If American agriculture has an unsatisfied need, it is surely the need for more intelligence and more enterprising interest on the part of its working men and women. From one end of the land to the other, its crying defect--recognized by all--is, that its best blood, or, in other words, its best brains and its best energy, is leaving it to seek other fields of labor. The influence which leads these best of the farmers' sons to other occupations is not so much the desire to make more money, or to find a less laborious occupation, as it is the desire to lead a more satisfactory life,--a life where that part of us which has been developed by the better education and better civilization for which in this century we have worked so hard and so well, may find responsive companionship and encouraging intercourse with others. It so happens that the few farm villages to which we can refer--such as Farmington, Hadley, and Deerfield--have become so attractive by means of their full-grown beauty, or have been so encroached upon by the wealth that has come over the district to which they belong, that they are no longer to be taken as types of pure country villages; nor do I recall a single village in the land which is precisely what I have now in mind. Assuming that a farming neighborhood--two miles, or at the utmost three miles, square--had been so arranged as to have all of its buildings (with the exception of hay-barracks in the fields, and cattle-shelters in the pastures) in a village, let us consider what would be the advantages in the manner of living which it would have to offer. The social benefits, and the facilities for frequent neighborly and informal intercourse, are obvious. To say nothing of the companionships and intimacies among the young people, their fathers and mothers would be kept from growing old and glum by constant friction with their kind; and, in so far as a more satisfactory social relation with one's fellow-men gives cheerfulness and the richness of a wider human interest, in that proportion would the village life have a wholesome, mellowing effect that is not to be found in the remote farmhouse, nor even in the sort of neighborhood we sometimes find in the country where several farmhouses are within a quarter of a mile of each other. The habit of "running in" for a moment's chat with a neighbor is a good one, and it gets but scant development among American farmers. This view of the case will suggest itself quite naturally on the first consideration of the subject.