STRING BEANS.

Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit.

behind :

Days of my youth! I have left ye 'Tis thirty long years since I quitted my teens, Yet Memory nothing recalls to my mind

So pleasant as this,

the first mess of String Beans.

O Fortune! what tricks have you played upon me! What a desert of sorrow and pain intervenes,

Since I rode the old charger, that little could see, To plough in the corn and the patch of String Beans !

O Roger! O Catherine! where are ye now?

There's a stone in the church-yard,- I dread what it means; And where is old Dobbin, and where is the cow ?

And where (O my soul!) is the patch of String Beans?

I have rambled through life, with its pleasures and cares, And viewed both its joyous and desolate scenes;

Yet I look back, aghast, that so little appears

That has given more joy than the patch of String Beans.

THE MOWER.

I'm a father of ploughmen, a son of the soil,

And my life never tires, for my pleasure is toil;

There are worse stains to bear than the sweat on the brow,
And worse things to follow, my friend, than the plough.

What is Sorrow? I think such a matter there is,
But to me it showed never its ill-looking phiz.
What is Want? To be idle, to steal, and to lie.
And Sickness? The doctor can tell you,

not I.

I suppose 1 must come to the scratch, though, at last,
For Time has a scythe that would cut down a mast;
Though now on the borders of threescore-and-ten,
Your corn rs I cut, and can do it again.

If the best of you willing to try with me feels,
Let him strip to the cotton, and look to his heels,
Through the clover and timothy look at my swarth,
Like the wake of a frigate, - stand out of my path!

FASHION.

Man, according to an old truism, is an imitating animal; and the transatlantic biped is very apt to form his actions upon models that exist over the water. There are fashions in all things; in opinions as well as in dress. Generally, the peculiar customs of a country are founded on some sufficient local reason; but too often the fashion of one land is introduced into another in which the reason cannot exist. In dress the fashion is pretty well established to be the same throughout Europe and America. There are some little differences, in shape and size, but the garments are the same. The Dutchman's trowsers may swell to a broader size than the Englishman's, and the Quaker's brim occupies more space than the dandy's. The difference is mainly in quantity.

There are some imported modes of action, however, which editors, as the general censors, and readers as the public, should be held to oppose. In London, the fashionable class are a large and important body, the fourth estate, at least, in the realm. In that great Babel of abominations, which extends a day's walk along the Thames, it has become a custom of fashion to keep different hours from those which are kept by labor. Fashion rises every day, a little before noon, and midnight is the time, therefore, when it is most awake. At this solemn church-yard hour, the streets are as light as gas can make them, and there is a constant rattle of coaches and throngs of people. A ball, then, would commence in London, at ten at night, if not much later; and this is no hardship to any who attend it, all of whom get their daily rest after the rising of the sun. This, to use repetition, is in London no hardship; for it is a common custom. But in Boston it is a hardship, a shame, and a sin. Few people here can live without daily labor of head or hand, and it is most

preposterous to dress for a ball after nine o'clock in a winter's night. It is just the time when the sufferer should have his book to read an hour before going to bed; and it is just the season when, if disturbed, he will be most apt to be cynical. Yet he may have an invitation to a route, which is, as he is placed, as imperative as a precept of the chief justice, and he is obliged to hold himself in strait coat and silk stockings, when he longs for slippers and night-gown, or he is bound to be civil when he has a greater tendency to be sleepy. The matron, too, perhaps the very one who gives this shock to the social system, · has her own daily cares; and probably, on the morning after, has to overlook her help in preparing breakfast at the usual hour of eight;- an hour when the titled dames of London, whom she aspires to imitate, have hardly retired to their pillows, and whose sleep is not broken till the meridian.

AGRICULTURE.

There are few employments more dignified than whacking bushes. Cincinnatus is the greatest name in Roman history, only because he was, after his victories, a farmer in a small way, subsisting chiefly on turnips of his own raising. The old Roman of the present day, also, seems to gain some favor with a part of the public from his agricultural pursuits at the Hermitage. May he have a speedy and a happy return to them!

