Green Mountain Freeman

Pennsylvania Barns.

The editor of the Minneapolis Tribune has been taking a stroll East, and thus discourses of the barns he saw there:

"May I jump from the foot-lights to the farm?—from Chicago to Pennsylvania? In Chester and Lancaster counties is, I think, the most finished farming in the Union. The farms, composed of a brick dust sort of soil, are cultivated from fence to fence, every rood, as the farms of Flemings and of Brittany are cultivated from hedge to hedge. Cattle stand with their four feet in two feet of clover. Every field is a park. Every barn is a cow-palace. Every pig-pen is a porcine paradise. Pennsylvania is pre-eminently the state of barns. Think of a three story stone barn, with a swell front and dormer windows in the roof, and a luxurious portico where the Sybaritic calves chew the cud of sweet contentment on summer evenings! And then behold the little cabin in the rear where the agricultural Dutchman lives with his "frow," and where the children lie on the floor, and envy the happy calves in the lattice portico. Every barn is three times as large as the house, which serves as a sort of appendage, and, as it were, plays second fiddle to it. The barn is headquarters, and the house is a sort of sentry-box where the man resides who takes care of it. The barn is slated, and the pig-sty is glazed, the chicken coops are painted, and the worm-fences are white-washed as far as you can see. I have no doubt the original dwellers here white-washed the ground for acres around the domicile twice or thrice a year, till they learned its fatality."