380 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
Ik Marvel—The Right Kind of Talk. 
Everybody, and the rest of mankind, have 
heard of Ik Marvel’s “ Reveries of a Bachelor,” 
and those who have read it may imagine Don¬ 
ald G. Mitchell (Ik Marvel) still a dreary 
bachelor. But such is not the case. He is es¬ 
tablished on a good farm near New Haven, Conn., 
and has (we suppose) a growing family around 
him. He works at home, but sometimes is called 
out to talk. Hear him. (We quote the closing 
paragraph of his address before the State Agri¬ 
cultural Society, in Hartford :) 
But there is something worth living for besides 
money. That is very good, but is not all. With 
the rest let us raise a crop of good ideas. While 
you are a farmer, remember that you are a 
man, with duties and responsibilites. Live down 
ihe old brutal notion that a farmer must be 
uncouth, uneducated, and unthinking—a mere 
plodder. 
You are brought into immediate contact with 
the great heart of civilization. You cannot get 
out of the buzz of the toiling world. The trill of 
the wonder-working wires, and the rumble of 
the locomotive (the thunder threat of nations) 
come to your once secluded hill-side. 
Move toward a better life. Do not keep your 
boys corn-shelling in the long winter evenings. 
Make your farm a place that your sons and daugh¬ 
ters cannot help loving. Cultivate the trees— 
care nothing for looks. You do care, else why 
uid you build that two-story white house, with 
blinds, and a cupola into which you never go. Or 
why did you, years ago, carefully brush your 
coat, and pull up your shirt collar, when you were 
starting on a Sunday evening to visit the good 
woman who now shares your home 1 
Care much more for books and pictures. Don’t 
keep a solemn parlor, into which you go but once 
a month, with the parson or sewing society. 
Hang around your walls pictures which shall tell 
stories of mercy, hope, courage, faith and charity. 
Make your living room the largest and most 
cheerful in the house. Let the place be such that 
when your boy has gone to distant lands, or even 
when, perhaps, he clings to a single plank in the 
tonely waters of the wide ocean, the thought of 
'he still homestead shall come across the deso¬ 
lation, bringing always light, hope and love. 
Have no dungeon about your house—no room 
you never open—no blinds that are always shut. 
Don’t teach your daughters French before they 
can weed a flower-bed or cling to a side-saddle. 
And daughters ! do not be ashamed of the prun¬ 
ing knife. Bring to your door the richest flowers 
from the woods ; cultivate the friendship of birds ; 
scorn the scamp that levels his murderous gun at 
the blue bird or the robin. Study botany, learn 
to love nature, and seek a higher cultivation than 
the fashionable world would give you. 
-- ■ —»♦« — -- 
The Farmer’s Mine. 
Not on the Frazer river, nor in California, but 
on his own land, and near his own barn. Guano, 
and other good marketable fertilize.s are all well 
in their place, but they should not be his chief de¬ 
pendence. It should be his daily object to manu¬ 
facture as much manure as possible within his 
laboratories. His cattle, swine, horses and poul¬ 
try must be kept constantly at work with this in 
view. If they have the requisite materials given 
them to work upon, and are wisely managed, they 
can be made self-sustaining animals by the quan¬ 
tity of manure they will create. The farmer 
should keep as much stock as his farm will sus¬ 
tain, and the more he keeps, the more he will be 
able to keep. His means of doing so Will accu¬ 
mulate annually. It is chiefly by husbanding 
every particle of manure, that many farmers, be¬ 
ginning with sterile or worn out lands, have grad¬ 
ually reared up arowid them a luxuriant vegeta¬ 
tion of orchards and waiving fields of grasses and 
grain. 
The following paragraphs, from a European 
work, confirm our view: “ The real source of 
the great fertility of the great Lombardian plain 
is now known to be its high cultivation. In the 
triangle included between Milan, Lodi and Pavia, 
each side of which is little more than twenty 
miles in length, there are, it is estimated, not 
fewer than 100,000 head of cattle, 100,000 pigs, 
and 25,000 horses, in addition to the human pop¬ 
ulation. It is to the immense supplies of manure, 
solid and liquid, obtained from these sources, and 
not to the refuse of the towns themselves, that 
the richness of the soil is mainly attributable.” 
-►-»- 
Blinks from a Lantern.. V. 
BY DiqSENES REDIVIVUS. 
A DESPONDING FARMER. 
It is said to be a constitutional infirmity of the 
Englishman to grumble. He is under a terrible 
despotism, unless he can give full license to his 
tongue, and find fault with everything that he 
knows anything about, and especially with mat-' 
ters that he knows nothing about. In the latter, 
his genius culminates. In this respect the Anglo- 
American shows his lineage. There is, however, 
this difference, that the American feels special li¬ 
cense to find fault with his own personal enter¬ 
prises, while the Englishman rarely allows his 
grumbling to disturb his own self-complacency. 
