orthy descendant, yielding to the
inherited love of the soil, flees the city and its artificial ways,
and gets a few acres in the country, where he proposes to engage in
the pursuit supposed to be free to every American citizen,--the
pursuit of happiness. The humble old farmhouse is discarded, and a
smart, modern country-house put up. Walks and roads are made and
graveled; trees and hedges are planted; the rustic old barn is
rehabilitated; and, after it is all fixed, the uneasy proprietor
stands off and looks, and calculates by how much he has missed the
picturesque, at which he aimed. Our new houses undoubtedly have
greater comforts and conveniences than the old; and, if we could
keep our pride and vanity in abeyance and forget that all the world
is looking on, they might have beauty also.

The man that forgets himself, he is the man we like; and the
dwelling that forgets itself, in its purpose to shelter and protect
its inmates and make them feel at home in it, is the dwelling that
fills the eye. When you see one of the great cathedrals, you know
that it was not pride that animated these builders, but fear and
worship; but when you see the house of the rich farmer, or of the
millionaire from the city, you see the pride of money and the
insolence of social power.

Machinery, I say, has taken away some of the picturesque features of
farm life. How much soever we may admire machinery and the faculty
of mechanical invention, there is no machine like a man; and the
work done directly by his hands, the things made or fashioned by
them, have a virtue and a quality that cannot be imparted by
machinery. The line of mowers in the meadows, with the straight
swaths behind them, is more picturesque than the "Clipper" or
"Buckeye" mower, with its team and driver. So are the flails of the
threshers, chasing each other through the air, more pleasing to the
eye and the ear than the machine, with its uproar, its choking
clouds of dust, and its general hurly-burly.

Sometimes the threshing was done in the open air, upon a broad rock,
or a smooth, dry plat of greensward; and it is occasionally done
there yet, especially the threshing of the buckwheat crop, by a
farmer who has not a good barn floor, or who cannot afford to hire
the machine. The flail makes a louder _thud_ in the fields than you
would imagine; and in the splendid October weather it is a pleasing
spectacle to behold the gathering of the ruddy crop, and three or
four li