/CULTURE^S 
EXCELSIOR 
If I’nrlt How, IYpw Vorlt, 
82 liiilVnlo St,, ttorlicsier. 
) $3.00 PER YEAR. 
\ Sinaie No., Eight Cents 
FUR THE WEEK ENDING SATURDAY, JUNE H, 1870 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, tn the year 1870. by D. D. T. Moore, in the Clerk’s Oilice of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.J 
villa, -which was his resi¬ 
dence when he died, and a 
view of which we give here¬ 
with. All over Brooklyn his 
friends point to monuments 
of his activity, taste and lib¬ 
erality. lie encouraged what¬ 
ever tended to beautify and 
render Long Island attract¬ 
ive. Ilis liberality extended 
to men. Poor men, if honest, 
always received encourage¬ 
ment, ami many of Brooklyn’s 
most prominent and wealthy 
citizens are named as having 
been started upon and helped 
along the road to fortune by 
Ids money and influence. 
It is well for men to re¬ 
member that lie who works 
most unselfishly pro bona pub¬ 
lico i, rears for himself a loftier 
and more lasting monument 
than his heirs can purchase 
with the money his miserly 
greed can lay up for them to 
scatter. 
from a warm room, made me sigh. But, ad¬ 
ded, the plantation wagon, the carriage and 
a spring wagon stood in the ham-yard, cov¬ 
ered with ice and snow,—the latter loaded 
with coal that had been brought home and 
hacked up to the house-yard gate, but not 
unloaded. On going into the house, the wife 
said she wished he would get some wood, as 
she was baking and could not get the fire to 
do right. L went with him to get wood, hut 
lo! it was not only icy and covered with 
snow, hut was green at that. His plea for 
this was, that John, the hired man, had gone 
to town and forgot to cut wood before lie 
went. 
If this article appears in print, and is read, 
many will say he ought to have quit farm¬ 
ing. That was my advice to him, as it was 
not his occupation, surely. In the spring 
following, when he left the farm, he told me 
he had sunk $500 that year. Fortunately 
his father was wealthy, and set him up in a 
business better suited to his tastes. That 
this is an exceptional case, to even city-raised 
men, there is no doubt; but L fear that a 
pretty near approach to it could he furnished 
by many of your readers. Were 1 to give 
date and locality to this, there are hundreds 
who would at once recognize the true parties 
thereto. An Or.n Farmer. 
them to learn how to manage. 
For the first year things 
went tolerably well, as the 
wife’s father, who was a good 
fanner, lived with them. The 
second year, in spite ot my 
friendly advice, and contrary 
to my instructions, things 
went by the hoard, as what 
follows will show. 
One December evening, 
about dusk, I took a notion 
to call and see my neighbor. 
On approaching ids place l 
passed through the orchard. 
Here were his sheep, their 
locks coated with sleet and 
weed, 
lib us trial 
SAMUEL E. JOHNSON, 
Men’s lives are pages of history. Tiiose 
who read are stimulated to good deeds there¬ 
by, or taught to avoid the mistakes such 
lives record. There cannot he too much 
said, or written, to encourage men of wealth 
to devote their leisure and money towards 
developing the beautiful in Nature, recover¬ 
ing and regenerating waste places, and af¬ 
fording men with less means opportunities 
for the study of Rural art. The influence 
of a single example of good taste in the 
adornment of a single place in a neighbor¬ 
hood or town, reaches far into the future and 
molds more than most men think, the exter¬ 
nal features of that neighborhood or town, 
and affects more ultimately the lives of those 
whom it influences. If one man plants a 
tree his neighbor wants one. If one house¬ 
wife has a flower parterre, another is not in¬ 
sensible to tlie enthusiasm with which the 
first exhibits and praises her floral pels. If 
one man sees his neighbor clearing out an 
old swamp, a ravine, or a rough place of any 
sort, and converting its rude angularities 
into symmetrical lines of beauty, lie ever 
after looks upon the rough places of his own 
domain with the possibilities of what it may 
become in his mind’s eye. And he realizes, 
sooner or later, the ideal beauty which the 
realizations of his neighbor have established. 
So we do not regard it any insignificant 
niche which men fill as educators, who, hav¬ 
ing wealth, have taste, enthusiastic love of 
nature, and use their means, their brains and 
their time to make from the crude materials 
God lias furnished, beautiful pictures for 
others to admire and enjoy. Buck a place 
did Hon. Samuel E. Johnson of Brooklyn 
fill; such was his influence ; such his work. 
