He has the right, I don’t deny, to please himself that way,
But ’tis a bad example set, and leads young folks astray:
Book-learning gets the upper hand, and work is slow and slack,
And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack.
Well—I suppose I’m old, and yet it is not long ago
When Reuben spread the swath to dry, and Jesse learned to mow,
And William raked, and Israel hoed, and Joseph pitched with me,
But such a man as I was then my boys will never be!
I don’t mind William’s hankering for lectures and for books,
He never had a farming knack—you’d see it in his looks;