rests at last upon his primitive activity. He stands close to nature; obtains from the earth bread; the food which was not, he has caused to be. And this necessity and duty give the farm its dignity. All men feel this to be their natural employment. The first farmer was the first man, and all nobility rests on the possession and use of land. Men do not like hard work very well; but every man has an exceptional respect for tillage, and a feeling that this is the original calling of his race; that he himself is only excused from it by some circumstance which made him delegate it for a time to other hands. If he has not some skill which recommends him to the farmer, some product which the farmer will give him corn for, he must himself return to his due place among the planters of corn. The profession has its ancient charm of standing nearest to God, the First Cause. Then the beauty of nature, the piety, the tranquillity, the innocence of countrymen, his independence, and all the pleasing arts belonging to him, the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruit, of trees, and the reaction on the workman, in giving him a strength and plain dignity, like the face and manners of nature, all men are sensible of. All of us keep the farm in reserve as an asylum where to hide our poverty and our solitude, if we do not succeed in society. Who know how many remorseful glances are turned this way from the competition of the shop and counting-room, from the mortifying cunning of the Courts and the Senates. After the man has been degraded so that he has no longer the vigor to attempt active labor on the soil, yet when he has been poisoned by town life and drugged by cooks, and every meal is a force-pump to exhaust by stimulus the poor remainder of his strength, he resolves: "Well, my children, whom I

have injured, shall go back to the land to be recruited and cured by that which should have been my nursery and shall now be their hospital."

The farmer is a person of remarkable condition. His office is precise and important, and it is no use to try to paint him in rose-color. You must take him just as he stands. Nothing is arbitrary or sentimental in his condition, and therefore one respects in his office rather the elements than himself. He bends to the order of the season and the weather and the soils, as the sails of the ship bend to the wind. He makes his gains little by little, and by hard labor. He is a slow person, being regulated by time and nature, and not by city watches. He takes the pace of the season, of the plants, and of chemistry. Nature never hurries, and atom by atom, little by little, accomplishes her work. The lesson one learns in fishing, yachting, hunting, or in planting, is the manners of nature; patience with the delays of the wind and sun, delays of the season, excess of water and drought, patience with the slowness of our feet, and with the littleness of our strength, with the largeness of sea and land.

The farmer, or the man with the hoe, times himself to nature, and acquires that immense patience which belongs to her. Slow, narrow man-he has to wait for his food to grow. His rule is that the earth shall feed him and find him, and he must be no large and graceful spender. His spending must be a farmer's spending and not a merchant's.

But though a farmer may be pinched on one side, he has advantage on the other. He is permanent; he clings to his land as the rocks do. Here in this town, farms remain in the same families now for seven or eight generations, and the settlers of 1635 have their names still in town; and the same general fact holds good in all the surrounding towns in the country.

This hard work will always be done by one kind of men; not by scheming speculators, nor by professors, nor by readers of Tennyson, but by men of strength and endurance.

The farmer has a great health, and the appetite of health, and means for his end. He has broad land in which to place his home. He has wood to burn great fires. He has plenty of plain food. His milk at least is not watered. He has sleep, cheaper, and better, and more of it, than citizens. He has grand trusts confided to him. In the great household of nature, the farmer stands at the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each his loaf. It is for him to say whether men shall marry or not. Early marriages and the number of births are indissolubly connected with abundance of food, for, as Burke said "Man breeds at the mouth." The farmer is a Board of Quarantine. He has not only the life, but the health of others in his keeping. He is the capital of health, as his farm is the capital of wealth. And it is from him and his influences, that the worth and power, moral and intellectual, of the cities comes. The city is always recruited from the country. The men in the cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheel in trade or politics, or arts or letters; the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their hard, silent life accumulated in the frosty furrow, in poverty, in darkness, and in necessity, in the summer's heat and winter's cold. Then he is a benefactor. He who digs and builds a well, or makes a stone fountain, he who plants a grove of trees by the roadside, who plants an orchard or builds a durable house, or even puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes the land lovely and desirable, and makes a fortune which he cannot carry with him, but which is useful to his coun

try and mankind long afterward. The man that works at home moves society throughout the world. If it be true that not by the fat of political parties, but by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of Missouri, out of Texas, out of the Middle States, out of Kentucky, then the true abolitionist is the farmer of Massachusetts, who, heedless of laws and constitutions, stands all day in the field investing his labor in the land, and making a product with which no forced labor can in the long run contend. The rich man, we say, can speak the truth. It is the boast that was ever claimed for wealth, that it could speak the truth, could afford honesty, could afford independence of opinion and action, and that is the theory of nobility. But understand that it is only the rich man in the true sense, who can do this,

the man who keeps his outgo within his income. The boys who watch the spindles in the English factories, to see that no thread breaks or gets entangled, are called "minders." And in this great factory of our Copernican globe, shifting its slides of constellations, tides and times, bringing now the day of planting, now the day of watering, now the day of reaping, now the day of curing and storing, the farmer is the "minder." His machine is of colossal proportions; the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the lever, the power of the battery, are out of all mechanic measure; and it takes him long to understand its abilities and its working. This pump never sucks. These screws are never loose. This machine is never out of gear. The piston and wheels and tires never wear out, but are self repairing. Let me show you then what are his aids.

Who are the farmer's servants? Not the Irish, no, but geology, chemistry, the quarry of the air, the water of the brook, the lightning of the clouds, the

castings of the worm, the plow of the frost, the winds that have blown in the interminable succession of years before he was born; the sun which has for ages soaked the land with light and heat, melted the earth, decomposed the rocks and covered them with forests, and accumulated the sphagnum which makes the peat of the meadow. The students of all nations have in the last years been dedicating their attention to universal science, and they have reformed our schoolbooks, and our terminology. The four-quarters of the globe are no longer Europe, Asia, Africa and America, but Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. The four seasons of the year are now Gravitation, Light, Heat and Electricity.

Science has been showing how Nature works in regard to the support of marine animals by marine plants. So Nature works on the land-on a plan of all for each, and each for all. You cannot detach an atom from its holdings, or strip from it the electricity, gravity and chemic relations, and leave the atom bare; it brings with it all its ties. The flame of fire that comes out of the cubic foot of wood or coal is exactly the same in amount as the light and heat which was taken up in sunshine in the formation of leaves and roots, and now is given out after a hundred thousand years. There lie in the farm inexhaustible magazines. The eternal rocks have held their oxygen and lime undiminished and entire as they were. No particle of oxygen can run away or wear out, but has the same energy as on the first morning. The good rocks say, " patient waiters are no losers; we have not lost so much as a spasm of the power we received.

The earth works for man. It is a machine which yields new service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufactory of soil. In the stem of.