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[Illustration: WALTER DIRECT, 2:05-3/4.]

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TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY


  VOL. 1. NASHVILLE, TENN., OCTOBER, 1905. NO. 1

Luther Burbank

  _He touched the spiculed desert--cacti-cursed--
    And turned its thorns to figs, its thistles, fruit;
  He nodded to the daisy, half immersed
    In dwarfing dust, and lo! a lily mute
    Rose from the weeds--a perfume with a flute._

  _And flowers ran to meet him--trailing vine--
    And wild hedge-roses--they whose souls had died
  Beneath the feet of cattle and of kine--
    Sought him--those pallid Magdalenes--and cried
    To touch his hem, and so stood glorified._

  _Trees dwarfed and soulless--fruits with hearts of stone,
    Wedded at his word; and in the sacred tryst
  Of loves united, that had yearned alone,
    Gave to the world the nectar of their bliss
    In pitless peaches, crimsoned with a kiss._

  _Who plants his poems in a berry’s bed,
    Or writes, with wild roses, sonnets to the sun,
  Hangs pictures on orchard boughs in gold and red,
    Makes epics of fruitland where before were none,
    Is Poet, Painter, Preacher--Master--all in one!_

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.




Benefits of Forestry to Farmers


BY PERCY BROWN, OF EWELL FARM.

Note.--Mr. Brown is a practical forester, having been chief forester
for the Houston Oil Co. and a graduate of Biltmore Forest School.--Ed.

  The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity.
  We have come to see that whatever destroys the forest, except to make
  way for agriculture, threatens our well being.--President Roosevelt.

With abundant supplies of timber for farm consumption, farmers of the
South have been inclined to regard the question of forest preservation
merely as a matter of sentiment, and have come to look upon the
forester as an impracticable sort of sentimentalist, whose main object
in life is to keep some lumberman from cutting his timber.

This indifference has resulted in the loss of the support of the
farming element to the cause of forestry, whereas the lumberman
who at one time considered the forester his natural enemy and the
forestry cause a clog in the wheels of progress, immediately began to
investigate the question with a view of combatting forest legislation
and the creation of a forestry sentiment throughout the country.

The result was that a thorough understanding of the objects of
forestry and the aims of the forester has caused the lumbermen and
lumber associations to give their unqualified support to all practical
forestry legislation. And in the Southern States we find that the only
journal of any importance that is persistently advocating forestry as a
business is one of the foremost lumber journals south of the Ohio River.

The silence that the farm journals of the country have maintained on
the question can be explained only by their ignorance of the question
and its important bearing on the agricultural interests of the entire
country. And as it is the purpose of this magazine to discuss all
questions of vital importance as well as those that will be of passing
interest to the farmers of the whole country it is well to begin with
an understanding of what forestry is, and to advance a few reasons why
the farmer should be the most ardent advocate of forestry.

Dr. W. H. Schlich, the noted English forester, says the task with which
“forestry has to deal is to ascertain the principles according to which
forests shall be managed and to apply these principles to the treatment
of the forests.”

Dr. B. E. Fernow, formerly chief of the Division of Forestry, defines
it as “The rational treatment of forests for forest purposes.”

Dr. C. A. Schenck, of the Biltmore Forest School, gives the following
very broad and terse definition: “Forestry is the proper handling of
forest investments.”

We see from these definitions that the forestry is purely a matter of
business differing only from other investments in the time element. A
forestry venture cannot be undertaken with a view of getting immediate
returns, but contemplates the continuity of the investment which makes
it the first duty of the forester to determine what is the best use the
forest can be put to in order to obtain the greatest annual return upon
the investment without drawing upon his capital invested. This does
not necessarily mean that his forest must be devoted entirely to the
production of timber, it may be maintained as a game preserve, or as a
watershed, in which case the returns to be obtained from the sale of
timber will be a secondary consideration.

Consequently we see that the forester is not merely a botanist or a
tree planter, but in the fullest sense of the term is a technically
educated man, with the knowledge of the forest trees and their history
and of all that pertains to their production, combines further
knowledge which enables him to manage forest property so as to produce
certain conditions resulting in the highest attainable revenue from the
soil by wood-crops.

The effect of forest cover and water-flow has been so persistently and
constantly proclaimed as the one great need for forest preservation
that the more important one of supply has been neglected.

In a series of articles by Dr. Fernow, on “The Outlook of the Timber
Supply in the United States” (Quarterly, 1903), after carefully
considering the data compiled by the Chief Geographer, together with
his personal investigations, he summarizes the situation, which
justifies the urgent need of the forester’s art in the United States,
from the point of view of supplies, as follows:

1. The consumption of forest supplies, larger than in any other country
in the world, promises not only to increase with the natural increase
of the population, but in excess of this increase per capita, similar
to that of other civilized, industrial nations, annually by a rate of
not less than three to five per cent.

2. The most sanguine estimate of timber standing predicates an
exhaustion of supplies in less than thirty years if this rate of
consumption continues, and of the most important timber supplies in a
much shorter time.

3. The conditions for continued imports from our neighbor, Canada,
practically the only country having accessible supplies such as we
need, are not reassuring and may not be expected to lengthen natural
supplies appreciably.

4. The reproduction of new supplies on the existing forest area could,
under proper management, be made to supply the legitimate requirements
for a long time; but fires destroy the young growth over large areas,
and where production is allowed to develop in the mixed forest, at
least, owing to the culling processes, which remove the valuable kinds
and leave the weeds, these latter reproduce in preference.

5. The attempts at systematic silviculture, that is, the growing of new
crops, are, so far, infinitesimal compared with the needs.

That this is a question of serious importance to the South, as well as
to the whole country, is shown by the great increase in the South’s
production of lumber, which, owing to the depletion in other sections
of the country, has risen from eleven and nine-tenths per cent in
1880 to twenty-five and two-tenths per cent of the total output of the
United States in 1900, and it is not hard to predict an even greater
production for 1910, when one concern alone has increased the number
of its mills in the long leaf pine belt from seven to fifteen, and its
daily output from 500,000 to 1,000,000 feet during the period from 1900
to 1904.

Basing their estimates upon the present standards of grading, the
hardwood lumber journals are predicting the total exhaustion of the
available supplies of this timber in fifteen years, and the hardwood
lumbermen are already looking to forestry as a means of relief.

In an address delivered before the third annual meeting of the Hardwood
Manufacturers’ Association of the United States, as an introduction to
the subject of “The Hardwood Producing Centers of the United States,”
Mr. John W. Love, of Nashville, said:

  “I hope to be able to briefly call the attention of this body of
  practical manufacturers to a few pertinent facts that may, in a
  measure, at least, open our eyes to a painful truth, viz., the
  rapidly decreasing area of hardwood timber in the United States,
  and when we consider how very little is being done to conserve our
  forest growth--how the forests are being cleaned from hoop-poles to
  giant oaks, and that to supply the one item of cross ties that are
  used in this country alone, about 4,000,000,000 feet of timber is
  required (clearing about 200,000 acres of wood lot annually), and
  a large proportion of these ties are cut from thrifty young trees,
  we must conclude that a matter so weighty as to give us pause. The
  one hopeful sign of the future is the hope that practical forestry
  methods may be enforced by the Government.”

This in an address from a lumberman to an association of lumber
manufacturers is indeed an encouraging sign of the times, but I fear
he has waked up “to the realization that our efforts to secure a more
rational treatment of our forest resources and apply forestry in their
management are not too early, but rather too late: that they are by no
means sufficient; that serious trouble and inconvenience are in store
for us in the not too distant future; that the blind indifference and
the dallying or amateurish playing with the problem of legislatures and
officials is fatal.”

The railroads and the farmers of the Western plains were among the
first to appreciate the importance of making provision for a future
supply of construction timber and material for use on the farms.

With the far-sighted policy of manipulators of great corporations, the
officials of the Santa Fe Railroad were among the pioneers in forest
planting in America on railroads, as about twenty years ago they
planted 1,280 acres in hardy catalpa at a total expense of $128,000,
and they estimated that at the end of twenty-five years from date of
planting this tract will have produced $2,500,000 of poles, ties and
posts.

A few years ago the Illinois Central made a plantation of catalpa and
black locust in Illinois and during the current year the Louisville &
Nashville Railroad have arranged for a similar plantation in Alabama.

It has not been necessary for the farmers of the South to resort to
plantations for their supplies of posts and fuel, and if we are not
improvident of our supplies it will hardly become necessary, as we have
left on nearly every farm enough timber of suitable varieties from
which we can procure our future supplies by self-sown seed, provided
the sections to be reserved for timber growth are protected from stock
and fires. In some instances, however, it may prove cheaper and more
expedient to plant as was the case with the now famous yaggy catalpa
plantation near Hutchinson, Kan., in which a ten-year-old block showed
a net value of $197, or a yearly net income of $19.75 per acre.

And a twenty-five-year-old plantation of red juniper, belonging to F.
C. F. Schutz, Menlo, Iowa, showed a net value of $200.54 per acre, or a
yearly net income of about $8--not a bad showing for forestry, when we
bear in mind that the net income from other farm crops seldom exceeds
that amount, but from the farm crops the returns are secured annually,
while in the case of a forestry investment there is quite a period
preceding the first harvest, during which we have to figure in an
accumulative value.

All wood-lot planting should be governed by the local demand, for
that reason it would be hard to suggest either methods or species for
the South as a whole, but generally speaking, black locust (robinia
pseudoacacia), hardy catalpa, mulberry and chestnut would be the most
desirable, as the first three would be quickly available for fence
posts, and the chestnut would always be in demand for telephone and
telegraph poles as well as furnishing construction timber.

