Farmers are decidedly a marrying class of men. The farm is a business in which a wife is of material service, and can really be a helpmate. The lower class of farmers usually marry quite as much or more for that reason than any others. The higher classes of agriculturists feel that they have a right to marry because they too can show a home in which to keep a wife. Though they may not have any large amount of capital, still they possess a good house and sufficient provision. They are, therefore, a marrying class of men, but do not commonly contract matrimonial alliances very early in life. The great object of an agriculturist who has sons is to get them settled in farms, and it is astonishing to what an extent this is carried by men who do not seem to have much capital to start their children with. Instances are common in which a man has three or four sons all in farms, and doing fairly well. One of the greatest difficulties he has to contend against is the necessity of providing education. Where is a farmer, living perhaps two or three miles, often enough four and six miles, from a town, to send his boys to school? The upper class of agriculturists can, of course, afford to have a proper governess at home till they are old enough, and then send them to one of the so-called middle-class schools. The lower class, on the other hand, who do not aspire very high, and whose ideas are little more ambitious than those of their labourers, are contented with the school in the neighbouring village. Till recently these village schools were very poor affairs, something a little better than the old dame school, but not much. But since the new Education Act the lower class of farmers are in a better position with respect to education than those who possess much higher claims to social distinction. Where there is not a school board, the clergyman and the landowners have combined, and built first-rate schools, up to all the requirements of the Act, and attended by properly certified teachers. The lower class farmer, who is troubled with no scruples about the association of his boys with the labourers' children, can send them to this school at a very low charge indeed, and they will there receive a good foundation. But the middle-class farmer--the man who is neither an independent gentleman, nor obliged to live on bacon and greens--is unprovided for, and yet this class is the most numerous. They have better views for their sons than to confine those early impressions upon which so much depends to the narrow and rude, if not coarse manners of the labourers' children. They look higher than that, and they are fully justified in doing so. They do not, therefore, at all relish the idea of sending their boys to the national school of the parish, let it be never so well supplied with teachers. There is another objection to it. It has a faint suspicion of the pauper. Now if there is anything a downright English yeoman abominates