Crops throughout the northwest have been fairly good, though the gain yield has been less in quantity and inferior in quality to that of last year. A Democratic administration has certainly frowned upon the professional, partisan office seekers, but it has been unable to stay the onward march of the chintz bug or to produce a perceptible falling off in pip among the yellow-limbed fowls. While Jeffersonian purity and economy have seemed to rage with great virulence at Washington, in the northwest heaves and botts among horses and common, old-fashioned hollow horn among cattle have been the prevailing complaints.
And yet there is much for which we should be thankful. Many broad-browed men who knew how a good paper ought to be conducted, but who had no other visible means of support, have passed on to another field of labor, leaving the work almost solely in the hands of the vast army of novices who at the present are at the head of journalism throughout the country, and who sadly miss those timely words of caution that were wont to fall from the lips of those men whose spirits are floating through space, finding fault with the arrangement of the solar system.
The fool-killer, in the meantime, has not been idle. With his old, rusty, unloaded musket, he has gathered in enough to make his old heart swell with pride, and to this number he has added many by using “rough on rats,” a preparation that never killed anything except those that were unfortunate enough to belong to the human family.
Still the fool-killer has missed a good many on account of the great rush of business in his line, and I presume that no one has a greater reason to be thankful for this oversight than I have.
Farming in Maine.
The State of Maine is a good place in which to experiment with prohibition, but it is not a good place to farm it in very largely.
In the first place, the season is generally a little reluctant. When I was up near Moosehead Lake, a short time ago, people were driving across that body of water on the ice with perfect impunity. That is one thing that interferes with the farming business in Maine. If a young man is sleigh-riding every night till midnight, he don't feel like hoeing corn the following day. Any man who has ever had his feet frost-bitten while bugging potatoes, will agree with me that it takes away the charm of pastoral pursuits. It is this desire to amalgamate dog days and Santa Claus, that has injured Maine as an agricultural hot-bed.
{Illustration: A DAY-DREAM.}