Wood-lot forestry has the advantage over similar work conducted on
a large scale, as the farmer is at no expense for protection or
supervision, the location of forest on the farm assures its safety from
fire or trespass, and he gives it his personal attention.

However, to secure the most desirable management his supervision should
be carried on under the direction of trained foresters.

To secure this without appreciable additional cost it is to his
interest to ally himself with those who are striving for a State
forestry system, under which a forester would be employed whose duty
would be to look after the State reserves and give advice to farmers
and timber land owners on the management of all forest tracts set aside
for permanent forest investments.

The indirect utility of the forests is well known and appreciated by
those who have given the matter any thought, but the average American
farmer has little use for a thing which does not appeal to him in
dollars and cents, however, the Bureau of Forestry realizing the great
importance of this matter to the agricultural interests, sent Mr. J.
W. Twomey to the San Bernardino Mountains of California to conduct
investigations of the “Relation of Forests to Stream Flow,” and in the
“Year-Book” of the Department of Agriculture for 1904 he reports these
conclusions:

“In humid regions, where the precipitation is fairly evenly distributed
over the year, and where the catchment area is sufficiently large to
permit the greater part of the seepage to enter the stream above the
point where it is gauged, the evidence accumulated to date indicates
that stream flow is materially increased by the presence of forests.

“In regions characterized by the short wet season and a long dry one,
as in Southern California and many other portions of the West, present
evidence indicates, at least on small mountainous catchment areas, that
the forest very materially decreases the total amount of run-off.

“Although the forest may have, on the whole, but little appreciable
effect in increasing the rainfall and the annual run-off, its economic
importance in regulating streams is beyond computation. The great
indirect value of the forest is the effect which it has in preventing
wind and water erosion, thus allowing the soil on hills and mountains
to remain where it is formed, and in other ways providing an adequate
absorbing medium at the sources of the water courses of the country.
It is the amount of water that passes into the soil, not the amount of
rainfall, that makes a garden or a desert.”

With such evidence as this before them, what farmer in the South will
dare question the importance of forestry to the agricultural interests
of every section of the South, and especially those sections lying
adjacent to streams having their sources in the territory of the
proposed Appalachian Forest Reserve?

By protecting the forest growth on the watersheds of these streams the
flow of the water is rendered more continuous, and the dangers from
violent floods, which destroy fences and carry away the most fertile
soil, are lessened.

The South to-day is pre-eminent in agriculture and timber production,
but the wasteful destruction of our forest resources bids fair to
transfer the laurels to the great undeveloped West, where we find
over 60,000,000 acres of forest reserves, which will for all time to
come offer a continuous supply of lumber for the manufacturer and
an abundance of water for the farmers who have made a garden of the
deserts.

It is the duty of the Southern farmer to join with the hardwood
lumberman in his efforts to introduce forestry in the South, and by so
doing give to succeeding generations the heritage that except for the
destructive forces of man would have come to them in nature’s great
scheme of things.

       *       *       *       *       *

TO THE CAHABA RIVER

  Ay, laugh along, thou cypress-crown’d stream,
    Thou echo of the cloud’s kiss on the hills,
  A Southern maid with eyes of deep-pool gleam
    And cheeks of dimpled whorls and smiles of rills.

  Dance, sweet, on sward of violet-crested green,
    Marked with the silvery pathway of thy track--
  With blue embossing ridge of hills between
    And hair mist in the soft wind floating back.

  And sweet with soul of aromatic leaves,
    Steeped in thy crucible of sun-warmed pool,
  And with the warm breath of the bay, that grieves
    His love-sigh out amid thy shadows cool.

  Dance, sweet, adown thy pathway’s wooded hush,
    Laughing to ’scape the red arms of the hills,
  Yet bringing on thy cheek the telltale blush,
    For chattering tongues of all the old dame mills.

  The live-oak bends to kiss thee, and his sigh
    Is mingled with the passing of thy charms;
  The willows start from hidden coverts by
    To clasp thee in their looping, lover arms.

  Is that deep shadow dark’ning now thine eye
    Repentant sorrow for the willow’s plight,
  As though the stern gloom of the cypress nigh
    Thou speedest like a Naiad of the night?

  O life--life--life--and hast thou found it so,
    A journey now in sunlight, now in shade--
  A laughter from the willows bending low
    A gloom-sob which the cypresses have made?

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.




Little Sister


Little Sister was Col. Rutherford’s only grandchild. She was also
Capt. John Rutherford’s only niece. I mention the last-named gentleman
because he had a great deal to do with the making of this story. He was
quite original himself, and a braver, bigger-hearted friend no man ever
had.

The Rutherford home was in the Middle Basin of Tennessee. The house
was built in 1812 by John Rutherford the first, who had eaten, slept,
fought, and finally died, with his old friend, Andrew Jackson. No
truer, better, braver people than the Rutherfords lived. No black sheep
ever came out of the flock. I have always maintained that a family’s
ability to refrain from throwing scrubs is the truest test of its
purity. The prepotency that produced dead-game, honest and true men and
women every time, is a long way ahead of “Norman blood.” “That’s the
genuine stuff,” as little three-year-old Sister once naively remarked
after looking over Uncle John’s pacing filly. However, that’s a story I
will tell later.

When I first knew Little Sister she was only two years old, for just
two years before a terrible gloom had settled over the Rutherford home
when Little Sister’s mother, the Colonel’s daughter, had died. Death
is a terrible, bitter, hollow mockery to those who live. Some day, in
another world, we shall see things differently. In this, “cabined,
cribbed, confined” in our puny environments, we see only “through a
glass darkly,” and so God help us.

As I said, she was the old Colonel’s only daughter--the fairest,
frailest, most lovely and most intellectual--a bride one year, and we
buried her the next. That’s all, except Little Sister, a fair, frail,
hot-tempered, sensitive--all brain and nerve--little tot who came to
take her mother’s place. Her bright blue eyes, pale-pink face and
red-flaxen hair kept one thinking of perpetual sunsets and twilights.
She was a _fac simile_ of her mother--intellect, impulsiveness,
loveliness, all except one thing--temper. She was fire and powder
there. A flash, an explosion--then she was sobbing for forgiveness in
your arms. That was Little Sister.

“I can’t see where in the world she gets her temper from,” Grandmother
Rutherford said when two-year-old Little Sister slapped her squarely in
the face one day and then hung sobbing around the old lady’s neck as if
the blow had broken her own heart.

“Col. Rutherford,” she would add impressively, “this child ought to be
spanked till she is conquered.”

“Don’t do it, mother,” said Uncle John, while Little Sister gave him
a grateful look through her tears; “don’t do it; that is not the way
to train race colts. A conquering, your way, would spoil her. She will
need all of that temper, if it is brought under control, to get through
life with, and land anywhere near the wire first. Besides, with her
sensitiveness, don’t you see she is suffering now more than if we had
punished her? If she were a plug, now, she would slap you and never
be sorry till you made her sorry with a switch. But conscience beats
hickory, and gentleness is away ahead of blows.”

And Uncle John would catch the two-year-old up and take her out to
see the colts. At sight of these she would forget all other trouble.
Her love for horses was as deep in her as the Rutherford blood. When
she saw the colts it was comical to see the great burst of sunshiny
laughter that spread all over her conscience-stricken face, while two
big tears--such big ones as only little heart-broken two-year-olds can
originate--were rolling slowly down her nose.

“Oh, Uncle John,” she would say gleefully, “now, ain’t they just too
sweet for anything? Do let me get down and hug them, every one.” And
Uncle John would let her if he had to catch every one himself.

The clear-cut way she talked English reminds me that there were two
things about Little Sister that always astonished me--her intellect and
her great sense of motherhood. I could readily see how she inherited
the first, but could never understand how so tiny a thing had such a
great big mother-heart. She loved everything little--everything born on
the farm. The fact that anything in hair, hide or feathers had arrived
was an occasion of jollification to her.

“Oh, do let me see the dear little thing,” would be the first thing
from Little Sister that greeted the announcement. And she generally
saw it; at least, if Uncle John was around. It is scarcely necessary
to add that during the spring of the year, on a farm as large as
the Rutherford place, she was kept in one continual state of happy
excitement.

One day they missed her from the house, and Uncle John quickly
“tracked” her to the cow barn, for it occurred to him he had only
the day before shown her the Short-horn’s latest edition--a big,
double-jointed, ugly, hungry male calf, who slept all day in the bedded
stall like a young Hercules, and only waked up long enough to wrinkle
his huge nose around and mentally make the remark the Governor of
North Carolina is said to have made to the Governor of South Carolina.
But Little Sister had declared he was “perfectly lovely.” That is
where Uncle John found her. She had climbed over the high stall gate,
unaided, and, after becoming acquainted, she had given young Hercules,
as a propitiary offering, her own beautiful string of beads and placed
them around his tawny neck.

“Come out of there, you little rascal,” laughed Uncle John. “What do
you see pretty about that big, ugly calf?”

“Oh, Uncle John,” sighed Little Sister, “I’m so sorry for him--he isn’t
pretty, to be sure--and so I have given him my beads. But he has a
lovely curly head,” she added encouragingly, “and he seems to be such a
healthy child.”

On another occasion they missed Little Sister about night. Everybody
started out in alarm. Grandma found her first, coming from the
brood-sow’s lot.

