Good-bye, City Life!

For the next month, until it gets gift-wrapped and put under the Christmas tree, I have in my possession a simply amazing newspaper "for the week ending Saturday, July 11, 1863" (a date that should mean something to history buffs). In addition to the riveting dispatches from Gettysburg during that history-changing week, it contains all kinds of useful house and farm advice, including a recipe for ginger snaps that's a lot like mine, and a testimonial for Mercurial Ointment as a cure for bed-bugs: "Some plead expense. I say if too stingy to purchase one shilling's worth of what will not fail, if properly used, they ought to be tormented now and ever."
I especially liked this (perhaps just slightly idealized) view of country life:
"No employment or profession is more fitted to give strength, elasticity and power to the body; none more adapted to expand and furnish more varied and healthful nourishment to the intellect, and to refine and ennoble the affections, and to render men and women more true and just to themselves, to their fellow-beings, and to their God, than that of Agriculture or Farming. ...
Children born of parents who work in the open air as farmers and who, up to years of manhood or womanhood work on the land, as men and women, take precedence of all others in the great drama of human life simply because, as a general rule, they are more perfect, and of course more powerful, physically, intellectually, socially and morally . . .
Ignorance, coarseness, vulgarity and general debasement of nature and character belong less to farming than to any other occupation or profession by which men and women subsist."