Farming
Richard Kendall Munkittrick
Paperback
(Forgotten Books, June 11, 2012)
Of farming I knew nothing but what I had heard from people who delighted in ridiculing its independence, as well as in looking at it from a serious standpoint, in order to prove it a comic occupation. I knew very well that Horace and Washington had tilled the soil, and that it would be nobler to farm with them than to ridicule farming with a number of well-meaning bookkeepers. I had frequently stood before print-shops, and noticed the steel engraving of the children in the impossible raiment gathering apples, which, while on the bough, were all outside the leaves to make a rich display. If such golden prosperity can shine on a steel engraving, I often thought, what must it be in reality? My friends, who delight in jesting on the subject of farm life, always made it a point to depict the farmers independence by giving an un hallowed description of the amount of labor he had to perform daily - or rather daily and nightly, for they claimed his work was never half done. If any one could detect any independence in that, they would like to see it. A man going out in a thunder-shower to find a stray cow by lightning at midnight, and getting lost himself, was a familiar picture of the farmer. Allusions to his boots, so rigid that the insteps were inflexible, were also freely indulged in. I argued that the farmer had some independence in that he was always at home under his own vine and apple-tree, that he didn't have to rise with the lark to catch a train, and that when age came along he wouldn't be thrust aside as unavailable timber by an employer who would make room for a son-in-law. About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology. Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to