“Where in the world have you been, darling?” asked Grandma, as she
picked her up.

“Playing with the little yesterday pigs,” she said. “And, Grandma, I
ought to have come home sooner, but I kissed one of the cunningest of
the little pigs good-night, and all the others looked so hurt, and
squealed so because I didn’t kiss them, too, I just had to catch every
one of them and kiss them before they would go to sleep. Indeed, I did.”

Inheritance had played a Hamlet’s part in Little Sister’s make-up.
Most children crow, and babble, and lisp, and talk in divers and
different languages before they learn to talk English, while some never
learn at all. But not so with Little Sister. The first word she ever
attempted was perfectly pronounced. The first sentence she put together
was grammatically correct. The correctness of her language, for one
so small, made it sound so quaint that I often had to laugh at its
quaintness, while her deep earnestness and intensity but added to its
originality.

And she picked up so many things from Uncle John. Else where did she
get this: Pete was a little darkey on the farm whose chief business
was to entertain Little Sister when everything else failed. Pete’s
repertoire consisted of all the funny things a monkey ever did, but his
two star performances were “racking” like Deacon Jones’ old claybank
pacer, and “playin’ possum.” Little Sister never tired of having
Pete do these two. And it was comical. Everybody knew Deacon Jones,
with his angular, sedate, solemn way of riding, and the unearthly,
double-shuffling, twisting, cork-screw gait of his old pacer. The
ludicrous gait of the old pacer struck Pete early in life, and he soon
learned to get down on his all-fours and make Deacon Jones’ old horse
ashamed of himself any day. The imitation was so perfect that Uncle
John used to call in his friends to see the show, which consisted of
Pete doing the racking act, while Little Sister, astraddle of his back,
with one hand in his shirt collar and the other wielding a hickory
switch, played the Deacon. One evening, as the company was taking
in the performance, and Pete, now thoroughly leg-weary, had paced
around for the twentieth time, Little Sister was seen to whack him in
the flanks very vigorously and exclaim: “Come, pace along there, you
son-of-a-gun, or I’ll put a head on you!”

Uncle John nearly fell out of his chair. Only a week before he had made
that same remark to Pete for being a little slow about bringing in his
shaving water. But he didn’t know that Little Sister had heard him.

The spring Little Sister was three years old the Colonel came in
to breakfast one morning with a cloud on his brow. It was a great
disappointment to him--old Betty, his saddle mare, the mare he had
ridden for fifteen years, “the best bred mare in Tennessee,” had
brought into the world a most unpromising offspring. “It is weak, puny
and no ’count, John,” he said to his son; “deformed, or something, in
its front legs, knuckles over and can’t stand up, the most infernally
curby-legged thing I ever saw.”

“That’s too bad,” remarked Uncle John, as he helped himself to another
battercake. “I’ll go out after breakfast and look at the poor little
thing.”

“No use,” remarked the Colonel gravely, “it’s deformed--can’t stand up;
and out of compassion for it I’ve ordered Jim to knock it in the head.
It’ll be better dead than alive.”

Little Sister, with her big, inquisitive eyes, had been taking it all
in, as she gravely ate her oatmeal and cream. But the last remark of
Grandpa stopped the spoon half way to her mouth. The next instant,
unobserved, she had slipped out of her high-chair and flown to the barn.

“I tell you, John,” remarked the old Colonel, “I sometimes think this
breeding horses is pure lottery. To think of old Betty, the gamest,
speediest mare I ever rode, having such a colt as that; and by Brown
Hal, too--the best young pacing horse I ever saw. It makes me feel bad
to think of it. Now, take old Betty’s pedigree----”

But the old Colonel never got any further, for piercing screams from
Little Sister came from the barn. Uncle John glanced at her empty
chair, turned pale with fright, kicked over the two chairs which stood
in his way, then his favorite setter dog that blockaded the door,
and rushed hatless to the barn. There a pathetic sight met his eyes.
A negro stood in old Betty’s stall door with an axe in his hand. In
a far corner, on some straw, lay a sorry-looking, helpless colt. But
it was not alone, for a three-year-old tot knelt beside it, and held
the colt’s head in her lap while she shook her tiny fist at the black
executioner, and screamed with grief and anger:

“You shan’t kill this baby colt--you shan’t--you shan’t! Don’t you come
in here--don’t you come! How dare you?” And, child though she was, the
flash of her keen, blue Rutherford eyes, like the bright sights of the
muzzle of two derringers, had awed the negro in the doorway and stopped
him in hesitancy and confusion.

“Go away, Jim,” said Uncle John, as he took in the situation. “Come,
Little Sister,” he said, “let’s go back to Grandma.”

But for once in her life Uncle John had no influence over the little
girl. She was indignant, shocked, grieved. She fairly blazed through
her tears and sobs. She would never speak to Grandpa again as long as
she lived. She intended her very self to kill Jim just as soon as she
“got big enough,” and as for Uncle John, she would never even love him
again if he did not promise her the baby colt should not be killed.

“Poor little thing,” she said, as she put her arm around its neck and
her tears fell over its big, soft eyes; “God just sent you last night,
and they want to kill you to-day.”

Uncle John brushed a tear away himself, and stooped over and
critically examined the little filly--for such it was. Little Sister
watched him intently for, in her opinion Uncle John knew everything and
could do anything. The tears were still rolling down her cheeks, as
Uncle John looked up quickly and said in his boyish, jolly way: “Hello,
Little Sister, this little filly is all right! Deformed be hanged!
She’s as sound as a hound’s tooth--just weak in her front tendons. I’ll
soon fix that. No sir, they don’t kill her, Mousey”--Uncle John called
her Mousey when he wanted her to laugh.

The tears gave way to a crackling little laugh. “Well, ain’t that just
too sweet for anything; and Oh, Uncle John, ain’t she just sweet enough
to eat?” And Little Sister danced about, the happiest child in the
world.

And what fun it was to help Uncle John “fix her up,” as he called it.
She brought him the cotton-batting herself and watched him gravely as
he made stays for the weak forelegs, and straightened out the crooked
little ankles. Finally, when he called Jim, and made him take the
little filly up in his arms and carry her into another stall where old
Betty stood and held her up to get her first breakfast, the little
girl could hardly contain herself. In a burst of generosity she begged
Jim’s pardon, and told her Uncle John confidentially that she didn’t
intend to kill Jim at all, now; but was going to give him a pair of her
Grandpa’s old boots instead.

In return for this, Jim promptly named the filly “Little Sister,” a
compliment which tickled the original Little Sister very much.

But having said the little filly was no-’count, the old Colonel stuck
to it--refused to notice it or take any stock in it.

“Po’ little thing,” he would say a month after it was able to pace
around without help from its stays--“po’ little thing; what a pity they
didn’t kill it!”

But Uncle John and Little Sister nursed it, petted it, and helped old
Betty raise it; and the next spring they were rewarded by seeing it
develop into a delicate-looking, but exceedingly blood-like, nervous,
highstrung little miss. Grandpa would surely relent now, but not so.
Prejudice, next to ignorance, is our greatest enemy, and the old
Colonel looked at the yearling and remarked:

“Po’ little thing--that old Betty should have played off on me like
that!” And he turned indifferently on his heel and walked away,
whereupon both the filly and the little girl turned up their noses
behind the old man’s back.

In the fall that the little filly was three years old the county pacing
stakes came off. A thousand dollars were hung up at the end of that
race, but greater still, the county’s reputation was at the feet of the
conqueror. The old Colonel had entered a big pacing fellow in the race,
named Princewood, and it looked like nothing could beat him. The big
fellow had been carefully trained for two seasons by a local driver,
and had already cost his owner more than he was worth. “But it’s the
reputation I am after, sir,” the Colonel would say to the driver--“the
honor of the thing. My farm has already taken it twice; I want to take
it again.”

Now, Uncle John was quite a whip himself, and the old Colonel had
failed to notice how all the fall he had been giving Betty’s filly
extra attention, with a hot brush on the road now and then. The old
man, wrapped up as he was in Princewood’s wonderful speed, had even
failed to notice that Uncle John had frequently called for his light
road wagon, and he and Little Sister, now six years old, had taken
delightful spins down the shady places in the by-ways, where nobody
could see them, behind the high-strung little filly, and that often, at
supper, when Grandpa would begin to brag about Princewood’s wonderful
speed, Uncle John would wink at Little Sister, and that little miss
would have to cram her mouth full of peach preserves to keep from
laughing out at the table and being sent supperless to bed.

There was a big crowd on the day of the race--it looked like all the
county was there. The field was a large one, for the purse was rich
and the honor richer--“and Princewood is a prime favorite,” chuckled
the old Colonel, as he stood holding a little girl’s hand near the
grandstand.

But the little girl was very quiet. For once in her life “the cat had
her tongue.” Now, anybody half educated in child ways would have seen
this tot clearly expected something to happen. If the old Colonel
hadn’t been so busy talking about Princewood he might have seen it, too.

The bell had already rung twice, and all the drivers and horses were
thought to be in, and were preparing to score down, when a newcomer
arrived, who attracted a good deal of attention. Instead of a sulky, he
sat in a spider-framed, four-wheeled gentleman’s road cart, at least
four seconds slow for a race like that. Instead of a cap he wore a soft
felt hat, and in lieu of a jacket, a cutaway business suit. He nodded
familiarly to the starting judge and paced his nervous-looking little
filly up the stretch.

