isits to the distant town would take him away from them if they
were on the farm. In the village, during the whole winter, and in bad
weather at other seasons, he would have little necessity or temptation
to absent himself from home. Indeed, those who have had an opportunity
to watch the life of the exceptional farmers whose houses and barns and
stables are in a village cannot have failed to notice how much more
home-like and engaging is the whole farm establishment than it usually
is in the country. It is hardly too much to say that the few instances
that we have, as in the farm-villages of New England, show that these
village-living farmers are apparently more attentive to their home
duties than are their isolated brethren, at least in the matter of
tidiness.

To complete the comparison with the merchant or manufacturer, who takes
his papers or plans home with him for work out of regular hours, one
might say that the farmer who lives at a distance from his land, with
his flocks and herds gathered about his homestead, has such of his work
as needs early and late attention close at hand, while his regular
workshop, the farm, calls him away for certain regular hours and regular
duties.

It is not worth while here to enter into the details of the question.
They are of serious moment, and involve among other things the driving
of animals to and from pasture, _versus_ the raising of soiling crops to
be fed in the stall or yard. All of these questions have been
satisfactorily solved in the experience of many exceptional cases in
this country, and of the almost universal conditions obtaining in
Europe. They present no practical difficulty, and need constitute no
serious objection to the general plan.

The items of economical working and money-making being fully weighed,
the more serious considerations of the mode of life, and the good to be
got from it, demand even greater attention. It may seem a strange
doctrine to be advanced by a somewhat enthusiastic farmer, but it is a
doctrine that has been slowly accepted after many years' observation, a
conviction that has taken possession of an unwilling mind, that the
young man who takes his young wife to an isolated farmhouse dooms her
and himself and their children to an unwholesome, unsatisfactory, and
vacant existence,--an existence marked by the absence of those more
satisfying and more cultivating influences which the best development of
character and intelligence demand.