A nation always begins to rot first in its great cities, is indeed perhaps always rotting there, and is saved only by the antiseptic virtues of fresh supplies of country blood.

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But it is not of country life in general that I am to speak, but of some phases of farm life, and of farm life in my native State.

Many of the early settlers of New York were from New England, Connecticut perhaps sending out the most.  My own ancestors were from the latter State.  The Connecticut emigrant usually made his first stop in our river counties, Putnam, Dutchess, or Columbia.  If he failed to find his place there, he made another flight to Orange, to Delaware, or to Schoharie County, where he generally stuck.  But the State early had one element introduced into its rural and farm life not found farther east, namely, the Holland Dutch.  These gave features more or less picturesque to the country that are not observable in New England.  The Dutch took root at various points along the Hudson, and about Albany and in the Mohawk valley, and remnants of their rural and domestic architecture may still be seen in these sections of the State.  A Dutch barn became proverbial.  “As broad as a Dutch barn” was a phrase that, when applied to the person of a man or woman, left room for little more to be said.  The main feature of these barns was their enormous expansion of roof.  It was a comfort to look at them, they suggested such shelter and protection.  The eaves were very low and the ridge-pole very high.  Long rafters and short posts gave them a quaint, short-waisted, grandmotherly look.  They were nearly square, and stood very broad upon the ground.  Their form was doubtless suggested by the damper climate of the Old World, where the grain and hay, instead of being packed in deep solid mows, used to be spread upon poles and exposed to the currents of air under the roof.  Surface and not cubic capacity is more important in these matters in Holland than in this country.  Our farmers have found that, in a climate where there is so much weather as with us, the less roof you have the better.  Roofs will leak, and cured hay will keep sweet in a mow of any depth and size in our dry atmosphere.

The Dutch barn was the most picturesque barn that has been built, especially when thatched with straw, as they nearly all were, and forming one side of an inclosure of lower roofs or sheds also covered with straw, beneath which the cattle took refuge from the winter storms.  Its immense, unpainted gable, cut with holes for the swallows, was like a section of a respectable-sized hill, and its roof like its slope.  Its great doors always had a hood projecting over them, and the doors themselves were divided horizontally into upper and lower halves; the upper halves very frequently being left open, through which you caught a glimpse of the mows of hay, or the twinkle of flails when the grain was being threshed.