Traditional routine has also operated powerfully to diminish the attractiveness of agricultural employments.  This cause, very happily, grows less powerful from year to year.  The purse is seen to have an intimate sympathy with intelligent farming.  Were we to say that God had so constituted the human mind that routine will tire and disgust it, we should say in effect that he never intended the farmer’s life to be one of routine.  Nature has done all she can to break up routine.  While the earth swings round its orbit once a year, and turns on its axis once in twenty-four hours,—­while the tide ebbs and flows twice daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its relations to every other atom every moment.  Influences are tossed into these skeleton cycles of motion and event which start a myriad of diverse currents, and break up the whole surface of life and being into a healthful confusion.  There are never two days alike.  The motherly sky never gives birth to twin clouds.  The weather shakes its bundle of mysteries in our faces, and banters us with, “Don’t you wish you knew?” We prophesy rain upon the morrow, and wake with a bar of golden sunlight on the coverlet.  We foretell a hard winter, and, before it is half gone, become nervous lest we should miss our supply of ice.  The fly, the murrain, the potato-rot, and the grasshoppers, all have a divine office in tipping over our calculations.  The phantom host of the great North come out for parade without announcement, and shoot their arrows toward the zenith, and flout the stars with their rosy flags, and retire, leaving us looking into heaven and wondering.  Long weeks of drought parch the earth, and then comes the sweet rain, and sets the flowers and the foliage dancing.  All the seasons are either very late or very early, or, for some reason, “the most remarkable within the memory of man.”

This is God’s management for destroying routine within the law of stated revolution, and for bringing the mind constantly into contact with fresh influences.  The soul, encased by a wall of adamantine circumstances, and driven around a track of unvarying duties, shrivels, or gets diseased.  But these circumstances need not imprison the farmer, nor these duties become the polished pavement of his cell.  He has his life among the most beautiful scenes of Nature and the most interesting facts of Science.  Chemistry, geology, botany, meteorology, entomology, and a dozen other related or constituent sciences,—­what is intelligent farming but a series of experiments, involving, first and last, all of these?  What is a farm but a laboratory where the most important and interesting scientific problems are solved?  The moment that any field of labor becomes intelligently experimental, that moment routine ceases, and that field becomes attractive.  The most repulsive things under heaven become attractive, on being invested with a scientific interest.  All, therefore, that a farmer has to do, to break up the traditional routine