Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awkward habit of yielding poor crops into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of “Hovey’s Root-Cutter,” or of the law of primaries, laying down rules[D] of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[E] and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

[Footnote D:  This mention, of course, excludes the Senator’s formulae for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.]

[Footnote E:  CXXXIV.  Cato, De Re Rustica.]

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean line, or in vine-growing,—­keeping clear of the newspapers,—­I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,—­as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences.  But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca.  The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. He dreaded the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cabbages; we have the “Herald,” and he had none; we have “Plantation-Bitters,” and he had his jug of the Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers “De Re Rustica” with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity.  Yet he challenges at once our confidence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject.  Life, he says, is a bubble,—­and the life of an old man a bubble about to break.  He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. ("Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam proficiscar e vita.”) Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which she may manage the farm.