to the Senate and Congress and the While House--he is the man that gets
left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man
and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for
over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States--I see by
the papers--has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their
farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town
clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that
ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for
farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men
that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs
and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything
else and hollered for the Union and the Republican party and free
schools and high terriff and anything else that they was told to, is
left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and
a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over."

"Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future
President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress."

"That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a
farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced
him and holds his head as high as a holly-hock. He bellers for
protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a
highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the
farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivvers, and he
has to wear his own son's lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to
death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member
of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to
sojourn through the winter in the flannel that was wore at the riggatter
before he went to Congress.

"So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me. Damn a farmer,
anyhow!"

He then went away.

[Illustration]

Ezra House

Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell,
Of the sad fate of one which I knew so passing well;
He enlisted at McCordsville, to battle in the south,
And protect his country's union; his name was Ezra House.

He was a young school-teacher, and educated high
In regards to Ray's arithmetic, and also Alegbra.
He give good satisfaction, but at his country's