A close observer of men and things told us the following little
history, which we hope will plow very deeply into the attention of all
who plow very shallow in their soils.
Two brothers settled together in —— county. One of them on a cold,
ugly, clay soil, covered with black-jack oak, not one of which was
large enough to make a half dozen rails. This man would never drive
any but large, powerful, Conastoga horses, some seventeen hands high.
He always put _three_ horses to a large plow, and plunged it in some
ten inches deep. This deep plowing he invariably practised and
cultivated thoroughly afterward. He raised his seventy bushels of corn
to the acre.
This man had a brother about six miles off, settled on a rich White
River bottom-land farm—and while a black-jack clay soil yielded
seventy bushels to the acre, this fine bottom-land would not average
fifty. One brother was steadily growing rich on poor land, and the
other steadily growing poor on rich land.
One day the bottom-land brother came down to see the black-jack oak
farmer, and they began to talk about their crops and farms, as farmers
are very apt to do.
“How is it,” said the first, “that you manage on this poor soil to
beat me in crops?”
They reply was “_I_ WORK _my land_.”
That was it, exactly. Some men have such rich land that they won’t
_work_, it; and they never get a step beyond where they began. They
rely on the _soil_, not on labor, or skill, or care. _Some men expect
their_ LANDS _to work, and some men expect to_ WORK THEIR LAND;—and that
is just the difference between a good and a bad farmer.
When we had written thus far, and read it to our informant, he said,
“three years ago I travelled again through that section, and the only
good farm I saw was this very one of which you have just written. All
the others were desolate—fences down—cabins abandoned, the settlers
discouraged and moved off. I thought I saw the same old stable door,
hanging by one hinge, that used to disgust me ten years before; and I
saw no change except for the worse in the whole county, with the
single exception of this one farm.”