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Walks and talks of an American farmer in England (Part 2 of 2) cover

Walks and talks of an American farmer in England (Part 2 of 2)

Chapter 2: PREFACE.
By Frederick Law Olmsted
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About This Book

A traveling narrator describes pedestrian tours through rural England, combining vivid scene-setting of villages, farms, inns, churches, and river scenery with practical agricultural discussion. Topics include orchard care, drainage, roofing and stock, and fruit and soil management, alongside portraits of local customs, market shows, angling, and small-town hospitality. Observations on social conditions—labourers’ diets and education, prisons and poor-houses—and encounters with country characters lead into reflections on policy and moral questions such as trade and punishment, producing a miscellany that mixes hands-on farming advice with social and cultural commentary.

PREFACE.

The kind and uncritical reception of my first volume, both at home and abroad, leaves no occasion for a formal introduction of my second. Sitting at the same broad old farm-house fireside, let me assume the same friendly companionable relation with my readers, improved by better acquaintance, and go on with my talk freely and unconstrainedly as before.

To any stranger who may like to know what it is about, I will add, that the volume is almost entirely descriptive of rustic and rural matters, as they came in the way of a party of young Americans walking through some of the western and southern parts of England, with such observations upon them as a young democratic farmer would naturally make.

I have added, in an Appendix, some information and advice to those wishing to make a pedestrian tour in Europe at small expense.

FRED. LAW OLMSTED.

Tosomoc Farm,
Southside, Staten Island, Sept. 2, 1852.