THE COUNTRY HOME [CHAPTER 
notice. It is not difficult for my boys to make a new 
chisel or some similar tool, to help us through a 
hurried job. Here is our saw for cutting wood, our 
bone-grinder, and a cider press for utilizing waste 
fruit. We sometimes grind one hundred barrels of 
apples in a year into cider and vinegar. All this, or 
nearly all this, is material that is allowed to go to 
waste on large farms. If a chair or table be broken, 
it goes to the shop; and so it is with all those forlorn 
happenings that generally stock a storeroom with 
useless rubbish —that finally finds its way into bon- 
fires. But construction is even more important 
than repairing. A shop leads a boy to try his skill. 
He thinks, he invents — he and the tools think to- 
together. The chiefest of drawbacks with recent 
farm life has, next to isolation, been its sharp alien- 
ation from all industries but land tillage. The fac- 
tories stole from us, one by one, all the industrial 
arts, out of doors and indoors. The mothers gave 
up their spinning, their weaving and their knitting; 
and the fathers gave up their building, their shoe- 
making, and their cheese and butter making. The 
farm was left to the duller work of every-day drudg- 
ery. Science had not come in to teach the charm of 
comparative culture, and agricultural tools had not 
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