The farmer is a lucky man; he is subject to few cares, diseases, or changes. He holds in fee a certain part of this planet, in the shape of a wedge, or inverted pyramid, running from the surface down to the centre, together with the atmosphere above it; and if any man should build a tower overhanging his line by a single brick, though a thousand feet in the air, it may be abated as a nuisance. It is a great thing to have a legal and equitable title to a portion of the earth, to cultivate it, and to owe a support to the application of strength, rather than the misapplication of wit. The farmer is independent of all but Providence, he calls no man

master.

He would not flatter Neptune for his pitchfork.

He is not only a friend of humanity, but he is kindly disposed towards brutes. An ox is to him in the light of a friend, a cow is a benefactor, and a calf is almost a child. He is clothed by the sheep, and the cosset lamb is a foster-brother of his children, who have a heavy day when their mute friend is sold to the butcher. The farmer has little to buy and much to sell, his means are large and his waste little. He is an especial favorite of Ceres and Pomona, but he cares little for Bacchus, Phoebus and other idlers.

He puts his hand, and a huge one it is, to the plough, and if he look back, it is in a furrow like the wake of a boat. In May he puts a potato or two in the earth, and in October he digs into the same place and finds a peck of them. In spring he covers with earth three or four kernels of maize, and in autumn he finds ears enough on the spot to furnish the materials for many loaves. He hides in the soil a seed, no bigger than a large bed-bug, and in a few weeks a vine appears with several pumpkins attached to it, of the capacity of four gallons. If the merchant secures to himself a gain of ten dollars in the hundred, happy man is his dole; if the farmer get not an increase of some hundreds per centum, it is a bad season, and an unfrequent occurrence.

"O fortunatos nimium," &c. as Virgil has it, or "He would be too happy a dog if he only knew how to estimate his good fortune." But this man, favored of fortune, this cultivator, whose reward is a direct consequence of his labor, this Christian, who never trusted Providence in vain, this farmer, who has a deed recorded of a portion of the earth, - a part of the solar system, -a particle of the universe, from which no ejector but death can oust him, and even Small-back cannot injure the title of the heirs, this ungrateful farmer himself is apt to forget his blessings, and to complain of hardship and the times. The times! what are the times to him, unless the seasons mentioned by the preacher, “A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted?"

He should have no money to borrow and no notes to pay. Now and then a bee may sting him, but he avoids Jack Cade's

peril from the bee's wax. "Some say," says this popular reformer, "That it is the bee that stings; but I say it is the bee's wax, for I did but seal a bit of paper, and I have not

been mine own man ever since."

If the farmer has not much thought, the exemption frees him from much care. His countenance is never "sicklied over by the pale cast of thought," but it is round, streaked and ruddy as the sunny side of a pearmain. His hand is hard, but his heart is soft. He has simplicity of character, and that preserves all his virtues, pickles all his good qualities.

Robinson Crusoe excites not our envy; we sigh not for a "lodge in some vast wilderness; " our aspirations are for a house with a gable-end, a well with a sweep, and a mossgrown bucket, a dobbin, a dog that answers to the name of Towser, a garden, a farm, a farmer's employment, and a farmer's appetite.

May 29, 1834.

HAY-MAKING.

Good hay-weather is a joyful season for the farmer, for it calls up all those energies that are apt to slumber over a winter's fire, while the earth is covered with snow. The days are the longest in the year, but they are too short for his labors. If he had the power of Joshua, he would, in a good hay-day, command the sun to stand still. Is there a sight in creation morally and physically so beautiful as a wide meadow, spotted with white shirts, (a mower in all of them,) as the ocean is gemmed with sails, or an expanse of haycocks like scattered Hindoo dwellings? each are raked and thatched, so that the rain cannot enter.

There is no prettier implement than a scythe, and there is no better employment than to swing it. It is creditable even to "rake after." There is a moral sublimity in cutting down tall grass, it partakes of the task of Azrael, — it is a good beginning for a soldier, a general, a hero, - but it would be a better end.

History is silent as to the implements of Cincinnatus, except his plough, which no doubt turned a respectable