He was a Long Islander by birth—born at 
Newtown in 1810. I le removed to Brooklyn 
in 1825; aided his father in transplanting, 
from Newtown, saplings to adorn 
the St,. Ann’s Church lot, corner 
of Washington and Prospect 
streets; graduated at Columbia 
College when twenty-one years of 
age; studied law with John Jay 
in New York; was admitted to 
the bar and opened an office for 
practice in Front street,, Brook¬ 
lyn. In 1845 he was appointed '• 
Master in Chancery; in 1847 was f. T 
elected County Judge; was a £ = 
member of Assembly in 1853; , a 
chosen Corporation Counselor in i 
1857; again went to the Lcgiela- 
ture in 1802, and has held many f 'M 
prominent local positions of trust. - /•'''• *-jj 
He was buried February 5,1870. * . Vu ^ 
It is of Judge Johnson’s love 
of horticulture we more particu- £ 
larly aim to speak. He was an en- f if A 
thusiastic student of architecture, ( ■L-ttflg. 
landscape gardening and arbori- b <’■ 
culture. lie lias often told one IPH . 
of bis most intimate friends that 
should it ever he his fortune to *' ’ 
become poor, and he tie com- 
pelled to depend upon his daily "T.-.’Si 
labor for a livelihood, he would ■ Jv-v 
become a gardener. His love tlr— 
of Rural Art and Life was almost 
a passion. Some years since he 
purchased one hundred and fwen- 
ty acres near Hempstead village, 
A road was subsequently laid asaig Ey 
i out through this land, leaving a SralEte 
* low, swampy section of sixteen -IpjP'm' * 
l, acres on one side thereof isolated 
. from the other. He sold the larg- jpn|||$? 
\ or portion, and said to his friends 
^ that he would convert the sixteen > 
acres of swamp into a beautiful 
^ home. He was laughed at. Butlie J ^ 
k did convert it into a beautiful 
snow, as was every 
blade of grass, and branch 
of tree. Here they were 
s huddled together as if to 
a sympathise with each other 
. / in their distress. The house 
Pk / looked ns though the place 
/ was deserted; hut soon the 
/ owner came to me and said 
j lie was trying to get the cows 
j out of a field, but could not, 
/ and uow they might stay out 
all night. This, I told him, 
/ would not do; and l would 
/ help him to stable them. But 
/ when we got them there it 
was not much wonder they 
refused to enter, for the ma¬ 
nure where their hind feet 
should ho was at least two 
feet high. This caused me 
to remark that they should 
clean out the stables oftener. 
Yes, he knew it; hut it. was such a job, as 
they bedded with corn fodder. 
The hogs were running about, squealing, 
the cattle bellowing, the sheep in the orchard 
bleating; this added to the scene overhead, 
one ot those chilly, gloomy, dismal Decem¬ 
ber evenings that, at any time, is enough to 
make one feel blue to even look out upon 
LEARN THE TRADE, 
A Town Hoy Tiirnina Kman¬ 
or, nod WUat Cimic of It. 
The following is a picture 
to which I was an eye-wit¬ 
ness, and which at the time 
made an impression on my 
mind not soon to be forgot¬ 
ten. Borne will, no doubt, 
think it is overdrawn and 
that such scenes are rarely 
witnessed; nevertheless this is true, and I 
only withhold my real name from the public 
for fear of hurting the feelings of those who 
figured in the play. 
Home ten years since T knew a young man 
living in town, following as a business, the 
bent of his own inclination, which was to 
admire horses and cattle, go out to bis Dither’s 
arm irconontii 
ECONOMICAL NOTES. 
The Three - I large Equalizer Patent I / 
frin trod. 
In the Rural New-Yorker of May 14tli, 
an Iowa correspondent of Hie Western Ru¬ 
ral has a description of an excellent and 
cheap equalizer for a three-horse team. 
Many of the same have been in use recently 
in this region, with great satisfaction, until 
lately, when the appearance of a special 
agent of the manufacturing company that 
owns a patent, on which this contrivance is 
a clear infringement, and the col¬ 
lection of a penalty of from six to 
eight, dollars from each person 
found so infringing, put a sudden 
stop to their satisfaction in that 
direction. Said agent reports his 
collections from that source in an 
adjoining county at $800. Many 
are doubtless innocently using 
_ this contrivance, or some oilier 
infringement on the same patent, 
which claims to cover not only 
the upright equalizer, hut.every 
similar device that carries one 
singletree above the other two.— 
kSA A. Colburn, OTunnpaif/n t.'a., III. 
SAMUF.L to. jounson. 
farms and sometimes do a little work. Tn 
course of time he took a wife to himself, who 
had also spent most of her time in town. 
The young man’s father bought him a farm, 
stocked It, ancl fitted them out quite comfort¬ 
ably. Their farm adjoined mine, and the 
father of the young man requested mo to 
keep an eye to the young folks and help 
Getting Hid of Stone. 
E. WnronT tells the Rural 
New-Yorker that when a man 
has stone on his farm that, need 
picking up, lie thinks a good way 
to get rid of them is to make 
drains witli them, it is no more 
work to make a stone drain Hum 
a tile drain. He makes them in 
this way:—Set up on each side 
Of the ditch stones about live 
inches high ; then cover with fiat 
stone to within two feet of the 
top. Cover with a layer of straw 
or tine brush and fill up with dirt. 
The ditch should he about four 
feet deep, and he guarantees it 
will give satisfaction. 
In stiff, clay soils wo have 
found a good way to get rid of 
small stones to he by digging 
deep ditches — as deep as you 
choose—and throwing them there¬ 
in in a mass, providing no chan¬ 
nel for tiie water. Wo have made- 
effective drains in this way: it will 
not answer on light soils so well. 
TiilL XiESUXEUSrOJE OF THE LiATTii SA.MTJTCX, TO. JO IT NS ON, HEMPSTEAD, Xj. I 
