It is pretty well understood among farmers that no man can succeed in their employment who hires his labor. The price of products is so low that wages consume all the profits. And yet there is a great deal of labor hired on the land by those who have lately begun to cultivate it; and the farmer should know that these persons can afford to lose five or six hundred dollars a year, and that they expect to do so, while learning the art of country life, and still be better off than they would had they continued in commerce at a yearly loss of as many thousands. Much surprise is often expressed by those unacquainted with the facts, that the farm-houses of the country look so rough; that more attention is not bestowed upon the cultivation of shade-trees and pleasure-grounds. Why, they ask, are the houses unpainted? why is it that the farmer's horse and cattle look as if they never felt the curry-comb? His harness looks as if it were never washed, and the owner himself only shaves on Sundays! Oh! farming must be a horrid business! So dirty! such smells! and so slovenly! It will do well enough in poetry and pictures, but Heaven preserve us from this harrowing, dung-heaving life! It must be confessed that the first business of the tiller of the soil is to attend to his crops, his wheat-fields and corn-fields; to think more of the fences around his pasture-lands than the flower-garden before his house. He must think first of these, and afterward of ornament. It must be confessed that the man who makes money or who keeps his farm from running him in debt, 'in these times,' must rise in the morning with his 'boys,' eat with them and work with them. He must wear a coarse frock and thick boots, and lead a rough but a healthful life. And we aver that the smell of the barn-yard is like a bed of violets, when compared with the reeking gutters of the city, and that the very gentlemen who take a pride in eating cheese _all alive_, turn up their noses with a poor grace of consistency at the earth-worms the plough-share turns up in the furrow.