“Who is that coming into this race in that kind of a thing?” asked the
old Colonel of a farmer near by--for the old man’s eyesight was failing
him.

“Why, Colonel, don’t you know your own son? That’s Cap’n John
Rutherford,” said the farmer.

“The devil you say!” shouted the excitable old gentleman. “Why, damn
it, has John gone crazy?” and he jumped over a bench and rushed
excitedly up the stretch to head off the driver of the little filly.

“In the name of heaven, John,” he shouted, “are you really going to
drive in this race?”

Captain John nodded and smiled.

“And what’s that po’ little thing you’ve got there?”

“It’s Little Sister, father,” said Captain John good naturedly. “I’m
just driving her to please the little girl. I want to see how she’ll
act in company, anyway.”

The old Colonel was thunderstruck. “Why, you’re a fool,” he blurted
out. “They’ll lose you both in this race. For heaven’s sake, John, get
off the track and don’t disgrace old Betty and the farm this way. Po’
little no-’count thing,” he added, sympathetically, “it’ll kill ’er to
go round there once!”

The Captain laughed. “It’s just for a little fun, father--all to please
the baby. It’s her pet, you know. I’ll just trail them the first heat,
and if she’s too soft I’ll pull out. But she’s better than you think,”
he added indifferently. “I’ve been driving her a good bit of late.”

The old Colonel expostulated--he even threatened--but Captain John
only laughed and drove off. Then the old Colonel repented, and it was
comically pathetic to hear him call out in his earnest way: “John! Oh,
John! Don’t tell anybody it’s old Betty’s colt, will you?”

Captain John laughed. “I’ll bet ten to one,” he chuckled to himself,
“he’ll be telling it before I do.”

And the little filly--when she got into company she seemed to be
positively gay. She forgot all about herself, threw off all her nervous
ways, and went away with a rush that almost took Captain John’s breath.
He pulled her quickly back. “Ho, ho! little miss,” he said, “if you
do that again you’ll give us dead away,” and he looked slyly around
to see if anybody had seen it. But they were all too busy chasing
Princewood. That horse clearly had the speed of the crowd. And so Uncle
John trailed behind, the very last of the long procession, with the
little filly fighting for her head all the way. Nobody seemed to notice
them at all--nobody but a little girl, who clung to her grandpa’s
middle finger and wondered, in her childish faith, if the mighty Uncle
John--the Uncle John who knew everything and could do everything, and
who never missed his mark in all his life, was going, really going, to
tumble now from his lofty throne in her childish mind? And with him
Little Sister, too.

She got behind Grandpa. Princewood paced in way ahead. She stuck her
fingers in her ears so she couldn’t hear the shouts, but took them out
in time to hear Grandpa say, “Well, I thought John had more sense,” as
that gentleman, after satisfying himself that he was not distanced,
paced slowly in.

This made Little Sister think it was all up with Uncle John. She went
after a glass of lemonade, but really to cry in the dark hall behind
the grandstand and wipe her eyes on the frills of the pretty little
petticoat Grandma had made her just to wear to the fair. It was too bad.

When she got back Grandpa was gone. He was over in the cooling stable,
talking to Uncle John.

“John,” he said solemnly, “don’t disgrace old Betty any more. I’m
downright sorry for the po’ little thing. I’m afraid she’ll fall dead
in her tracks,” he added.

Captain John flushed, “Well, let her drop,” he said, “but if I’m not
mistaken you’ll hear something drop yourself.”

The old Colonel turned on his heels in disgust.

But Uncle John meant business this time. He changed his cart for a
sulky, and again they got the word. Gradually, carefully, he gave the
little filly her head. Steadily, gracefully, she went by them one by
one, until at the half she was just behind Princewood, who seemed to
be claiming all the grandstand’s attention. The field left behind! If
Princewood wins this heat the race is over!

“Princewood’s got ’em, Colonel!” exclaimed a countryman to the old man.
“They’s nothin’ that kin head ’im!” and “Princewood wins! Princewood
wins!” as they headed into the stretch.

And then something dropped. Little Sister felt the reins relax, and a
kindly chirrup came from Uncle John. In a twinkling she was up with the
big fellow, half frightened at her own speed, half doubting, like a
prima donna when her sweet voice first fills a great hall, that it was
really she who had done it.

“Princewood! Princewood!” shouted the crowd around their idol, the
Colonel. “Princewood will break the record!” from partisans who knew
more about plow horses than race horses.

The old Colonel arose in happy anticipation--and then, as his trained
eye really took in the situation, his jaw dropped. What was that little
bay streak that had collared so gamely his big horse? Who was the
quiet-looking gentleman in the soft felt hat, handling the reins like a
veteran driver? His son John was in a cart--this driver was in a sulky.
“Who the devil--” he started to say, when somebody clinging to his
finger cried out: “Look! Look! Grandpa! It’s Little Sister. Ain’t she
just too sweet for anything?”

And the next instant the little filly laughed in the big pacer’s face,
as much as to say, “You big duffer, have you quit already?” And then,
like a homing pigeon loosed for the first time, she sailed away from
the field.

“Princewood! Princewood will break the record!” shouted a man who
hadn’t caught on and was yelling for Princewood while looking at the
champion pumpkin in the window of the agricultural hall.

And then the old Colonel lost his head and, I am sorry to say, the most
of his religion, for he jumped up on a bench and shouted so loud the
town crier heard him in the court-house window, a mile away: “_Damn
Princewood! Damn the record! It’s Little Sister! Little Sister! Old
Betty’s filly--my old mare’s colt!_”

And then Uncle John laughed till he nearly fell out of the sulky. “I
said he’d be telling all about her first,” he said, while a little
innocent-looking tot plucked the old man by the coat-tail long enough
to get him to stop telling the crowd all about the marvelous breeding
of the wonderful filly, as she naively remarked: “And the little thing
did play off on you sure enough, didn’t she, Grandpa?”

The crowd laughed, and Grandma picked her up, kissed her, and shouted:
“And here’s the girl that saved her, gentlemen--the smartest girl in
Tennessee--and she’s got more horse sense than her old granddaddy!”

There was one more heat, of course; but it was only a procession, and
those behind cannot swear to this day which way Little Sister went.

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.




A History of the Hals


By JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

[Illustration: CAPT. THOMAS GIBSON. Owner of Gibson’s Tom Hal and John
Dilliard.]


CHAPTER I. THE PACING RACE HORSE.

  Full-muscled, clean, clear-cut, without a flaw,
  Deep-chested--shallow where the quick flanks draw--
  Round-footed, flat and flinty in the bone,
  Eyes full and flashing, as the opal stone,
  Neck like the deep-grooved classic column’s ply--
  Massive at base, tap’ring towards the sky,
  Ears thin and slender, velvet-pointed, fine
  As the unbursted leaflets of the columbine.
  Shoulders well back, slanting, thin and strong,
  Ribbed close as steel, where girders run along;
  Quarters long and massive, rubber-hard and round,
  Quick in the stride, but quicker in rebound--
  Back like the beam that held Pantheon’s dome--
  Gods, give the word, and see this horse come home!

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

The race horse has come, by common consent to represent all that is
graceful and grand in the animal kingdom. The culmination of perfected
strength and speed, courage and intelligence, he stands, nevertheless,
the model of patience, gentleness and forbearance. How wonderful it
seems that in this dumb creature, whose mental gifts, compared to
man’s, are as a clay bed to a bank of violets, yet has he reached,
through the misty channels of mere instinct, a physical perfection and
often a moral excellence which his maker and molder may never attain!
He is amiable in spite of force and desperate races, and often blows
and cruelty; he is gentle, notwithstanding a training tending to make
him a whirlwind of wrath and a tornado of tempests; he is honest in
spite of the dishonesty of those around him and docile and contented
despite the fact that there slumbers within him like sleeping bolts in
a flying cloud the spirit of madness gathered from the nerve granaries
of a long line of unnumbered ancestors.

A regiment with his courage would ride over the guns of a Balaklava;
a state with his honesty would need no criminal laws; give scholars
his patience, and the stars would be their playthings; imbued with
his power of endurance, the weakest nation would tunnel mountains as
a child a sand hill, build cities as a dreamer builds castles, and
shoulder the world with a laugh. To one who sees him as he is, and
loves him for his intrinsic greatness, he is all this and more. Man’s
honest servant, dumb exemplar, truest helper, best friend.

In his master’s hour of recreation, he is the joyful spirit that whirls
him, at the swish of a whip, along the dizzy course where the whistling
winds sing their warning. In his hours of stern reality, when fortunes
hang on his hoof beats and fame stands balanced on the wire that ends
the home-stretch, he is the embodiment of power and dignity, the
champion of might and the god of victory. And finally, in his gentler
moods, he is the faithful servant of the stubble and the plow, the
gentle guardian of the family turn-out, who hauls the laughing children
along the by-ways amid the sweet grasses, where the sunshine and the
zephyrs play. Out from the past, the dim, bloody, shifting past, came
this noble animal, the horse, side by side with man, fighting with
him the battles of progress, bearing with him the burdens of the
centuries. Down the long, hard road, through flint or mire, through
swamp or sand, wherever there has been a footprint, there also will be
seen a hoof-print. They have been one and inseparable, the aim and the
object, the means and the end. And if the time shall ever come, as some
boastingly declare, when the one shall breed away from the other, the
puny relic of a once perfect manhood will not live long enough to trace
the record of it on the tablet of time.

