e the ox and the ass are kings in the world, and we are
but younger brothers in the royal family. So we say to every
farmer,--If you would make your calling attractive to yourself and
your boys, seek that knowledge which will break up routine, and make
your calling, to yourself and to them, an intelligent pursuit.

A recent traveller in England speaks enthusiastically of a visit which
he paid to an old farm-house in that country, and of the garden-farm
upon which it stood, which had descended from father to son through a
period of five hundred years. He found a family of charming
intelligence and the politest culture. That hallowed soil was a
beautiful body, of which the family interests and associations were
the soul. To be dissociated from that soil forever would be
regarded by its proprietors as almost equivalent to family
annihilation. Proprietorship in English soil is one of the prime
ambitions of the true Englishman; but we do not find in New England
any kindred sentiments of pride in landed property and family
affection for the paternal acres. The nomadic tribes of Asia would
seem to have quite as strong local attachments as Yankee landholders,
most of whom will sell their homesteads as readily as they will their
horses. This fact we cannot but regard as one among the many causes
which have conspired to despoil the farmer's calling of some of its
legitimate attractions. The son slips away from the old homestead as
easily as he does from the door of a hotel. Very likely his father has
rooted up all home attachments by talking of removing Westward ever
since the boy saw the light. This lack of affection for the family
acres is doubtless owing somewhat to the fact that in this country
landed property is not associated with political privilege, as it has
been in England; but this cannot be the sole reason; for the sentiment
has a genuine basis in nature, and, in not a few instances, an actual
existence amongst us.

Resulting from the operation of all the causes which we have briefly
noticed, there is another cause of the deterioration of farming life
in New England, which cannot be recovered from in many years. Actual
farming life has been brought into such harsh contrast with other
life, that its best materials have been sifted out of it, have slid
away from it. An inquiry at the doors of the great majority of farmers
would exhibit the general fact, that the brightest boys have gone to
college, or have become mech