I say again, if you want more men and women on the farms, something must be done to make farm-life pleasant. One great difficulty is that the farm is lonely. People write about the pleasures of solitude, but they are found only in books. He who lives long alone, becomes insane. 17. The Best Farming States The farmer in the Middle States has the best soil--the greatest return for the least labor--more leisure--more time for enjoyment than any other farmer in the world. His hard work ceases with autumn. He has the long winters in which to become acquainted with his family--with his neighbors--in which to read and keep abreast with the advanced thought of his day. He has the time and means of self-culture. He has more time than the mechanic, the merchant or the professional man. If the farmer is not well informed it is his own fault. Books are cheap, and every farmer can have enough to give him the outline of every science, and an idea of all that has been accomplished by man. 18. The Laborers, the Kings and Queens The farmer has been elevated through science, and he should not forget the debt he owes to the mechanic, to the inventor, to the thinker. He should remember that all laborers belong to the same grand family--that they are the real kings and queens, the only true nobility. HOME AND CHILDREN 19. The Family the Only Heaven in this World Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when she has no ear for music, and when she has practiced until she can play "Bonaparte Crossing the Alps," you can't tell after she has played it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are about the necks of both. 20. The Far-Seeing Eyes of Children. I want to tell you this, you cannot get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil. 21. Love and Freedom in a Cabin I would rather go to the forest far away and build me a little cabin--build it myself and daub it with mud, and live there with my wife aud family--and have a little path that led down to the spring, where the water bubbled out day and night, like a little poem from the heart of the earth; a little hut with some hollyhocks at the corner, with their bannered bosoms open to the sun, and with the thrush in the air, like a song of joy in the morning; I would rather live there and have some lattice work across the window, so that the sunlight would fall checkered on the baby in the cradle; I would rather live there and have my soul erect and free, than to live in a palace of gold and wear the crown of imperial power and know that my soul was slimy with hypocrisy. 22. The Turnpike Road of Happiness