ON FARMING

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2175, 3 September 1907, Page 1

ON FARMING

(Bv Kati-kati in the “Lone 'Hand.’ There is no happier, freer and moro wholesome pursuit than farming, if you can make it pay, or if you need not; but it is not like farming on paper or in the abstract. (Farming in the abstract i's curiously unlike farming in tile .country. In the abstract, for instance, the lien lays an egg every day but Sunday, and will hatch thirteen clucks to the dozen eggs. •11l tlie country, the hen spends the first three months of each year finding a place in which to lay ; she takes the second three months to make up her mind not to lay there at all.' The rest of the year is spent on rearing one chicken worth 2Jd.

In the abstract, the lark is always soaring to Heaven’s gate and pollring forth floods of melody, which the farmer may dam up and use for irrigating his soil in dry times. 11l the country the lark spends most of his time pulling up plants and seeds. The farmer dams the larks, and not the floods of melody. A friend of mine, who went into 1 the country with more enthusiasm than knowledge, said that when lie’planted cabbages the larks' ate them, when lie sowed peas the sjiarrows ate them, when he planted lettuce the slugs ate them, when bo made hay nothing would eat it. And thus he came to hold that the assertion “There is ah.other and better world,” was at least plausible. Yet farming is one of the best businesses after all —the farmer’s work is always among things either beautiful or wonderful, or both. He is so close to Nature that be gets to understand her, and to hear her softest whisper. He can feel the throb of her pulses, and his love deepens into reverence and worship, and bis toil is transmuted into loving service, and life is one long harmony, and death simply a uniting with his beloved. . . In short, as I was going to say, farming is one of the best businesses to be out of.

GEN NEWS Sabgvvogb'lh’e Earl Grey, the Governor-General of Canada, responding to a memorial in favor of a system of State-owned cables round the globe, termed Canada “not only the natural and God-appointed, but-tlie accepted, mail and passenger route between- Great Britain and the Far East and those great British dominions in tlie southern seas, New Zealand and Austra-