ure as well as the
present.

I have been prosy and practical enough and now have used my allotted
time and space. It may not be wholly out of place to further tax your
time and patience, and ask you to lift your eyes from taking a critical
view of defective drains, muddy ditches, and unattractive detail work,
and look at the result of careful and thorough labor. As the years come
and go with their changing seasons, your drained fields are ever your
friends, always cheering you with a bountiful harvest, always answering
to every industrious touch you may bestow upon them. "No excellence
without labor," says the scholar to the discouraged student. "No
excellence without labor," says the soil to the farmer, as he drains and
plows and digs, and so we all learn that success in dealing with nature
is brought about by thorough and honest work.

Our enthusiasm scarcely knows bounds when we see that by our drainage
work the apparently obstinate soil is made to reflect the sunlight from
a covering of golden grain; when gardens and orchards bloom and yield
fruit where once the willows dipped their drooping branches in the slimy
fluid below, and frogs regaled the passer-by with their festive songs.
Roses now twine over the rural cottage and send their fragrance into the
wholesome air, where once the beaver reared his rude dwelling, and
disease lurked in every breath, ready to seize his unsuspecting victim.

Think you that these changes can be wrought without earnest and careful
effort? I have but little sympathy with the glittering generalities and
highly colored pictures of success in industrial pursuits, held before
the public gaze by unpractical but well meaning public teachers. We need
the dissemination of ideas of thoroughness and the knowledge necessary
to put those ideas into practical use in order that the farmers of
Illinois may make the fewest possible mistakes in drainage.

FARMERS ADVICE.

Farmers get plenty of advice. Were we able to work as easy and as well
as the advice generally given to us would seem to indicate we could how
easy and independent our occupation would become. In no other line of
business is advice so freely given, and so much blame attached because
the advice is not followed.

The great trouble is that nearly everybody imagines they know how to
farm. Although these same people may never have been practical farmers,
they yet seem to think that anybody can farm, and, of course, they know