The Daily Cincinnati Republican, And Commercial Register

WINTER EVENINGS.

Long, cheerful winter evenings. These constitute one redeeming trait in our cold varying climate. Our winter evenings are sufficient to reconcile us to our locality on terra firma, so valuable are they as the season for fireside amusements and intellectual improvement. What a pity it is they are so generally wasted. We have known many an indolent mechanic who would tumble into bed at eight o'clock, while his painstaking spouse worked till eleven or twelve: and many a farmer's wife will work till midnight, while her husband dozes in the chimney corner.

This dozing is a bad habit. If you need sleep, go to bed and have it, and then be wide awake when you get up. Don't allow yourself to snore in the chimney corner—it is ill-bred and indolent. A man who will sleep like an animal while his wife is hard at work, don't deserve to have a wife. Take a book and read to her these long winter evenings. It will be a mutual benefit. It dissipates much of the gloom and inquietude too often engendered by care and hard labor; it will make you more happy, more useful and more respected.

Our farmers are too apt to misspend these long evenings in idle grumbling about hard times, high taxes, and modern degeneracy. Finding fault won't mend the times. They must read, improve themselves and educate their children, that the next generation may be wiser than their fathers. Our farmers are but half acquainted with the rich resources of their soil. Were they familiar with the most improved system of husbandry, and they might readily become so by devoting these long winter evenings to the reading of books which treat on this subject, they would have less cause to complain of hard times.

Some of the greatest and best men of our country were sound practical farmers, but they were not ignorant farmers. They were men whom great emergencies called from the seclusion of private life to take part in great national affairs, and when the state of the country no longer required the exercise of their talents, they returned again to the healthful and honorable labor of the farm.

When our farmers are better informed, and not till then, may they hope to take that rank, and exert that influence in society to which the respectability and importance of their occupations so justly entitle them.

We again say, let our apprentices, our mechanics, and our farmers read—spend their winter evenings in acquiring knowledge, as the best preservative from folly, vice, and dissipation of every kind.— Portland Courier.