These men have learned to read, but they rarely read any thing, except the weekly newspaper, taken exclusively for the probate notices. The only books in their houses are the Bible and two or three volumes forced upon them at unguarded moments by book-agents, who made the most of internal wood-cuts, and external Dutch metal to place them in possession of the "History of the World," or the "Lives of the Presidents," or some other production equally extensive and comprehensive. There is no exhibition of taste about their dwellings. Every thing is brought down to the hard standard of use. If their wives should desire a border for flowers, they regard them as very silly, and look upon their attempts to "fix up things" as a great waste of labor. They never go out with their wives to mingle in the social life of their neighborhood; and if the wives of their neighbors come to spend an afternoon, they harness their horses, and drive off to attend to some distant business that will detain them until the women get away. It is useless to say to me that this is an extreme picture, for I know what I am writing about, and know that I am painting from the life. I know that there are hundreds of thousands of American farmers whose life and whose ideas of life are cast upon these models. Some of these are as coarse and hard as I paint them, and others are only a little better. Such a farmer's boy is brought up to the idea that work is the grand thing in life. Work, indeed, is supposed by him to be pretty much all of life. It is supposed to spoil farmers to get any thing but work into their heads; and scientific agriculturists will bear witness that they have been obliged to fight the popular prejudices against "book farming" at every step of their progress. They will also testify that the improvements made in farming and in the implements of agriculture have not been made by farmers themselves, but by outsiders--mechanics, and men of science--who have marvelled at the brainless stupidity which toiled on in its old track of unreasoning routine, and looked with suspicion and discouragement upon innovations. The reason why the farmer has not been foremost in improving the instruments and methods of his own business, is, that his mind has been unfitted for improvement by the excessive labors of his body. A man whose whole vital energy is directed to the support of muscle has, of course, none to direct to the support of thought. A man whose strength is habitually exhausted by bodily labor becomes, at length, incapable of mental exertion; and I cannot help feeling that half of the farmers of the country establish insuperable obstacles to their own improvement by their excessive toil. They are nothing more than the living machines of a calling which so far exhausts their vitality that they have neither the disposition nor the power to improve either their calling or themselves.