is composed of a finer and higher grade of men, women, and children is of particular moment to our argument, because it is composed of people who are only one, two, or three removes from a rural origin.  The city comes from the country; the street is replenished by the farm; but the city children, going back to the farm, show that a new element has been introduced into their blood.  The angles are rounded; the face is brighter; the movements are more graceful; there is in every way a finer development.

There is probably no better exponent of the farmer’s life than the farmer’s home.  We propose to present the portrait of such a home, and, while we offer it as a just outline of the farmer’s home generally, in districts removed from large social centres, we gladly acknowledge the existence of a great multitude of happy exceptions.  But the sketch:—­A square, brown house; a chimney coming out of the middle of a roof; not a tree nearer than the orchard, and not a flower at the door.  At one end projects a kitchen; from the kitchen projects a wood-shed and wagon-cover, occupied at night by hens; beyond the wood-shed, a hog-pen, fragrant and musical.  Proceeding no farther in this direction, we look directly across the road, to where the barn stands, like the hull of a great black ship-of-the-line, with its port-holes opened threateningly upon the fort opposite, out of one of which a horse has thrust his head for the possible purpose of examining the strength of the works.  An old ox-sled is turned up against the wall close by, where it will have the privilege of rotting.  This whole establishment was contrived with a single eye to utility.  The barn was built in such a manner that its deposits might be convenient to the road which divides the farm, while the sty was made an attachment of the house for convenience in feeding its occupants.

We enter the house at the back door, and find the family at dinner in the kitchen.  A kettle of soap-grease is stewing upon the stove, and the fumes of this, mingled with those that were generated by boiling the cabbage which we see upon the table, and by perspiring men in shirt-sleeves, and by boots that have forgotten or do not care where they have been, make the air anything but agreeable to those who are not accustomed to it.  This is the place where the family live.  They cook everything here for themselves and their hogs.  They eat every meal here.  They sit here every evening, and here they receive their friends.  The women in this kitchen toil incessantly, from the time they rise in the morning until they go to bed at night.  Here man and woman, sons and daughters, live, in the belief that work is the great thing, that efficiency in work is the crowning excellence of manhood and womanhood, and willingly go so far into essential self-debasement, sometimes, as to contemn beauty and those who love it, and to glory above all things in brute strength and brute endurance.