Good and Bad Farming Contrasted. 155 
broad branches of the old tree which stood by the way side. 
But, you say, " What has childhood to do with this matter?" 
Much, we aver; the child is surely the model of the rnan. How- 
ever, we will, in courtesy to you, pass over a few intervening 
years, and take our latter hero where we did our first, at the hope- 
ful age of twenty-one. 
Here we find him entering upon possession of a small real es- 
tate given him by his father, as an assurance of having reached 
the period of seniority, with all necessary requisites of stock, 
tools, &c., for managing said estate with success. True, he had 
not strength of muscle and vigor of mind like Thomas, for effemi- 
nate indulgence had weakened both. Yet he had a constitution 
strong enough, with proper management, to have enabled him to 
perform much hard and profitable service, and a mind sufficiently 
alive and active to see where others " missed it," and to seek 
employment in almost any way but by labor. This life of 
drudgery — this rising in the world, by " rising before it was yet 
light, and eating the bread of carefulness," he did not believe in, 
and therefore exerted the whole bent of his ingenuity to " rise in 
the world " in some other way — to secure more than a compe- 
tence — to " hasten to be rich," by other, and in the end, less 
certain paths than those marked out, wherein strictly honest men 
must walk. Consequently, among other schemes adopted to 
attain his object, trade was among the number most favorable to 
his inclination. Now, trade is both honorable and lawful, so far 
as it gives the parties a mutual benefit in the transaction, and 
trading men in every community, when they act from principles 
of living and letting live, are among the most useful men; but 
sharpers, who have an eye at only one side of the bargain, and 
who can practise fraud and deceit to accomplish their mercenary 
ends, are serious drawbacks, not only to the pecuniary advance- 
ments of the community, but they prey upon the very core of its 
morals, and leave a wake of mire in their train the most melan- 
choly and alarming. Of this class of dealers, however, Philip's 
taste led him to think so favoraby as to induce him to claim brother- 
hood with them; though nearly all attempts to obtain high stand- 
ing there were vain and ineffectual. In fact he never effected but 
one shave in his life; and that was when he married his beautiful 
and industrious wife, who in the unsuspecting simplicity of her 
pure and noble mind, supposed that where there was so much 
shadow there must be a little substance. But his dealing propen- 
sities must be carried out, and for one who had the trade to learn, 
and so little intellectual capital to invest, it looked in the outset 
like bad calculation. However, he traded, lost, and must trade 
again to make the matter even, and again /05/.' The swindlers 
into whose hands he had thrown himself, finding him rather a 