Higgins loves to find fault with himself and his 
farm management better than any man I know 
of. He owns a grand farm, in the suburbs of the 
city, which now means anywhere within six hours 
ride by rail. He does business in the city—going 
home once a week to spend a day or two upon 
the farm, to give directions, and to supervise im¬ 
provements already projected. Considering that 
he is not a farmer “ to the manor born,” he has 
really done a good business, and made fewer mis¬ 
takes than might have been expected. I lately 
went over to Higgins’ place to inspect improve¬ 
ments, and, by invitation, to offer a little advice 
on farm matters, though I am not yet duly adver¬ 
tised as a “ consulting agriculturist.” The fact 
is, the samples of my counsel before the public 
are not particularly attractive. The medicine is 
bitter, and people do not love to take it. 
I found Higgins rather “ down in the mouth,” 
about a recent importation of English swine. He 
is engaged in the shipping business, and frequent¬ 
ly imports rare animals from abroad. He was in 
one of his bluest veins, and had evidently been 
“ done for,” and was just now waking up to the 
fact. 
“ I thought agricultural writers recommended 
pork-raising as a pleasing and profitable branch 
of husbandry, the pig as an industrious artizan to 
manufacture manure ; his body, a living crucible, 
wherein all manner of coarse matters could be 
purged of their dross, and come out clean fat, 
solid pork, and tender hams, fit for use. I am 
sorry to say, O Diogenes, that gentlemen of the 
press draw too much upon their fancy, and lead 
us, solid men, to a great many unprofitable in 
vestments. Their view of pork-raising is all 
moonshine. Every pig kept in the country is a 
dead loss to the owner, and the manure he makes 
costs, at least, five dollars a cord. I want you 
to go over to my barn, and look at a sow that I 
imported from London last Spring. The order was 
for ‘ a rare breed—something extra.’ ” 
I looked into the pen, and thought the artist 
must have visited the same place for the original 
of his likeness of the “ land pike ” in the October 
Agriculturist. He has left off nothing but the 
bristles, three inches of the tail, and a splendid 
row of teats along the belly. If I had been any¬ 
thing else but. a cynic, I should have burst into a 
horse laugh at that interesting specimen of 
rare breed of English sivine." What added' to the 
forlorn prospects of the gentleman farmer was,, 
thirteen juvenile pikes, as much like the mothet! 
as possible. I had to. remark : 
“ My good friend-, your order has only been too 
literally fulfilled. Search all the styes in Great 
Britain,, and you will hardly find the match, ot 
'that animal. It must have been picked up in some 
|of the back alleys of London—probably taken tor 
!debt b.y some hard- faced landlord, and sold to, 
-your captain for ship stores. All the ancestors of 
that animal, for ten generations back, have been 
half starved, and it will take at least ten genera¬ 
tions to come, with judicious crossing, to get 
'decent hog out of that stock. Smother those ani¬ 
mals to-night, friend, unless you have corn and 
meal moulding for want of a market.” 
Higgins saw that he had been badly “ sold,” and 
; with a very expressive whistle, led me off to the 
cattle pens, where he had a dozen oxen stall-feed¬ 
ing for market. 
“ I don’t feed with turnips this year- th' men 
of the quill have ridden that hobby to death. I 
tried turnips last year—raised four thousand bush¬ 
els—and tried to fatten cattle with them ; satisfied 
myself entirely, and have not planted a turnip this 
season. I meant to see if there was any fat in 
them, gave them three bushels a day a-piece. It 
scoured them badly, and they lost flesh instead of 
laying on fat.” 
“ You don’t mean to say, that you gave them 
nothing else but turnips 1” 
“Yes, I do.” 
“ And a great fool you were, too. You remind 
me of the man who went into the country to eat 
strawberries and cream. He ate nothing else for 
a week, and the result, of the trip was, that the 
bare mention of strawberries afterwards affected 
him very much as water does a mad dog. Tur¬ 
nips, alone, never fattened an animal; and I nev¬ 
er saw this claimed for the article. It only shows 
with how little discrimination you have read agri¬ 
cultural papers. Butter would probably make 
almost any man lean, if he ate nothing else. It 
hardly follows, that it is not a very useful article 
in its place. Turnips should be given in connec¬ 
tion with other fodder—grass, hay, meal, or oil 
cake. An animal demands a variety of food, es¬ 
pecially while fattening, and you can hardly find 
anything better than turnips to sharpen the appe¬ 
tite, and to keep the digestive organs in a healthy 
state. If fed in the Winter, the animals should 
be kept in warm stables, and the turnips in a root 
room inaccessible to frost. Not even turnips will 
save a bullock from colic, with a bushel or two ot 
ice in his stomach.” 
Higgins raised his beaver, and scratched hi 
head, as if several new ideas had crawled under 
his wool all at once. Like a sensible man he 
did not respond “ it’s no use to raise turnips,” 
but led the way to his fruit yard. 
“ I can’t raise pears on my soil; have tried it 
