It may have been true long years ago that no shares, factory, bank, or railroad paid better dividends than the plowshare, but it is the veriest nonsense now.

Think of the New England climate in summer.  Rufus Choate describes it eloquently:  “Take the climate of New England in summer, hot to-day, cold to-morrow, mercury at eighty degrees in the shade in the morning, with a sultry wind southwest.  In three hours more a sea turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees.  Now so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire, then floods carrying off all the dams and bridges on the Penobscot and Androscoggin.  Snow in Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by lightning in Rhode Island.  You would think the world was coming to an end.  But we go along.  Seed time and harvest never fail.  We have the early and the latter rains; the sixty days of hot corn weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us; the Indian summer, with its bland south winds and mitigated sunshine, brings all up, and about the 25th of November, being Thursday, a grateful people gather about the Thanksgiving board, with hearts full of gratitude for the blessings that have been vouchsafed to them.”

Poets love to sing of the sympathy of Nature.  I think she is decidedly at odds with the farming interests of the country.  At any rate, her antipathy to me was something intense and personal.  That mysterious stepmother of ours was really riled by my experiments and determined to circumvent every agricultural ambition.

She detailed a bug for every root, worms to build nests on every tree, others to devour every leaf, insects to attack every flower, drought or deluge to ruin the crops, grasshoppers to finish everything that was left.

Potato bugs swooped down on my fields by tens of thousands, and when somewhat thinned in ranks by my unceasing war, would be re-enforced from a neighbor’s fields, once actually fording my lakelet to get to my precious potato patch.  The number and variety of devouring pests connected with each vegetable are alarming.  Here are a few connected closely with the homely cabbage, as given by a noted helminthologist under the head of “Cut-worms”: 

“Granulated,” “shagreened,” “white,” “marked,” “greasy,” “glassy,” “speckled,” “variegated,” “wavy,” “striped,” “harlequin,” “imbricated,” “tarnished.”  The “snout beetle” is also a deadly foe.

To realize this horror, this worse than Pharaoh plague, you must either try a season of farming or peruse octavo volumes on Insects injurious to Vegetation, fully illustrated.

In those you may gain a faint idea of the “skippers,” “stingers,” “soothsayers,” “walking sticks or specters,” “saw flies and slugs,” “boring caterpillars,” “horn-tailed wood wasps,” etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.—­a never-ending list.  The average absolute loss of the farmers of this country from such pests is fully one million dollars per annum.