6 MY FARM. 



ment had been worded as it was. For the mere estab- 

 lishment of a country home, one hundred acres might 

 seem an unnecessarily large number, as indeed it is. 

 But I must confess to having felt an anxiety to test 

 the question, as to whether a country liver was really 

 made the poorer by all the acres he possessed beyond 

 the one or two immediately about his homestead. 

 Indeed I may say that I felt a somewhat enthusiastic 

 curiosity to know, and to determine by actual experi- 

 ment, if farm lands were simply a cost and an annoy- 

 ance to any one who would not wholly forswear books, 

 enter the mud trenches valorously, and take the pig 

 by the ears, with his own hands. 



A half dozen acres, which a man looks after in the 

 intervals of other business, and sets thick with his 

 fancies, in the shape of orchard houses, or dwarf 

 pear trees, or glazed graperies, offer no solution. All 

 this is in most instances, only the expression of an 

 individualism of taste, entered upon with no thought 

 of those economies which Xenophon has illustrated 

 in his treatise, and worse than useless as a guide to 

 any one who would make a profession of agricultural 

 pursuits. 



With fifty or a hundred acres, however, steaming 

 under the plough, and with crops opening successively 

 into waving fields of green, into feathery blossom, 

 into full maturity ; too large for waste ; too consid- 



