GARIBALDI AS A FARMER.

Southland Times, Issue 1183, 17 December 1869, Page 3

GARIBALDI AS A FARMER.

(From the Times.) "We have heard but little of late of Garibaldi's doings. Some of hia most melancholy anniversaries recur in the forthcoming autumn months, and his best friends must rejoice at the almost perfect certainty that nothing this year will tempt him out of his island horne — that home which he would never have quitted for his disastrous exploits of Aspromonte and Mentana had not the seductions of some of his friends got the better of his sound but not sufficiently self-relying judgment. At Caprera, and away from the turmoil of politics, Garibaldi is hmself again, and shows himself possessed of the practical brains as well as the kind heart for which the world gives him credit. There can be nothing more charming than the account some of the General's recent visitors give of the manner in which his love and labor have in little more than ten or twelve years contrived to turn a bare rock, near the coast of (Sardinia, not only into a smiling garden, but also into a richly productive estate. It was natural to expect that a man of Garibaldi's pimple tastes and abstemious habits would have chosen his island hermitage for the mere sake of its barren and desolate look, and that the tilling of a few acres of wheat, and the growth of the commonest vegetables, should have met all his requirements. But the cultivation of the mere necessaries of lie would not have filled up the cravings of an extraordinarily active mind. Unlike most of his countrymen, Garibaldi did not gratify his ambition by setting masons to work. " He charged nature with the embellishment of his home ; and so marvellous is that Mediterranean cUmate that in this short time luxuriant groves of laurel and myrtle have sprung up to overshadow his lowly roof. All round, in the hollows, wherever shelter could be found ot made, the orange and lemon are growing in thickets, while on more exposed sites there spreads a wide plantation of olive and almond, overtopped by the cypress, the pine, and even the date palm, though the latter bears no fruit. Garibaldi himself drinks no wine ; but he is, nevertheless, a wine-grower on a large scale. His hill-sides are covered with low, closely-pruned vine-stocks, an importation from the most celebrated Piedmontese and Tuscan vineyards ; the young vines, planted in straight rows at a metre's distance from one another, are never suffered to rise above two or three feet from the ground, and never bear more than two or three bunches of grapes. By this thrift the hospitable General is enabled to place choice wine before the guests who crowd upon him, while the Marsala and Malaga grapes growing at will on his lofty arbours Bupply the dessert with such luscious fruit as the South alone knows of. The General's orchards do not yield many apples, pears, or peaches, but the prickly pear and the carob-tree are so prolific that their produce ia thrown with a full hand to fatten swine. Garibaldi's dairy ia supplie&jutb. milk and butter by six cowa of the tail Cremona breed, but numerous herds of cattle roam at large in the island, needing no shelter at any time in the year, and providing the establishment with mountain-fed butcher-meat in return for the lucerne and clover which the General coaxes out of artificial meadows where the grass is cut five times in the year. The same constant prosperity does not attend all the General's undertakings. All his efforts to root out a poisonous weed with which the island once teemed have not been altogether successful, and the propagation of his flocks and herds is thereby sensibly checked. In the same manner the attempt to acclimatise the silk-worm has turned out a failure, the soil being unpropitious to the growth of the mulberry. Garibaldi, however, points with exaltation to the flourishing condition of his potato fields. No species of the favorite root is neglected, and there is no treat he so heartily enjoys as a dish of his own potatoes, baked under embers, with his own hand, in the open air — a treat which calls up reminiscences of his camp life on the Tonale or the Stelvio, or of his pioneer's experience in the backwoods of the Mississippi or the Plate. Garibaldi indulges in the luxury of a flower-garden, but the bees which he has lately introduced, and of which he has already nine hives, " the object of his assiduous and almost paternal care," are not dependent on his beds for their honey, but cull it out of the fragrant shrubs with which both Caprera and the adjoining Maddalena are covered. To get hives to do well on so gusty a spot as that bleak rods, of Caprera has been accounted little less than a prodigy. On the coasts of his own island, all round Maddalena and along the shore of Sardinia, Garibaldi's nets have the pick of the Mediterranean fishery ; while quails, partridges, and wild goats afford him plentiful home sport, without reckoning the pheasant and the wild boar, with which he has stocked some of the most unreclaimed heaths of his domain. It would be well for Garibaldi's countrymen if they would spare a little of their admiration for their hero in action to bestow it on their hero in repose. The world has heard enough of Garibaldi as a Camillus or Marcellus. It would be well if Italy could apreciate his worth as a Cincinnatus. It little matters whether or not the Italians have learnt from Garibaldi how to fight, for others have in a great measure done that work for them, and they can now afford to think their fighting days are over. But it would be well if they would learn from Garibaldi how to work ; if they would strive to make as much of their rich plains and verdant hills as he has done of a naked rock, which before his time was hardly deemed fit for human habitation. A body of well meaning gentlemen have been lately " inaugurating an Agricultural and Sylvicultural Institute at Vallombrosa." It is to be hoped that a school of husbandry under those classical and monastic shades may have better results than to afford sinecures to a new batch of Professors in a country where the teachers

so very nearly outnumber the pupils ; but agriculture in Italy, unless we are greatly mistaken, is less in want of public help than of private exertion. It is not of model farms that Italy is in need, but of model farmers — of gentlemen and men of substance to speed the plough, to take the work from the hands of the mere labourer, and bring intelligence and energy, as well as capital, to multiply the forces of mere toil.