The greatest distinct family of horses that has ever lived is the
Hal family of pacers, a distinctively Tennessee product, originating
in that peculiar geological formation known as the Middle Basin--the
bluegrass region of Tennessee. To understand the greatness of this
family of horses--now known throughout the world, wherever speed and
endurance has a name--it is only necessary to publish the following
table of world-records held by them. These records have all been won
in the last quarter of a century, the remarkable fact being that
before that time these horses lived only for the plow, the saddle
or the wheel, and that nearly all of them are sons and daughters or
descendants of one horse--a roan, known locally as Gibson’s Tom Hal,
from the fact that Capt. Thomas Gibson, a gentleman of the old school,
then living on his estate in Maury County, Tenn., and now the efficient
secretary of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway Library,
first reclaimed him from obscurity and brought him to the county where
his greatness was recognized.

These world records, the choicest in the harness world, are held
to-day, August, 1905, by the descendants of the old roan pacer:

  1. First horse to go a mile in harness in 2 minutes, Star Pointer,
  1:59-1/4.

  2. Fastest 4-year-old mare, The Maid, 2:05-1/4.

  3. Fastest green performer (1905), Walter Direct, 2:05-3/4.

  4. Fastest heat in a race, stallion, Star Pointer, 2:00-1/2.

  5. Fastest heat in a race, mare, Fanny Dillard, 2:03-3/4.

  6. Fastest first heat in a race, Star Pointer, 2:02.

  7. Fastest third heat in a race, Star Pointer, 2:00-1/2.

  8. Fastest fifth heat in a race, The Maid, 2:05-3/4.

  9. Fastest two heats in race (Dariel and) Fanny Dillard, 2:03-3/4,
  2:05.

  10. Fastest three consecutive heats in a race, Star Pointer,
  2:02-1/2, 2:03-1/2, 2:03-3/4.

  11. Fastest three heats in a race, Star Pointer, 2:02-1/2, 2:03-1/2,
  2:03-3/4.

  12. Fastest seven-heat race, The Maid, 2:07-1/4, 2:07-1/4, 2:05-1/4,
  2:09, 2:05-3/4, 2:07, 2:08-3/4.

  13. Fastest mile in a race to wagon, Angus Pointer, 2:04-1/2.

  14. Fastest team, Direct Hal and Prince Direct, 2:05-1/2.

  15. Fastest three-heat in race to wagon, Angus Pointer, 2:06-1/4,
  2:04-1/2, 2:06-1/4.

  16. Fastest green performer, stallion, Direct Hal, 2:04-1/2.

  17. Fastest team in a race, Charley B and Bobby Hal, 2:13.

  18. Fastest pacing team, amateur trials, Prince Direct and Morning
  Star, 2:06.

It will be observed that all of these records except a few were made in
races and not against time.

Whence came this wonderful family of horses? What is this pacing gait?
What mingling of blood lines have brought these horses of the plow, the
saddle and the wheel to the grandstand and the pinacle of fame?

This is the story I shall tell as a serial during the first twelve
issues of Trotwood’s Monthly.

The light-harness horse has come to be a type of its own. It is
distinctly an American type, as distinguished from the English running,
or thoroughbred horse, the German and French coach, the Russian Orloff
and horses of other nationalities. There is a wide gap, however,
between a race horse, whether runner or harness horse, and other
breeds, however pure, their blood lines. It is the difference of
intelligence, speed, endurance, of lung development, of steel bone. It
is the difference between genius and mediocracy--for speed is to the
horse what genius is to man.

Whence began this speed--in the English runner, in the American trotter
and pacer? Traced back, the sheiks of the desert might tell; they who
worshipped the midnight stars, or chased on steeds of fire the wild
antelope of the plains, before Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldees.”
Knowing the past now from the present, seeing it so clearly through
the glasses of twentieth century science, knowing the laws of the
“survival of the fittest,” that land and air and sand and sun make both
the physical man as well as the physical horse, we can easily guess
what centuries of wild gallops across the desert will do for the horse,
supplemented by that natural love of him in his master--that love which
brings care and kindness and the exercise of common sense in mating and
maternity.

As to the American horse, there are two distinct classes, based on
their respective gaits--the trotter and the pacer. In another chapter
these respective gaits are fully discussed, their difference shown,
their origin and the speed attained by each. This brief history will
deal only with the pacing gait, but so closely are these two great
gaits related, and so often do the blood lines of trotter and pacer
run in parallel columns that it is necessary for a clear explanation
of the subject to say a foreword about the trotter, that grand type of
beauty, speed and utility, so purely American and so superbly great
that the very mention of his name should excite a patriotic glow in the
bosom of every American who loves his country and her just fame.

The history of the trotting horse began with Messenger, a gray
thoroughbred foaled in 1780, and imported from England to America in
May, 1788. He was royally bred for his time, being by Mambrino, son
of Engineer, and through both sire and dam he traced to the famous
Godolphin Arabian. An old description of him says he was 15-3/4
hands high, with “a large, long head, rather short, straight neck,
with wind-pipe and nostrils nearly twice as large as ordinary; low
withers, shoulders somewhat upright, but deep and strong; powerful
loins and quarters; hocks and knees unusually large, and below them
limbs of medium size, but flat and clean and, whether at rest or in
motion, always in perfect position.” With this beginning, in 1822, a
Norfolk trotter called Bellfounder, who had trotted two miles in six
minutes, and had challenged all England to a trot, was imported. It
was his daughter in which the strains of Messenger met that produced
Hambletonian 10, the head of the trotting type in America, the first
great trotting sire of the world, and through him perpetuated by his
great sons, such as Geo. Wilkes, Electioneer, Dictator, and their
descendants. Through all these years the trotting record has gradually
been reduced, first by one great trotter and then another, beginning
with the first queen of the trotting turf, Lady Suffolk, and ending
with that superb little thing of fire and speed and sweetness, Lou
Dillon. Literally, in that century of progress millions of dollars
have been spent, not only by thousands of small breeders, but by such
financial magnates and great breeders as Vanderbilt, Sanford, Bonner,
Backman, Alexander, Forbes, Lawson and others, chiefly in New York, New
England, Kentucky and California.

The effect of all this was to create that splendid race of trotters now
known all over the world, and to produce a horse capable of trotting a
mile in two minutes or better.

But even before the advent of Messenger there had developed in the
eastern coast of the Colonies, chiefly in Delaware and Rhode Island, a
family of extremely fast pacers known as the Narragansetts, an account
of which will be seen a few chapters further on. These horses were
small, but game, docile, excellent under the saddle, and used almost
exclusively for travel in those early days of pioneer roads. Their
speed was marvelous, if the testimony of Rev. Dr. McSparrow, 1721, an
English minister who was stationed in the Colonies, may be accepted as
proof. This reverend gentleman, writing to a friend in England says
that he has seen them pace in races under saddle, going a mile in “a
little less than two and a good deal better than three minutes.”

However, for nearly two centuries the pacer never was thought of as
a factor in horse development, especially as a race horse until the
advent of the Hal family of Tennessee, in the early 70’s, with Little
Brown Jug and Mattie Hunter, although the great bloodlines and speed
of Pocahontas, James K. Polk and other noted pacers in the early ’40’s
ought to have foretold what great possibilities lay in the despised
pacing gait. As usual, the rejected stone found itself in the key of
the arch, and out of Tennessee, by what some might term chance, but in
fact the legitimate product of scientific breeding, of soil, of climate
and grass, out of an obscure family of saddle horses, bred with no idea
of racing and with never a thought of fame, but taken, like Coriolanus,
literally from the plow, this horse is found--the first to go a mile
in two minutes or better, and to do almost without price and without
effort what the millionaires of horsedom had spent fortunes to do in
vain.

This was first accomplished by Star Pointer, at Readville, Mass.,
September 2, 1897.

Such a family deserves to be perpetuated in history, however brief it
may be and unpretentiously written. And I beg the future as well as the
present historian not to criticise too closely its style, for in it,
as I go along, a hundred fancies will twine themselves with my facts.
There is so much about man and horse that is akin. There is so much of
human nature in both--there is such a chance for moralizing on their
life, their death, their fame, their fortune, their brief days’ strut
on the stage of time, their passing out--“and the rest is silence.”
And, speaking of fame in both man and horse, is it not all a lottery?

With men she is a sly and uncertain goddess, coming seldom to those who
court her, and often to others who care nothing for her, so, in the
rearing of race-horses the same uncertainty exists, and matron after
matron bred in purple lines may go on throwing quitters and lunkheads
year after year, while some obscure dam, whose breeding is barely
tolerable, but stamped by nature with a spirit of fire and a soul of
steel, sends out from some hithertofore obscure breeders’ farm a race
horse that sets a new mark for speed and a new fashion for blood lines.

In a decision, Judge Gaynor, of the Supreme Court of King’s County,
New York, in a case against the president of the Gravesend track,
where runners are raced, held that horse racing was not a lottery.
This may be true within the technical meaning of the term, lottery,
but if the honorable court had held that breeding race horses was not
a lottery, we have our doubt whether the decision would have met with
the unanimous consent of the breeders themselves. And, as we remarked
above, fame itself is not more uncertain.

There is so much similarity between man and horse that a student of
either will constantly find himself comparing the two. Almost every
quality possessed by man has its counterpart, though often in a less
degree, in man’s favorite animal, while now and then the master fails
to come up to the many excellencies of his beast. A good judge of
human nature is invariably a good judge of horses and horse nature. In
fact, so well understood is this rule that “horse sense” in man has
come to have a definite meaning of its own, and classes the human thus
favored with a common sense stronger than usual.

