t mental culture is
of the highest importance even in the ordinary departments of human
industry. It is, indeed, hardly less important for the man of business,
the farmer, or the mechanic, than for statesmen, legislators, and
members of the so-called learned professions.

An intelligent farmer of my acquaintance having a piece of greensward to
break up, and having three work-horses, determined to employ them all.
He hence, possessing some mechanical skill, himself constructed a
three-horse whipple-tree, by means of which he advantageously combined
the strength of his horses. A less intelligent neighbor, pleased with
the novel appearance of three horses working abreast, resolved to try
the experiment himself. But not possessing the skill requisite to
construct such a whipple-tree, he waited till his better-informed and
more expert neighbor had got through with his, and then, borrowing it,
tried the experiment with his own team. Early one morning, and full of
expectation, aided by his two sons and a hired man, he harnessed his
three horses to the plow. But one of them, for the first time, refused
to draw. After several fruitless attempts to make the team work as first
harnessed, the relative position of the horses was changed, when, lo!
although _this_ horse would draw as formerly, one of the others would
not. By and by another change was made, and the third horse, in turn,
refused to draw. The farmer could not understand it, nor his sons, nor
his hired man. His three horses, for the first time, were each fickle in
turn. And, what was most surprising, they would all work in either of
two positions, but in the third none of them would draw. The honest
farmer thought the age of witchcraft had not yet passed. At the
conclusion of the forenoon he gave up the undertaking in disgust, and,
carrying the whipple-tree home, told the story of his unsuccessful and
vexatious experiment.

"And how did you harness the horses to the whipple-tree?" inquired the
more intelligent farmer. "Why, one at the short end, and two at the long
end, where there is the most room for them, to be sure!" was the frank
reply.

The power at the short end, I need not say, should be twice that at the
long end; whereas he had it reversed. One horse drew against two with a
double purchase. He then would have to draw twice as much as both of
them, or four times as much as one of them. The fickleness of the
horses, then, instead of being the result of _witchc