We enter the house at the back door, and find the family at dinner in the kitchen. A kettle of soap-grease is stewing upon the stove, and the fumes of this, mingled with those that were generated by boiling the cabbage which we see upon the table, and by perspiring men in shirt-sleeves, and by boots that have forgotten or do not care where they have been, make the air anything but agreeable to those who are not accustomed to it. This is the place where the family live. They cook everything here for themselves and their hogs. They eat every meal here. They sit here every evening, and here they receive their friends. The women in this kitchen toil incessantly, from the time they rise in the morning until they go to bed at night. Here man and woman, sons and daughters, live, in the belief that work is the great thing, that efficiency in work is the crowning excellence of manhood and womanhood, and willingly go so far into essential self-debasement, sometimes, as to contemn beauty and those who love it, and to glory above all things in brute strength and brute endurance. Here we are ready to state the point and the lesson of our discussion:--The real reason for the deterioration of agriculture in New England is to be found in the fact, that the farmer's life and the farmer's home, generally, are unloved and unlovable things, and in the multitude of causes which have tended to make them so. Let the son of such a home as we have pictured get a taste of a better life than this, or, through sensibilities which he did not inherit, apprehend a worthier style of existence, and what inducements, save those which necessity imposes, can retain him there? He hates the farm, and will flee from it at the first opportunity. If the New England farmer's life were a loved and lovable thing, the New England boys could hardly be driven from the New England hills. They would not only find a way to live here, but they would make farming profitable. They would honor the employment to which they are bred, and would leave it, save in exceptional instances, for no other. It is not strange that the country grows thin and the city plethoric. It is not strange that mercantile and mechanical employments are thronged by young men, running all risks for success, when the alternative is a life in which they find no meaning, and no inspiring and ennobling influence.