The out-buildings, first to go, are falling in. 

 Acres of land once cultivated lie around. The sign 

 announcing the place as being for sale is broken and 

 hanging by a single nail, and the words are almost 

 untraceable. 



" Another scene will represent a ruin. The roof has 

 tumbled in. The charming prospect of hill and dale and 

 wood and setting sun is now never more to be shut out 

 from the front door, where once the busy housewife may 

 have sometimes glanced, for the door is swung far back 

 and gaping on the scene, and no one is there to push it 

 to. At some time or other the barn fell down, and the 

 boards and timbers are rotting from the repeated dryings 

 and wettings. It is a scene of desolation. The sugges- 

 tiveness of former tenancy imparts to it a melancholy, 

 such as a mere old cellar or the traces of a stone under- 

 pinning do not have. These, too, may be found some- 

 times in the midst of lonely woods, where the trees have 

 grown up in th^ fields formerly ploughed and sowed, so 

 that the owner is already counting on their value at some 

 lone saw-mill. But where the remnant of a frame is 

 standing, it suggests the farmer's hopes, the housewife's 

 counsels, the ploughboy's whistle, once known here, and 

 now gone forever. 



" Large areas are now offered for sale. The prices 

 asked for the land are low compared with the prices 

 asked for land in the places where the population is 

 growing." 



If any State of New England can be said to have made 

 verifiable progress in the past, it is Massachusetts ; and 



