From the hills which inclose this valley of the upper Hudson (and from ever so many other valleys as well), brooks and rivulets, copious in Spring, when their waters are surcharged and discolored by the richest juices of the uplands, pour down in frequent cascades and dance across the intervale to be lost in the river. There is scarcely an acre of that intervale which might not be irrigated from these streams at a very moderate outlay of work at the season when work is least pressing: the water thus held back by dams being allowed to flow thence gently and equably across the intervale, conveying not moisture only, but fertility also, to every plant growing thereon. I am confident that I passed many places on the upper Hudson, as well as on the Connecticut and Ammonoosuc, where 100 faithful days' work providing for irrigation would have given 100 bushels of grain, or 10 tuns of hay additional this year, and as much per annum henceforth, at a cost of not more than two days' work in each year hereafter. Farmers, but above all farmers' sons, think of these things. XXXIII. INTELLECT IN AGRICULTURE. If a man whose capital consists of the clothes on his back, $5 in his pocket, and an ax over his right shoulder, undertakes to hew for himself a farm out of the primitive forest, he must of course devote some years to rugged manual labor, or he will fail of success. It is indeed possible that he should find others, even on the rude outposts of civilization, who will hire them to teach school, or serve as county clerk, or survey lands, or do something else of like nature: thus enabling him to do his chopping trees, and rolling logs, and breaking up his stumpy acres, by proxy; but the fair presumption is that he will have to chop and log, and burn off and fence, and break up, by the use of his own proper muscle; and he must be energetic and frugal, as well as fortunate, if he gets a comfortable house over his head, with forty arable acres about him, at the end of fifteen years' hard work. If he has brains, and has been well educated, he may possibly shorten this ordeal to ten years; but, should he begin by fancying hard work beneath him, or his abilities too great to be squandered in bushwhacking, he is very likely to come out at the little end of the horn, and, straggling back to some populous settlement, more needy and seedy than when he set forth to wrest a farm from the wilderness, declare the pioneer's life one of such dreary, hopeless privation that no one who can read or cypher ought ever to attempt it.