bly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the
charities of today that the malcontents cannot pull his character in
pieces. To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course
of his Persian campaign; but he tells the story of it in his "Anabasis"
with a brave front: his purse was low, and needed replenishment; there
is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers.

The farming reputation of the General rests upon his "Economics" and
his horse-treatise ([Greek: Hippikae]).

Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it
were only--saving. Its true gist is better expressed by the word
_management_; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant
title for Xenophon's book: management of the household, management of
flocks, of servants, of land, of property in general.

At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisdom, which is put
into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:--"Those
things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither
can those lands be called goods which by a man's unskilful management
put him to more expense than he receives profit by them; nor may those
lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as
may give him a good living."

Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it
appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a
great many capital hints upon domestic management. The apartments, the
exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an
admirably practical, common-sense way as would make the old Greek a good
lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time. And when the wife of
the wise Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on _rouge_
and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary
rebuke:--"Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?"

"The science of husbandry," he says, and it might be said of the science
in most times, "is extremely profitable to those who understand it;
but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who
undertake it without knowledge." (sec. xv.)

Where Xenophon comes to speak of the details of farm-labor, of
ploughings and fallowings, there is all that precision and particularity
of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the
columns of the "Country Gentleman." He even describes how a field should
be thr