768 Transactions of the American Institute. 



stable boy, and that would be as bad as the other way. Boys that 

 are put out to do farm chores for their board generally hate farming, 

 and make good speculators, or peddlers, or politicians. Suppose, for 

 instance, he has been nearly all day in the hay field, or following a 

 horse in the corn, comes to the house and finds some young company. 

 Can he go and put on a white shirt, wash his face and be gay for an 

 hour, or is he to keep on his old clothes, feed the pigs, milk his two 

 cows, and measure out the oats for the work horses as soon as they 

 cool. Farmers often take a grim pleasure in putting a briglit-faced 

 boy who says he wants to be a farmer, at work which is about the 

 hardest and meanest on the place ; he sprouts potatoes in the cellar, 

 shovels green manure, hoes corn, suckers tobacco, and picks up stone. 

 Can you expect a lad to be anything but disgusted with such a life ? 

 If we send city boys to farm, let us send them where they will find 

 some bread that is not crust, and some meat that is not bone. 



Mr. H. L. Reade. — Some years since I took a vagrant boy from 

 these streets, and found a home for him on a farm. He is now a 

 hard-working, honest and trusted citizen, prosperous, and known 

 through the town where he lives for a good farmer. 



Dr. F. H. Hexamer. — The chief difficulty is in giving boys a love 

 of nature and a taste for rural life. The average city lad is lacking 

 in this, and here is the difiiculty. But if some care is used, such 

 enthusiasm may be infused. 



Dr. Isaac P. Trimble. — Among the Quakers the placing of a" city 

 boy with a good farmer is quite common, and some of their finest 

 men have been reared in just this way. But they honor agriculture 

 beyond most of other people, and look to it as the true life of the 

 good man, most blessed to himself and most useful to his fellow men. 



The Chairman. — This subject is one of importance, and as sug- 

 gested, I will a])point Mr. Curtis, Mr. Lyman, and Mr. Reade a com- 

 mittee to report on some method by which the boy may find his 

 farmer, and the countryman be set in correspondence with the lad he 

 is looking for. 



How Premium Corn Crops are Measured. 

 Mr. S. E. Todd, Brooklyn, iS^. Y. — ^When I was on a form, a distant 

 neighbor won the premium on one acre of Indian corn, which had 

 been ofiered by the county agricultural society. A few years after 

 the man who gave his affidavit before the ofiicers of the society that 

 he husked and measui'cd every bushel that grew on that acre, dis- 



