ABSTRACT
Mention has been made of an early ambition to get back to the soil. That longing never left me; and in the year 1880, at the age of forty-two, I bought a farm in the same White Mountain region of the Granite State where my boyhood had been passed. For half a dozen years or thereabouts I was not seen at the office very much. New clerks failed to recognize me on the occasions of my rare appearances, and my partners commonly refrained from consulting me or telling me very much about what was going on. There were daily or weekly reports sent to me, but I had sense enough not to attempt to control a business that I did net give attention to. I diversified farming with a six months’ tour of Europe, an expedition to the West Indies, Mexico and our Pacific States; devoted considerable time to trout and bass fishing—but never quite so much as was good for me—expended much energy and some money in improving the farm, concerning which I am able to say, that in spite of my early training, having been born and bred on a farm, I did not, during any single month of the more than twenty years that I experimented with Prospect Farm, succeed in getting enough income from it to pay the running expenses of that month. This seems more strange when it is stated that occasionally nearly the entire product for a year would be sold and turned into money at one time. Surely one might think that the month of the greatest sale would now and then provide for at least its own share of the yearly outgo, but no such case ever did happen. I introduced thoroughbred cattle, and at the county fair, came so near carrying off all the premiums offered that I aroused the energies of my brother farmers to such an extent that they elected me president of the Agricultural Society; and that seemed a death blow to its fortunes, for 291a year or two later the grounds were sold to an association of gentlemen, who had horse trots very much more on their minds than prize pumpkins or fat oxen.
