TEN ACRES ENOUGH

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The crisis of 1837 nearly ruined me, and I was kept struggling along during the five succeeding years of hard times, until the revival of 1842 came round. Previous to this crisis, necessity had driven me to the banks for discounts, one of the sore evils of doing business upon insufficient capital. As is always the case with these institutions, they compelled me to return the borrowed money at the very time it was least convenient for me to do so they needed it as urgently as myself. But to refund them I was compelled to borrow elsewhere, and that too at excessive rates of interest, thus increasing the burden while laboring to shake it off.

Thousands have gone through the same unhappy experience, and been crushed by the load. Such can anticipate my trials and privations. Yet I was not insolvent. My property had cost me far more than I owed, yet if offered for sale at a time when the whole community seemed to want money only, no one could have been found to give cost. I could not use it as the basis of a loan, neither could I part with it without abandoning my business.

Hence I struggled on through that exhausting crisis, haunted by perpetual fears of being dishonored at bank lying down at night, not to peaceful slumber, but to dream of fresh expedients to preserve my credit for tomorrow.

I had always loved the country, but my wife preferred the city. I could take no step but such as would be likely to promote her happiness. So long as times continued fair, we ceased to canvass the propriety of a removal. We had children to educate, and to her the city seemed the best and most convenient place for qualifying them for future usefulness.

Then, most of our relations resided near us. Our habits were eminently social. We had made numerous friends, and among our neighbors there had turned up many valuable families. We felt even the thought of breaking away from all these cordial ties to be a trying one. But the refuge of a removal to the country had taken strong hold of my mind.

Indeed, it may be said that I was born with a passion for living on a farm. It was fixed and strengthened by my long experience of the business vicissitudes of city life.

For many years I had been a constant subscriber for several agricultural journals, whose contents I read as carefully as I did those of the daily papers. My wife also, being a great reader, came in time to study them almost as attentively.

Every thing I saw in the journals only tended to confirm my longing for the country, while they gave definite views of what kind of farming I was fit for. In fact they educated me for the position before I assumed it. I am sure they exercised a powerful influence in removing most of my wife's objections to living in the country. I studied their contents as carefully as did the writers who prepared them. I watched the reports of crops, of experiments, and of profits.

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