pend the whole
day on the land. The cows are milked and all stable work done before
breakfast, and some one drives them out to pasture. The men remain
a-field until an hour before sunset. They must be content with a cold
dinner, as is the usual custom with mechanics and laborers. The cows are
driven home in time for the evening milking, and are put into the
barnyard at night with green fodder brought home by the returning teams.
After the "chores" are done, and a hearty and substantial supper is
eaten,--the principal meal of the day,--all hands will be too weary for
much enjoyment of the evening, but not so weary that they will not
appreciate the difference between the lounging places of a village and
the former dulness at the farm. Other farmers in the neighborhood will,
many of them, also be milk producers; and, as the stables are near
together, they will naturally co-operate, sending their milk to market
with a single team, employing the services of a single man in the place
of five or six men and teams heretofore needed to market the same milk.
I have recently received an account of this sort of co-operation, where
the cost of selling was reduced to a fraction over eight cents for each
hundred quarts.

This arrangement will have the still further benefit of allowing the
farmer to remain at home and attend to his more important work, leaving
the detail of marketing to be done by a person especially qualified for
it and therefore able to do it more cheaply than he could do it in
person. During the working season there will be enough rainy weather to
allow the work of the stable, the barnyard, and the woodshed to be
properly attended to. There will of course be sudden showers and
occasional storms, and other inconveniences, which will make the farmer
regret at times that he lives at such a distance from his field work;
but he will find more than compensation in the advantages that come
naturally from living in a village.

For his wife and children the improvement will be absolute; and it will
be no slight argument in favor of the change, that both in doors and
out of doors a better class of servants will be available, because of
the better life that can be offered. It will be easier to secure the
services of laborers who are married and who live in their own houses,
and so avoid the serious annoyance to the household that attends the
boarding of hired men.

To make this radical change in any farming neighborhood as