172 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[May, 
profitable crops. A hundred dollars worth of 
corn that has cost a hundred dollars had better 
not have been grown. It don’t pay to work over 
large areas for meagre produce. Pile on the 
steam !—Crowd the production to the most re¬ 
munerative point !—and then extend your oper¬ 
ations to the next best field and make that pay 
a round profit. This is the soundest principle 
of good farming and in carrying it out we shall 
have no more efficient aid than is rendered by 
thorough draining on the best lands that 
need draining. When this is accepted as 
the correct principle, we shall see draining ex¬ 
tending in all directions. So long as the chief 
effect of draining is to convert innocent waste 
lands into fields for unprofitable work, its pro¬ 
gress will be but halting, and farmers will con¬ 
tinue to cry out against its great cost.—Cost? 
Why, suppose it costs as much to drain an acre 
of land as to buy an adjoining acre. This is no 
argument against it. The one acre, drained, 
would pay a handsome profit—the two acres 
undrained would pay no profit at all, and had 
better be left to grow w r ood. What is wanted, 
as the foundation of the best improvement, is a 
conviction in the minds of the farming public 
that it is better to have good farms than to have 
large farms. That point being gained, all the 
rest will come as a matter of course. Let us 
confine ourselves to such areas as will give us 
the most money for our farming, and leave the 
rest of the land to take care of itself. 
If I were disposed to modify Mr. Geddes’ 
statement it would be by advising that, after 
draining, manure and labor go together. In 
fact, if the land is in grass I would prefer to fol¬ 
low the draining with a liberal winter top-dress¬ 
ing of manure and so stimulate the largest pos¬ 
sible growth of grass and roots, in advance of 
plowing. This would give us something to 
start on, and the cultivation would be profitable 
from the start; while if the whole of the first 
year is to be spent in work, without manure to 
make crops, both time and money will be lost. 
Still, I am diffident about questioning the pro¬ 
priety of any statement of so good a farmer as 
Mr. Geddes has shown himself to be. 
This question of labor reminds me of the ad¬ 
monition of the author of “ Walks and Talks.” 
He is great on the question of summer-fallow¬ 
ing. I have no doubt lie is right so far as gen¬ 
eral practice is concerned. If land is foul and 
labor is scarce, it may pay to lose a year in or¬ 
der to gain condition ; but I would be sorry to 
see my land accumulating a year’s interest and 
the cost of a year’s cultivation without trying to 
get my money back in some way;—and I think 
that Mr. Harris will agree that if the force can 
be commanded it is best to have the fallow a 
fallow-crop, rather than a naked surface. A 
thousand bushels of mangels to the acre will 
leave the land as clean as even he could desire, 
and they will be well worth having in the root 
cellar for early spring feeding. 
Tim Bunker on Old Hats—Old Folks. 
Mr. Editor: I was down to the city the 
other day, and I met one of your readers, and 
he wanted to know how much longer Uncle 
Jotham Sparrowgrass, Jake Frink, and the rest 
of the Hookertown people was going to live. 
He said I hey had been on the stage some time, 
and thought Ihev must begetting rather infirm. 
I had to enlighten him as to the remarkable quali¬ 
ties of the Hookertown climate, and the health¬ 
ful tendencies of farm life. lie seemed to have 
got bis notions of human life from the city, where 
a man reaches his prime at thirty-five, retires 
from business at forty with broken health, and is 
in his grave at fifty. We don’t run the human 
machine in that style, out here, and I guess we 
get about as much out of life as the fastest man 
upon your sidewalks. Uncle Jotham has no 
more doubt that he is just in his prime, than he 
had thirty years ago when he lived over on the 
Island. If you should ask him what his age 
was, he would tell you about seventy. The fact 
is after a man gets to be sixty out here, he is of 
no particular age, like a horse in his teens, until 
he is past eighty, when he begins to brag that he 
has past four score and grows jealous of every¬ 
body that is older than himself:—Jotham’s father 
is still living a hale old man, at the age of ninety, 
and is as likely to live ten years longer as Jo¬ 
tham himself. I know “ Lying like a grave¬ 
stone” has passed into a proverb, but grave¬ 
stones are not apt to lie about people’s ages, if 
they do about their virtues. If you go into the 
burying-ground of Mr. Spooner’s meeting-house 
you will find about one-third of all the folks 
lying there, seventy years and upward. People 
of eighty and ninety, are not uncommon, and 
now and then one reaches a hundred. Mr. 
Spooner preached a sermon a while ago, in 
which lie said that one-third of all the people 
who had died in the parish for the last ten 
years, had reached the average age of eighty-two 
years. He keeps the dates and knows. This is 
not a very good region for doctors, but it is 
grand for folks who cultivate the soil. 
I met Dea. Stokes on Hookertown street last 
week in his farm wagon, with an old hat on, 
seventeen years old. He had just come in with 
his Wednesday’s pail of butter and a big willow 
basket full of eggs. I dont suppose he has fail¬ 
ed to bring butter to market during the season 
on Wednesdays and Sat urdays a dozen times in 
the last thirty years. It always comes in pound 
balls, nicely stamped, in a bright tin pail, and 
during the hottest weather it comes in ice so 
that it is easily handled. The Deacon is eighty 
years old, and if he is not as capable of doing 
business as he ever was, he has not found it out. 
