BOOK FIRST. 



The Larger Aspects of Farm Life. 



CHAPTER I. .• : . . : ; 



THE OLD FARMER * 



THE old farmer was a jack of all trades. T rememoer 

 that ill the then new country of Northeastern Ohio each 

 farmer sought to raise two or three acres of wheat, of 

 which he took what he needed to the neighboring mill, pay- 

 ing toll for the grinding at the rate, if I remember rightly, of 

 two quarts to the bushel, and taking home his flour, middlings, 

 and bran. His surplus wheat he sold usually in my time at 

 $1.00 a bushel. He had from five to ten acres of corn, which 

 he mostly fed out on the place to hogs, of which, after filling 

 his pork barrels, he would have one or two to turn off. A 

 steer or " farrow cow," also fattened on the corn, was usually 

 killed in the fall, half sold among the neighbors and half 

 corned or dried for family use, incidentally furnishing the 

 tallow for the dipped candles. From three to a dozen sheep 



* This chapter first appeared over my signature in the San Francisco Call, 

 in September, 1895. It was an expansion of a portion of a lecture by Prof. 

 E. A. Ross, of Stanford University, to which I had listened a few weeks 

 previous. Due credit was given to Dr. Ross in this original publication. The 

 article was somewhat widely copied in the press of the day, and subsequently I 

 saw similar articles— some by well-known authors— which were also widely 

 copied. The contrast between the old and the new conditions is very obvious, 

 and the subject is evidently fascinating to those of us whose boyhood memories 

 run back to those days. Portions of three chapters immediately following also 

 appeared in the series of which this chapter formed a part. k. f. a. 



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