It is almost certain failure for erring man to struggle only to be
famous. She never yet came in all her splendor to the impetuous wooer.
Like Cleopatra, who secretly tired of the infatuated Anthony, who could
not fight at Actium for thoughts of her, and secretly died for love of
the young Caesar who heartily despised the character of the ancient
Langtry, so also with fame. “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,”
and perhaps knows if he allowed the fools who burn up their lives and
their midnight oil seeking to become famous, to become so, their heads
would burst with conceit or their own vanity would wreck them. But
on the other hand, He often showers on those who honestly fight for
right, regardless of consequences, who care more for principle than
for worldly honor, and more for truth than for glory, and who do their
whole duty regardless of consequences, the greatest fame and honor.
The strutting peacock has all he can carry in his gaudy plumage and
resplendent feathers. It would have been as much a sacrilege to have
added these decorations to either Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, as
it would have been cruel to deprive John Pope and Robert Tombs of them.
And the gap between the pairs is the true distance between fame and
feathers.

The wild, reckless and dissipated young rake, who left Rome more to
be rid of his creditors than to fight the Gauls, never dreamed of the
glory in store for him as he threw the fire of his soul in his work and
blazed his way to fame both with a pen and sword--each so resplendently
bright that the student of to-day is lost in wonder and admiration
as he endeavors to decide on which Caesar’s greatest claim to renown
rests. “Here lies one whose name is written on water,” is the epitaph
which the poor, gentle, timid Keats begged to have carved on his tomb,
begged it as he lay dying from shafts of cruelty and malice. And yet,
his fame is as enduring as his art, and that is “a thing of beauty” and
“a joy forever.” “What have I done to be worthy of this great honor?”
asked Washington, when he heard he was elected the first president of
the Republic. Shakespeare was silent, morose, dissatisfied, as all true
artists are, with his own work, and judging from the epitaph, which it
is said he himself wrote, it appears he was fearful he might not have
even a place to rest his bones. And so, the world over. Simplicity is
greatness. Truth is fame. Honesty is glory. If you doubt it compare
Agricola and Cataline; Washington and Arnold; Paul and Iscariot;
Shakespeare and Sheridan.

In the same line of reasoning it is an hundred to one when a breeder,
pinning everything on a pedigree, an individuality, or some supposed
excellency, ever hits the mark. It is said that the same man once
owned Kittrell’s Tom Hal and Copperbottom. The latter he thought was
the better horse; the former was ignored. Time has shown, perhaps to
his loss, the owner’s error. An exchange recently published a story of
how a prospective buyer went to purchase one or two colts. The first
was Hambletonian 10, then, I think, a yearling; the second was a horse
called Abdallah. He regarded Abdallah the handsomest, the speediest,
the best. He spent a good deal of time in his examination, and as they
were priced the same, showing that even the owners had not discovered
any difference, he finally purchased the Abdallah colt, and, the writer
adds, “The first went to fame, the second to a double-tree.”

But some people think horse-breeding is not a lottery. Why, even
man-breeding is.

And so the Hal family, thinking not of fame, find it thrust upon them.

(To be Continued.)

       *       *       *       *       *

THE LAST HYMN OF THE BILOXI

(The Biloxi, a noble tribe of Indians who lived on the Gulf Coast many
centuries ago, were defeated in battle and besieged in their last
remaining fortress by an unrelenting enemy. Choosing rather to die in
the sea than to be captured and enslaved, they marched out of their
gate on a moonlit night, singing a death chant, a stately procession
of men, women and children, and continued seaward until the waves
swallowed them up. Their enemies stood on the shore and watched them,
struck with surprise and admiration. The remains of their last fortress
is said to be still standing at Biloxi, Miss., and to this day there is
heard a weird music which comes in from the Gulf, oftenest on still,
moonlit nights, which the natives call “The Last Hymn of the Biloxi.”)

  Over the sea, the silent sea,
  Faint is the music that comes to me.
            Pitifully pealing.
            Silently stealing.
  Kissing the waves so tenderly.

  Starlight above--June--chirrup of crickets--
  Fireflies and phantoms of stars in the glow.
  Corn in the tassel--faint odor of pollen--
  Blow! ye soft night winds, our requiem, blow--
  Dear land that has known us, no more will ye know.

  Over the sea, the moonlit sea,
  Sad is the music that comes to me.
            Echoing--dying--
            Sobbing--sighing--
  Song of a race that would ever be free.

  Death in the land--grim death in the battle--
  Death--and worse death--for mother and maid.
  Bravely we fought, but Fate did not favor--
  Sons of Biloxi, ye were never afraid--
  In caverns of corals our bones shall be laid.

  Over the sea, the crooning sea
  (Weird as the wail of a wraith, to me).
            Soft as the light dew
            Falling the night through.
  Faint as a sea-shell’s lullaby.

  Moonlight around--mist, mist on the water--
  Mist--’tis the drapery of Death on the deep.
  White-robed we come--babe, mother and maiden--
  Priest--warrior--pity us, sweet sea, and keep--
  Dear Sea that has nursed us, in thee let us sleep.

  Into the sea, the soothing sea.
  Singing, they entered, and died to be free.
            Now, when the echoing wave
            Sobs o’er their coral grave.
  It sings the last hymn of the brave Biloxi.

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.




Testing and Redeeming Soils


BY H. ALISON WEBSTER.

With the population of the world ever increasing, and the acreage of
fertile lands ever decreasing, with the consequent increasing demand
for, and decreasing supply of all products of the soil, is not the
duty of redeeming worn-out lands, enriching naturally poor lands and
preserving the fertility of fertile lands a duty that every land owner
owes to posterity? If the results of robbing the soil of its plant
foods has already been felt by the farmer, and if such a practice
be continued, what will be the condition of the same soil by the
time it descends to his great-grandchildren? If the vast majority of
the inhabitants of the globe are poor, and scarcely able to provide
food and raiment at the present prices, what will be the fate of
such a people when prices rise higher and higher, as will be the
inevitable result of an inadequate supply? Is confidence the cause
of such shameful neglect, or does the farmer lack confidence in the
practicability of the results of scientific research? It is true that
the great variety of objects in nature are extremely bewildering, and
if every farmer were forced to comprehend God’s creations in order
to equip himself to cultivate his land intelligently, the soil would
continue to get poorer and poorer, as the useful years of a long life
would pass in study; but men of science, in the past and present
generations, by faithful and noble work, have reduced all to simple
facts to be made practicable by the farmer, and there is no longer any
excuse for ignorance and neglect. Study the results of the work of
these men of science. Put them into practice. Experiment and work with
the soil. Study it and find out what it needs, and having found out,
supply the right thing in the right way at the right time. It is work,
hard work; but the reward is generous. In the words of Mr. Charles
Barnard, “Try things and learn, and having learned, do what is right by
your soil, and it will return all your labor in full measure, running
over, and your children will inherit the land as a well-kept trust and
blessing.”

As stated, things have been greatly simplified. Chemists, by thousands
of experiments, have found in all sixty-five single separate things
they call elements. Seventeen of these elements are in the soil. Out
of these seventeen the farmer is obliged to provide only four, as
the remaining thirteen, with favorable weather and proper tillage of
the soil, will take care of themselves. The four to be provided are
nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and calcium. The first three elements
are the most important, as they are plant foods or fertilizers. The
last, calcium, or lime, is a stimulant, and serves in the capacity of
neutralizing the acids of the soil. Lime is abundant in many soils and
in such soils is not needed; but where it is needed it is needed badly
and should be supplied. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are the
plant foods that are yearly consumed in various quantities by various
crops, which are taken away and sold or otherwise disposed of. They
are foods absolutely necessary to plant life, and if taken away and
never returned, the soil is as certain to become poor and exhausted
as the sun is to set in the west. This is the sum and substance of
the whole matter. What you take from the soil, you have to replace or
suffer loss. Your soil may need one, two, three or all four of the
elements. What it requires can be found out by experiment, as will
be shown further on. These elements as everyone must know, can be
easily obtained at costs varying with, and depending upon, the form
in which they are bought, or methods by which they are secured. The
all-important thing is to study the soil and prepare it to accept
and properly appropriate whatever foods are applied. No fertilizer
is insurance against laziness and ignorance. It takes work and
intelligence to accomplish any task. Study your soil, and you will
appreciate the fact that it has a constitution like yourself, and
will get worn out, and sick, and need physic just as you do. After
knowing its constitution, you can prescribe and administer the physic
it requires. No doctor can prescribe medicine intelligently without
knowing the constitution of his patient.

Naturally, though unfortunately, men of science, so far as the farmer
is concerned, are quite as intricate in their explanations of the
objects of nature, as are the objects themselves. Mr. Charles Bernard
in his “Talks About Soils,” published by Funk & Wagnalls, New York, is
the first to reduce matters to a practical plane. His explanations and
experiments I therefore adopt to simplify and make clear many things
which are of unquestionable importance.

The soil having been formed, in the main, by the weathering away of
the rocks, its foundation is either sand or clay or both combined.
On account of different quantities of sand and clay being found in
different soils, and to distinguish one from another, soils have been
divided into six classes. These are as follows:

A Light Sand.--This is a soil containing ninety per cent of sand. If it
had more sand and less of clay and other matter it would hardly produce
any useful plants, and could not fairly be called a soil.

2. A Pure Clay.--This would be a soil in which no sand could be found.
A pure clay soil would be wet and cold, and would not be good for our
common plants. Such soils are rare: and what is commonly called a pure
clay soil is one containing a great excess of clay, and only a little
sand or other matter.

