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never tucks in grub." When a man lies down for rest and sleep he does not " go to roost." To a man, marriage is something more than "hitching on," and a dirty shirt is a good deal more of a "surprise" to a man's back than a clean one. There is no doubt about the fact that a life whose whole energies are expended in hard bodily labor is such a life as God never intended man should live. I do not wonder that men fly from this life and gather into the larger villages and cities, to get some employment which will leave them leisure for living. Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul. It was never meant by the Creator that the soul should always be subordinate to the body, or sacrificed to the body.

I am perfectly aware that I am not revealing pleas ant truths. We are very much in the habit of glorifying rural life, and praising the intelligence and virtue of rural populations; and if they believe us, they cannot receive what I write upon this subject with pleasure. But the question which interests these people most is not whether my statements are pleasant but whether they are true. Is the philosophy sound? Are the facts. as they are represented to be? Does a severe and constant tax upon the muscular system repress mental development, and tend to make life hard and homely and unattractive? Is this the kind of life generally

which the American farmer leads? Is not the American farmer, generally, a man who has sacrificed a free and full mental development, and all his finer sensibilities and affections, and a generous and genial family and social life, and the dignities and tasteful proprieties of a well-appointed home, to the support of his muscles? I am aware that there are instances of a better life than this among the farmers, and I should not have written this article if those instances had not taught me that this everlasting devotion to labor is unnecessary. There are farmers who prosper in their calling, and do not become stolid. There are farmers who are gentlemen -men of intelligence-whose homes are the abodes of refinement, whose watchward is improvement, and whose aim it is to elevate their calling. If there be a man on the earth whom I honestly honor it is a farmer who has broken away from his slavery to labor, and applied his mind to his soil.

Mind must be the emancipator of the farmer. Science, intelligence, machinery-these must liberate the white bondman of the soil from his long slavery. When I look back and see what has been done for the farmer within my brief memory, I am full of hope for the future. The plough, under the hand of science, is become a new instrument. The horse now hoes the corn, digs the potatoes, mows the grass, rakes the hay, reaps the wheat, and threshes and winnows it; and

every day adds new machinery to the farmer's stock, to supersede the clumsy implements which once bound him to his hard and never-ending toil. When a farmer begins to use machinery and to study the processes of other men, and to apply his mind to farming so far as he can make it take the place of muscle, then he illuminates his calling with a new light, and lifts himself into the dignity of a man. If mind once gets the upper hand, it will serve itself and see that the body is properly cared for. Intelligent farming is dignified living. For a farmer who reads and thinks, and studies and applies, nature will open the storehouse of her secrets, and point the way to a life full of dignity and beauty, and grateful and improvable leisure.

LESSON XIII.

REPOSE.

Peace, greatness best becomes; calm power doth guide

With a far more imperious stateliness

Than all the swords of violence can do,

And easier gains those ends she tends unto."

MRS

Sunday. She always is at church; and she never forgets her fan. I have known her for many years, and have never known her to be in church without a fan in her hand, and some article upon her person that rustled constantly. Her black silk dress is death to devotion over the space of twenty feet on all

sides of her. She fixes the wires in the bonnets of her little girls, then takes their hats off entirely, then wipes their noses, then shakes her head at them, then makes them exchange seats with each other, then finds the text and the hymns for them, then fusses with the cricket, and then fans herself unremittingly until she can see something else to do. During all this time, and throughout all these exercises, the one article of dress upon her fidgety person that has rustle in it, rustles. It chafes against the walls of silence as a caged bear chafes, with feverish restlessness, against the walls of his cell; and as if the annoyance of one sense were not sufficient, she seems to have adopted a bob-and-sinker style of trimming, for hat and dress, and hair and cloak, and every thing that goes to make up her externals. Little pendants are everywhere-little tassels, and little balls, and little tufts--at the end of little cords; and these are all the time bobbing up and down, and trembling, and threatening to bob up and down, like

"The one red leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost bough that looks up at the sky."

Any person who sits near Mrs. Flutter Budget, or undertakes to look at her during divine service, loses all sense of repose, and all power of reflection. The most solemn exercises in which the mind engages cannot be