122 
COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 
It is not enough, that your house is a shelter from the sun and 
storm; it is not enough that it is a place in which to eat and 
sleep with safety ; it should be a place of the highest social 
enjoyment, and the first thing to be done after you have a 
house, is to make that house a pleasant home ; pleasant and 
improving for you ; pleasant and improving for your children. 
To do this requires no great expense, no costly furniture, no 
expensive and showy dress, no magnificent rooms. The thing 
is simple. On the outside you want trees and shrubs and vines, 
fruit trees and flowers—on the inside you want neatness and 
kindness, books and music, a disposition to learn and enjoy. I 
know that many farmers start poor, and that they have a sharp 
struggle, perhaps, for many years, for a bare subsistence, but 
it is no harder, and costs no more effort, to strive for something 
more. Very many lead a more bare and rough life than there 
is any necessity for. Having the means in their hands to live 
well, they live very poorly. They have no orchard, no garden 
and raise perhaps but two or three crops, wheat, corn, potatoes ; 
their labor must be more diversified to be profitable in the long 
run, and the garden is most shamefully neglected. How small 
and desolate a patch of ground is what many Farmers call their 
garden. How different from what it might and should be. To 
be sure it takes some time and labor to cultivate a garden, but 
nothing pays better; at a very small expense you may have 
varied, abundant and pleasant food for a large portion of the 
year. How few understand this and practice it thoroughly. 
Farmers have the means and should live so far as food is con¬ 
cerned the best of all classes of men. Next after the garden 
comes the orchard, and that gets far too little attention; you 
are pressed for time, you are poor and unable to buy trees and 
* 
many of the trees your neighbors have planted have proved 
failures, they cannot stand the climate, they are not adapted to 
the soil, and you have not the courage and faith to try. Well, 
there is one way that I have never known to fail, and that you 
are all able to pursue. You can get seeds and plant them, 
if you like, where you wish the trees to grow, plant three or 