3. A Loam.--This is one of the best of all soils. Such a soil contains
both sand and clay as well as other matter.

4. A Sandy Loam.--This is a mixture of sand and clay, with more sand
than clay.

5. A Clay Loam.--This is a mixture in which there is more clay than
sand.

6. A Strong Clay.--This is a clay containing from five to twenty per
cent of sand and other matter.

Experiments with Sand and Clay.--Procure a quart of pure sand and
spread it out in the sun to dry, and when dry place a small quantity
on a spoon, and hold over a hot fire. The heat has no effect upon it.
Remove the spoonful of sand from the fire, and it will be found that
the sand keeps its heat for a long time. Place a small quantity of sand
in a small sieve and pour water over it. The water at first flows away
more or less discolored, and presently runs quickly through the sand
pure and clean. While wet the sand sticks together slightly. Place it
in the air, and it soon dries, and the grains are as loose as before.
Place a little of the washed sand in a bottle filled with water. Cork
the bottle and shake it up. The sand will move about as long as the
water is in motion, but the instant the bottle is at rest, it falls
to the bottom, and forms a layer under the clear water. Place some
of the sand in an oven or in the sun till perfectly dry. Place three
tablespoonfuls of water in a saucer, and then pour carefully into the
saucer a cupful of dry sand. It becomes wet around the little heap
while still dry at the top; soon the water will begin to creep up the
sand and in a short time it is all wet, and remains wet as long as
there is water in the saucer.

These experiments show us that sand is not affected by heat, and that
it keeps its heat for some time; that water passes through it readily
and, if clean, the water passes through pure and clean. When wet it is
very slightly sticky, when dry this stickiness disappears completely.
In water it sinks the moment the water is at rest. Water rises through
it easily by capillary attraction.

Another experiment, taking more time, is to place some clean sand in a
flower pot, wet it, and sprinkle fine grass-seeds over it. Place in a
warm room and the seeds will soon sprout and send small roots down into
the sand.

These experiments show some of the characteristics of all soils
composed largely of sand. We observed that sand when heated retains its
heat for some time. Any soil having a large proportion of sand, when
warmed by the sun will keep the heat after the sun has set or is hid by
the clouds. We proved that water would flow quickly through it. A sandy
soil is therefore a dry soil, and for this reason favorable to nearly
all our useful plants. We saw that water would rise through sand by
capillary attraction, which makes sand useful in soil in dry weather to
bring water up from a damp subsoil to feed the roots of plants growing
in the soil.

However, there are objections to sand. As we saw, it is loose and
easily moved about by water. A sandy soil is therefore easily washed
away by rains, and, if too sandy, may suffer great injury by washing in
heavy storms. Water flows through sand quickly, and if there is no damp
subsoil immediately beneath, the soil may get so dry that plants will
burn up. The water may also wash down all the light organic matter out
of reach of the plants.

We observed that sand is easily moved about. This is important in that
all soils where plants are growing must be frequently stirred, to let
air come into the soil, and to kill the weeds. A sandy soil is easy to
hoe or plow, because the sand is loose. This saves time and money, or
work in caring for plants, and is a business advantage.

If you carry out the experiment with seeds planted on sand you will
observe that the roots of the young plants easily find their way
through the sand in search of food and water. This shows that a soil
containing sand is favorable to the growth of plants, because in it
their roots spread in every direction.

Procure a small quantity of clay from some clay bank. Place in a
warm place to dry, and in a day or two you can crush it into a soft,
impalpable powder. Pinch a little between the fingers and it appears
to stick together slightly. Place some in a bottle of water, cork it
tight and shake the bottle. The powder floats in the water in clouds,
till the water appears completely filled with it. Let the bottle stand
and it will be many hours before the clay settles and the water becomes
clear. Wet some of the dry clay, and it forms a sticky, pasty mass,
that has a soft, greasy feeling between the fingers. Spread some of the
soft, pasty mass over a sieve, and pour water on it and the water will
hardly pass through the sieve at all. Spread some wet clay over a rough
board, and pour water over it, and the clay will cling to the board a
long time before it is swept away. Place a lump of wet clay in the sun
and it will be many hours before it is entirely dry. Spread some of the
wet clay over a dish and place it in the sun, and when it slowly dries
it will be found full of cracks. Place a lump of wet clay in an oven
and it will dry hard like stone.

Place some of the wet clay in a pot and scatter fine seeds over it.
The seeds may sprout and try to grow, but they will probably perish as
tender roots are unable to push their way through the sticky clay.

After all these experiments have been performed with the clay and sand,
another experiment can be made by drying both the clay and sand and
then mixing them together in equal parts. When well mixed place in a
pot and scatter fine seeds upon the mixture. Water well, and place in
a sunny window; and the plants will sprout and grow longer and better
than in either the pure sand or pure clay.

These experiments with the lump of clay show that if soil consists
wholly of clay, it must be a poor place for plants. In every hard rain
the water, instead of sinking into the soil to supply the plants, would
run away over the surface and be wasted. After slow soaking rains the
soil would remain wet and cold for a long time. When the sun dries the
soil it splits and cracks and tears the roots of plants growing in it.
This sticky, pasty soil sticks to spade and plows and we find it hard,
slow work to cultivate it. A pure clay from these would appear to be
a poor soil for plants. We must not, however, be led astray by our
experiments, as it is not easy to find a soil composed wholly of clay.
It is usually mixed with other things and then forms a valuable part of
the best soils. Sand alone would be a poor soil. Clay alone would be a
poorer soil. Mixed together and mixed with other things, they make a
part of all good soils.

Organic and Inorganic Matter.--Organic matter is something that has
life, or has had life at some time. The organic matter in the soil has
been supplied by animals and plants, in one way or another. All else
is inorganic. Both organic and inorganic matters are necessary to the
existence of plants. Peaty soils wholly organic will not grow plants,
neither will sandy soils wholly sand. Inorganic matter forms the
foundation of soils and generally forms from eighty to ninety per cent
of the whole soil.

Testing Soils for Clay, Sand and Organic Matter.--Take from the ground
you wish to test, a peck of soil and place on a board in a round heap,
and with a trowel stir it until completely mixed. Then pile into a
heap and divide into four equal parts. Next weigh out eight ounces,
and spread it out to dry. When dry weigh it and note the loss by
air-drying. Next put the soil in a pan and place it in an oven for
three hours. Then take the soil out of the pan and weigh it, noting the
loss by fire-drying. It is now dry soil and to estimate the organic
and inorganic matter, place an iron shovel over the fire, and when
red hot put the dry soil on it, let it burn, stirring it occasionally
as it burns. It will smoke and smoulder away to ashes and dust. When
it ceases to smoke, carefully weigh the ashes. This ash represents
the inorganic sand and clay parts of the soil. All the organic matter
disappeared in the smoke.

Now take this ash and pour it in a bottle of water. Shake the bottle
well and then set on a table, and just so soon as the water becomes
still the sand will immediately settle at the bottom, while the clay
will remain for some time making the water muddy. As soon as the sand
has settled, pour the muddy or clay water off, being careful not to
pour any of the sand with it. Then pour some clear water in the bottle
on the sand, shake it and pour sand water and all on a cloth fine
enough to catch the sand. Dry the sand and weigh it. If it weighs two
ounces, then out of the four ounces of dry soil you have tested you
have two ounces of sand, one ounce of clay and one ounce of organic
matter. Or your soil is twenty-five per cent organic matter and
twenty-five per cent clay, and fifty per cent sand. You have a loam
soil.

Testing Soils with Plant Foods and Lime.--In the field to be tested,
select as level a place as possible and mark out ten squares, each
measuring one rod on each side. Place these in two rows leaving spaces
three feet wide between the squares. These empty spaces are to be kept
clear of weeds and used as walks. Each square should be marked by
stakes at the corners, and properly numbered as in the accompanying
diagram.

The squares are to be planted with the same crop and well cultivated
through the season. Two of these squares, Nos. 2 and 9, are to have no
fertilizers, that they may serve as a check or guide in testing the
other squares. Square No. 1 is to have a fertilizer containing nitrogen
only. No. 4 potassium and phosphorous combined; No. 5 potassium alone;
No. 6 nitrogen and phosphorus; No. 7 phosphorus alone; No. 8 all three
plant foods combined, and No. 10 is to have calcium only.

  No. 1. Potassium and Nitrogen   No. 2. No Fertilizer

  No. 3. Nitrogen                 No. 4. Potassium and Phosphorus

  No. 5. Potassium                No. 6. Nitrogen and Phosphorus

  No. 7. Phosphorus               No. 8. Nitrogen Phosphorus Potassium

  No. 9. No Fertilizer            No. 10. Calcium

Apply the fertilizers and work them in the soil about four inches deep
before the crop is planted. Plant the same variety of seed on all the
squares at the same time, and carefully cultivate through the entire
season, treating all exactly alike. Suppose that potatoes have been
used. During the growing season, carefully watch the different plats
and notice if any one or more seems more or less thrifty than others.
Notice which plat appears to mature first, which blooms first and keep
a record of all observations. At the end of the season, carefully dig
the crop on each square, gathering all the tubers large and small,
and weigh each lot. First weigh the crops on squares 2 and 9. This
will serve as a standard of comparison, as it will show the natural
condition of the soil. Record the weights in each lot and just for
illustration we may say that they run something like this: Average of
2 and 9, 80 pounds; No. 1, 380 pounds; No. 3, 250 pounds; No. 4, 360
pounds; No. 5, 350 pounds; No. 6, 300 pounds; No. 7, 220 pounds; No. 8,
400 pounds; No. 10, 120 pounds.

