4 breathes his own breath of life into the earth again, and it makes him and sustains him every day. There is not much land, even among the rich river-bottoms and prairies of the West, so genial that man has “ only to tickle it with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest.” What would our farmers think of that great tract of black earth in the empire of Russia, “ lying between the fifty-first and fifty-seventh parallels of latitude, comprising about 247,000,000 acres, so rich that if manured the first years of culture, the crops often prove abortive from excessive vegetation. The thickness of this deposit varies from three to six feet, and in many places it runs to an unknown depth.”* But how hard it is to evoke civilization and knowledge out of that depth, because neither of them cultivate it. Yet it is in that great temperate plateau of Russia, called “ The Industrial Region,” that freedom and religion when planted may be expected to subdue the rankness of the soil. Here freedom and religion coax and flatter sterility till it fairly forgets itself and smiles. In a still autumn morning, when the brown roads have drift-heaps of red and yellow leaves, and the air seems to be nothing but a mingling of shine and warmth, what a ride it is to take up and down the valleys here, through the north part of Watertown, where the first farmers of New England sowed their English grass, and across Beaver brook through the uplands of Waltham, and behind Prospect-hill, where the farms and wood-lots stretch pleasantly away. Perhaps you turn off towards Lexington, and cross the famous turnpike down which the farmers “ fired the first shot heard round the world,” when, as minute-men, they top-dressed their fields with English blood, and were not chary of their own. Religion and liberty have grown well ever since. You ride past their manifest tokens; you pause at their memorial when you hitch your horse at a farmer’s door, and ask the price of his potatoes and pumpkins which lie there, great heaps of plenty, before barns bursting with corn-shucks and upland grass, the sinews of wax- and of peace. No sharp-shooting behind the stone fences now, nor irregular firing up and down the road. The cricket chirps from the door-step a tranquil song, whose burden * Patent Office Report, 1861. Agricultural.
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