ed by good farmers, who are intelligently awake
to the problem of scientific agriculture in its multiple phases.

These farmers grow fruits, raise general farm produce, breed a little
stock, cut some timber, besides all of the time-honored occupations of
the professional farmer. The boys and girls growing up in the town or
the neighboring countryside, blessed with good air, and a cheap supply
of wholesome food, look pleasantly forward toward life as something
worth living.

So much for the good side of Lowville. Sad indeed is it to recall that
there is another side. Anyone who has been in close contact with
country life can readily imagine the ignorance, bigotry, prejudice,
unfairness and unsociableness of the population; the tendency to cling
to the past no matter what its shortcomings; the unwillingness to
venture into even the rosiest future which involves change. Lowville is
blessed a great deal and cursed a very little. The blessings are being
augmented and the curses minimized by means of the local high school.

II Lowville Academy

Lowville Academy is an ancient private school whose usefulness was
immensely enhanced when it was converted into a public high school. When
Mr. W. F. H. Breeze took over the principalship he made no particular
objection to the old class rooms and wooden stairs, but he was very
insistent upon discovering, first, what the community needed, and
second, whether or not the school was meeting the need.

More than half (at the present time sixty-five per cent.) of the pupils
at the school came from outside of the village. That is, they come from
the farms. As farmers' boys, many of them have been brought up to all of
the unscientific crudities which have been handed down in American
agriculture since the early settlers took the land from the Indians in
grateful recognition of their instructions in fertilization. While many
agricultural anachronisms may be laid to the door of the redskins,
planting by the moon and several equally absurd customs are traceable to
the higher civilization of Western Europe.

Saturated with traditional agricultural lore--some better and some
worse--the boys and girls from outside of Lowville, sixty-five in each
hundred high school students, were growing up to become the owners of
promising New York farms. They needed, first of all, an education which
should equip them with all of the culture of our schools, beside giving
them a knowledge of the sciences of