The Lyceum speakers took up various phases of New England life in a more scholarly fashion, and all were well received. But the serious work of the winter came with the lecturers from the Agricultural School who considered the subject of live stock in New England--an interesting question if not a particularly romantic one. They discussed the matter of why we should raise our own meats instead of importing them from the West. And really, for a community like ours, there didn’t seem to be anything at all to be said against the proposition. If there were obvious objections to keeping chickens, pigs, and cows in a tenement, they certainly didn’t hold here. And yet there hadn’t been a steer raised for meat in our town for twenty-five years. We didn’t even raise the corn to feed our cows on. Even pigs were scarce, while eggs and chickens were actually bought to a large extent from the city market. On the face of it nothing could seem more absurd. With land enough and labor enough to supply ourselves we allowed ourselves to be supplied from land several thousand miles away. And it wasn’t because we got our goods cheaper. We paid prices that almost drove us into bankruptcy. We might with as much logic have imported our water. Now the only explanation of this that anyone could see was that convenience, which is another word for laziness, had led us into the habit and this habit had become so fixed that it now seemed like a necessity. Of course it wasn’t argued that we could raise meat on any such wholesale scale as is done in the West where the plains furnish free fodder, or in the corn belt where corn could be raised at a price for stock feeding impossible to us. But raising enough to supply at least the home market didn’t involve those conditions. There wasn’t a man with a farm who couldn’t feed a portion of his hay and corn to beef to better advantage than he could sell it, who didn’t have grazing land available for that purpose that at present was only growing up to useless small growth. Even when balanced against the question of whether the feed couldn’t at a better profit be turned into milk, a field was still left open for beef enough to supply the local market. Another lecturer took up the matter of sheep raising. It wasn’t so very long ago that every farmer in New England had a small flock of sheep as much as a matter of course as he had a horse. To-day with the price of mutton and lamb soaring, with wool at a premium, a flock of sheep on a New England farm is a curiosity.