MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES. 
227 
The farmer had to plod his weary way from early morn till dewy 
eve behind the old-fashioned, cumbrous plow. The cultivator, the 
reaper, the mower, and the threshing machine were yet in tlie 
perhaps uncreated brain of their subsequent discoverers. Then, 
the back breaking sickle was the only instrument for the cutting 
of grain, while the threshing was still accomplished, as in the old 
Scripture days, beneath the hoofs of cattle, or the grain beaten 
out upon the threshing floor under the now obsolete flail. The 
spinning wheel and hand loom were inmates of every house, how¬ 
ever humble, and few were the farmers’ daughters whose nimble 
fingers were not employed in producing the indispensable home- 
spun, fortunate indeed if the supply was not exhausted more rap¬ 
idly than it could be produced. 
Not many of the lads of to-day would consider it a privilege to 
be permitted three months’ attendance at district school in the win¬ 
ter season, at the expense of wading some miles every day 
through the snow drifts, after doing “ the chores ” in the midwin¬ 
ter twilight, before daybreak? In those primitive days, when the 
son of some unusually well-to-do farmer was enabled to enter 
college, he was the wonder and the envy of the surrounding com¬ 
munity. Now-a-days, we have substituted the music of the piano 
for the buzz of the spinning-wheel, and the only yarn spun by our 
daughters is street yarn, very inferior to the good old-fashioned 
cotton or woolen fibre. Our boys go to college, and our girls to 
a fashionable boarding-school, the means of education having 
been multiplied to an extent even beyond the imagination of the 
good people of forty years ago. 
Witness our noble State University in which all of our citizens 
take so just a pride, and the other collegiate and normal institu¬ 
tions, almost too numerous to mention, so thickly scattered over 
the entire country. Our public school edifices of to-day compare 
more than favorably with some of the eastern colleges of forty 
years ago. 
How different the condition of the farming population of to¬ 
day from that of the last generation I The many labor saving 
machines — too many to enumerate — serve to render their labor 
almost a pastime in comparison. Who, then, as he contemplates 
their improved condition, but feels his heart swell with gratitude 
