Two men planted out each one hundred apple-trees. In six or seven
years they began to bear. One had spared no pains to bring his orchard
into the highest condition. He had constantly cultivated the soil
about them, scraped off the rough bark, washed them with urinated
soap, picked off every worm and nursed them as if they had been
children. The other, pursuing a cheaper plan, simply let his trees
alone; but the moss, and canker-worms took his place and attended to
them every year. When the orchards began to bear, the careful man had
the best fruit, and the careless man covered his folly by cursing the
nursery-man for selling him poor trees. In a year or two the careful
man had two bushels to the other’s one from each tree. Not to be
outdone, the latter determined to have as many apples as the former,
and set out another hundred trees. By and by, when they bore, the
other orchard had so improved that it produced twice as many yet;
another hundred trees were therefore planted. In process of time the
first orchard of one hundred trees still sent more fruit to market
than the three hundred trees of the careless man, who now gave up and
declared that he never did have luck, and it was of no use to try _on
his soil_ to raise good fruit.
1. When a man is too shiftless to take good care of two horses, he
buys two more, and gets from the four what he might get from two.
2. A farmer who picks up a cow simply because it is not an ox, and
_is_, nominally, lactiferous, and then lets the creature work for a
living, very soon buys a second, and a third, and a fourth, and gets
from them all, what he should have had from one good one.
3. A farmer had one hundred acres. Instead of getting seventy-five
bushels of corn to the acre, he gets forty and makes it up by
cultivating twice as many acres; instead of thirty bushes of wheat he
gets twelve, and puts in acres enough to make up; instead of making
one hundred acres do the work of three hundred, he buys more land, and
allows three hundred to do only the work of one hundred.
4. A young woman, with a little pains, can have three times as many
clothes as she needs, and then not look so well as a humble neighbor
who has not half her wardrobe; wherefore, we close with some proverbs
made for the occasion:
Active little is better than lazy much.
Carefulness is richer than abundance.
Large farming is not always good farming, and small farming is often
the largest.