Adopting an Abandoned Farm

The idealized farmer, as he is depicted by these white-handed rhetoricians who, like John Paul, “would never lay hand to a plow, unless said plow should actually pursue him to a second story, and then lay hands on it only to throw it out of the window,” and the phlegmatic, overworked, horny-handed tillers of the soil are no more alike than Fenimore Cooper’s handsome, romantic, noble, and impressive red man of the forest and the actual Sioux or Apache, as regarded by the cowboy of the West.