His boys have all gone out from him long ago, 
and he runs the Stokes homestead, where his an¬ 
cestors have lived for six generations, on his 
own account. He is not a very rich man, but 
he is vastly more independent on his two hun¬ 
dred-acre farm, than a multitude of city mer¬ 
chants, who have an income of twenty thousand 
a year. He is altogether the shabbiest part of 
liis establishment, except on Sundays, when he 
comes to meeting close shaven, and tidily, if not 
fashionably dressed. The farm buildings are 
kept painted, for he has learned the economy of 
white-lead and oil upon clapboards and shin¬ 
gles. The tools, carts, and wagons are kept 
housed, for he believes in having everything in 
place. The family carriage is venerable but 
cleanly, and carries Madam Stokes and her 
maiden daughter to church with as much regu¬ 
larity as the Deacon himself. But on week-day 
occasions, the Deacon believes in plain doings, 
and conies to market in a dress that Madam 
Stokes criticises to very little purpose, for the 
Deacon is very sot in his notions. That hat was 
worn ten years as his Sunday best, and for the 
last seven years, has borne the brunt of the ele¬ 
ments on all occasions when he wanted to be 
out of doors. There is a dim scattering of thin 
nap left in patches, but the whole frame-work 
of the hat is laid bare, and the hatter’s art is no 
longer a mystery. Seth Twiggs came along as 
the Deacon and I were talking, puffing away at 
his dirty pipe as usual, and says he,: 
“Deacon, how long have you had that hat, if 
it is a fair question ?”_“Waal let’s see. It 
was the year my youngest boy Oliver was mar¬ 
ried, and that’s seventeen year ago the 1st of 
May. I got it to go to the wedding.”... .“’Bout 
earnt its freedom liain’t it?” inquired Seth_ 
“ I guess not,” replied the Deacon. “ It keeps off 
the rain and sunshine, dont it ?”....“ Yes.”.... 
“Would a new hat do anymore?”....“ Perhaps 
not,” said Seth doubtingly_“ Waal then, aint 
it just as good as a new hat?” inquired the 
Deacon... .“But the looks of the thing?” in¬ 
sinuated Seth. 
“ Waal folks must pay for looks that want 
’em. I dont have the looking to do. Ye see, 
neighbor Twiggs, it makes all the difference in 
the world whether a man pays for what he 
wants himself, or for what his neighbors want 
him to have. The main pint about a hat is to 
keep off rain and sunshine, and when one has 
done that for seventeen year, you come to have 
considerable faith, that it will do it just one 
year longer. If I thought, getting a new hat 
every spring would make me any better man, if 
it would make my work any more profitable, or 
benefit my neighbors in any way, I should sar- 
tinly get one. But I dont see it in that light. 
Have you ever ciphered on the hat question ?” 
“No I hain’t,” said Seth. “What on’t?” 
“There is a deal of philosophy in it. You see 
a hat every year would cost, at six dollars a 
piece, $102, and the interest two-thirds as much 
more, call it $170, spent for an article that dont 
promote a man’s comfort, or add to a man’s re¬ 
spectability. My health is just as good as if I had 
bought a new hat every quarter, and my bank 
account is a great deal better. For you see, 
Seth, if a man begins right with his head, he 
comes out all right at the foot. Savin’ on hats 
means savin’ on everything else. And you see 
if a man keeps puttin’ in to the bank more than 
he takes out every year, he is pretty sartin’ to 
have somethin’ ahead when he gets past labor.” 
The Deacon drove off leaving Seth very much 
befog’d in wreaths of smoke. 
Deacon Stokes carries his joke on old hats a 
little too far, I guess; but there is a good deal of 
sense in what he says about saving in small 
things and in being a slave to the opinion of 
your neighbors. But the Deacon’s style of sav¬ 
ing, and spending will never do much for our 
farming interests. He has run the Stokes farm 
very much as his fathers did before him, but 
he has not made it more productive. Indeed, 
it has fallen off very much,—will not carry the 
stock it would twenty years ago. We want to 
learn, what the Deacon never has learned—how 
to spend judiciously as well as to save; how to 
invest capital in the soil, and make it pay ten 
per cent. It is not much of a knack to run 
to the savings-bank with every ten dollars that 
is made from the sale of crops. Everybody 
knows that the managers of savings-banks are 
careful men, and will return your capital with 
interest. It requires some brain, as well as mus¬ 
cular power, to put capital freely into the bank 
of earth, and make it enrich the soil, while it 
enriches you. This is what every good farmer 
ought to do, and leave the material world, as 
well as the moral, better for his having lived in 
it. Old hats generally mean, old clothes, poor 
fare, a starving soil, and a starved mind. Young 
America abhors this water-gruel style of living 
and we must have such husbandry as will give 
us roast beef for dinner, and a new hat every 
year, or our sons will follow the Stokeses and 
emigrate. 
Hookertown , Conn., ) Yours to Command, 
April, 15,1870 f Timotiiy Bunker, Esq. 