On the particular soil we are supposed to be testing, we can clearly
see that the land is benefited in some degree by every element used.
Calcium helps, and that means that it should be used on that soil
in addition to all of the others. This land plainly needs all four
elements and needs potassium especially.

What to Do.--After having gone through with Mr. Barnard’s experiments,
you will have a practical idea of what your soil is, and what it needs.
The only remaining questions then are those of preparing the soil, and
obtaining and applying the plant foods and the lime.

A cold, wet, clay soil needs to be made warmer and lighter, and a
light, sandy soil, being too dry, needs some moisture-retaining
substance. If conditions are favorable, it would be well at odd time
to put sand on the clay soil and clay on the sandy soil; but in most
cases this is too expensive, and therefore not practical. To redeem
poor lands then, you will have to depend almost entirely upon green
manure and lime. Barnyard manures are, of course, at all times, with
all soils, the best of all fertilizers, as they return to the soil by
the laws of nature, what has been taken from them, or what it should
have. Besides the plant foods, it furnishes additional organic matter
or humus, which makes the soil lighter and facilitates plant growth by
furnishing food to bacteria essential to plant life. The trouble about
barn-yard manure is its scarcity. Every farm needs more plant food and
humus than can be supplied with common manure.

In the fall, apply 500 pounds of lime per acre to the poor land to be
redeemed, break it and prepare it thoroughly, and seed it to rye. In
the spring when the rye heads out, turn it under and sow cow peas. When
the peas mature, scatter lime, 500 pounds to the acre, over them and
turn them under. The lime will prevent the green stuff from souring the
soil, will decompose it and fit it for plant food, and will prepare the
soil to accept any other foods that may be applied. Follow the peas
with wheat, or wheat and clover.

The land once redeemed, do not wear it out again, but preserve its
fertility by the use of high-grade commercial fertilizers and barn-yard
manure, always rotating the crops so as to get back to some leguminous
crop and lime at least once every four years.

Do not retard agricultural education by making warfare on commercial
fertilizers, for they are indispensable to every farmer in preserving
the fertility of the soil. The world employs the use of just about
one-tenth of the artificial fertilizers it should use, and about
one-half of what is used is used intelligently. Make war on low
grade fertilizers that have the attractive but deceiving feature of
cheapness, and buy grade fertilizers by the unit under the guidance of
the requirements of your soil.


Phosphatic Limestone.

The use of lime has been and is being sadly neglected, especially in
the Southern States and, when it is absolutely necessary to all soils
in which it does not exist or exists only in small or insufficient
quantities, it does look like the move to provide it is one of
imperative moment. Look at the Bluegrass Region of Tennessee and
Kentucky, the fairest and most fertile of God’s country. What made
it? The dissolution and weathering away of the original phosphatic
limestone rock. It is strictly a limestone country and teaches one of
nature’s great lessons that the agricultural world should accept and be
profited thereby.

All the limestone of this region contains more or less bone phosphate
of lime, and in this fact lies the whole secret. In the past ages the
foliage from the thick mass of trees and other vegetable growth fell
to the ground, soured, and formed an acid which immediately attacked
the bone phosphate of lime and converted it into phosphoric acid, while
the calcium carbonate or lime decomposed all vegetable matter and
conditioned it for plant food, neutralizing all acids and stood ready
itself to enter into all future and standing vegetable growth. Now the
forests have given place to the cleared fields and we no longer have
the dropping from the trees to enrich our soils, neither have we in
our fields in sections devoid of limestone any vegetation with roots
that extend deep enough in the earth to bring up the carbonate of lime
sufficient to support our crops. Therefore the vegetable matter the
cheapest of all manures, we provide by turning under green leguminous
or nitrogen-gathering plants. These plants sour and finally decompose,
but without carbonate of lime to perform its important duties of
creating plant food out of this decayed matter, all the fertilizer you
get from your crop is the nitrogen it has gathered from the air. Then
why not use powdered Tennessee phosphatic-limestone containing enough
calcium carbonate (not quick lime) to furnish desired results and no
more bone phosphate of lime than will be entirely and immediately
converted into plant food. If this phosphatic-limestone product is used
with leguminous crops, potash is the only plant food that you will have
to provide during the two crop seasons following; however, every soil
that has a clay subsoil is a safe bank that will retain all you place
on deposit, and if you have the money to spare, deposit it in the soil
by investing in high-grade fertilizers and draw a high rate of interest
on it instead of letting it stand idle. The calcium in the phosphatic
limestone will absolutely correct all free acids in the commercial
fertilizers, the burning, deleterious effects of which you may have
experienced, and it will rectify the sourness of any and all soils.

An object lesson in favor of this phosphatic limestone is taught
by riding along any turnpike macadamized with it and observing the
rankness of the crops about fifty yards on either side of the pike,
especially where the fields are worn and poor. This demonstrates that
it is the dust blown from the roads over into the fields that makes
the rank growth alongside the roads. It may be argued that the manure
dropped on the pike produced the results; but if so small an amount
of manure produced such wonderful results when mixed with the dust
from the pike, what would be the result if you would mix all of your
barn-yard manure with the powdered limestone?

Recently the writer made twelve tests or experiments with litmus paper.
The first ten of these experiments were made with blue litmus paper and
samples drawn from ten different fields, all of which have been under
cultivation for many years and have had liberal yearly applications
of acid fertilizers. The soils so tested are Alabama soils, and are
decidedly acid, as shown by the bits of blue litmus turning red on
coming in contact with them.

Everyone must know that it takes lime to neutralize the acids of acid
soils; but comparatively few farmers ever take the trouble to find out
whether or not their soils are acid, even after failing to get a catch
of clover three or four years in succession. All clovers positively
refuse to grow in acid soils. Inoculation will not do any good for
bacteria cannot exist and operate in such soils. Sweeten the soil and
nature will in most cases supply the bacteria.

Carbonate of lime enters into the frame of every plant and a lack of
it will cause soft stems and flabby leaves. It improves the chemical,
mechanical and biological condition of the soil. It flocculates very
light, sandy soils, making them compact and capable of retaining
moisture, while it prevents clayey soils from becoming pasty hard and
full of cracks by causing them to crumble when dry.

Lime is the great carrier into plants of other elements which go there
to form their organic compounds, during the elaboration of which,
organic acids are created, any and all of which would poison and kill
the plants were it not for the action of lime; so lime, in addition
to its all-importance as a salifiable base, becomes the great carrier
of all foods into plants where it is again of paramount importance as
a fixer of oxalic fermentation, thus having the natural and distinct
power to act where all other elements are useless.

It will correct sourness in any soil regardless of its origin, it will
neutralize all acids that come into the soil through cultivation,
through commercial fertilizers or green manurial crops. It will
facilitate cultivation and produce a greater porosity and granulation
of all soils and thereby lessen the bad effects of drought by reducing
surface evaporation, will obviate excessive capillary rise of moisture
which elevates the water-soluble foods above the zone of roots, provide
better circulation of air in the soil and will cause rapid percolation
of rain and thus reduce surface washing. It stimulates and increases
nitrification and decomposes vegetable matter, extracting from it
all plant foods and leaving humus to lighten the soil and retain
its moisture. It enters into the composition of all plant life and
therefore into all animal life, giving to animals its carbon combined
with the carbon of the air to furnish them fat, and its lime to furnish
them bone. It is the phosphatic-limestone that has made Tennessee and
Kentucky horses the strength to excel in work and racing, and it is
this same soil constituent that has given to the Jersey cow sufficient
butter fat to lead the world in butter tests. It enables the clovers
and grasses to grow, and without such crops what would the brothers of
the hoe do toward profitable farming and meeting the responsibilities
of life? It perpetuates and permits the use of commercial fertilizers
which are becoming so absolutely essential to husbandry, as it obviates
the evil effects of the acids these products contain, and makes all
plant food available to the plant. Finally, it is a property designed
by the Creator to act for and enter into all vegetable and animal life,
and evil will be the reward to him who rejects it.




The Watermelon Sermon


Watermelon time is in full blast in Tennessee now. Ordinarily, the
whites in the South cease to eat watermelons after the fifteenth of
September, because they know that as soon as the cool nights begin
every melon contains a thousand chills. But not so with the darkey.
A chill rattles as harmlessly off the armour of his constitution as
buckshot from the back of the Olympia. He can absorb miasma like a
sponge, and, like it, grow fat as he absorbs. The negro, then, eats his
melon until the November frosts kill the vines. Even then he carries
the half-ripe melon into his cabin and often, on Christmas morning, an
ice-cold watermelon is his first diet.

And a great treat it is. Did you never wander over the fields, way
down South, after the cotton was all picked, and the November breezes
came cool and ladened with that delicate, indescribably rare flavor
the frost gives when it first nips the mellow-ripe muscadine? You
have shouldered your gun and gone out after old Mollie Cotton Tail.
It was cool and crisp when you went out, but toward noon it has grown
hot again. Flushed and tired, you stop to rest by the big spring that
flows from under the roots of the big oak near the cotton field. In
the shadow of that oak, half hid in the frost-bitten weeds, you find a
little striped watermelon--a guinea melon, as the darkies call it--a
kind of a volunteer melon that grows in the cotton every year, the
first seeds of which were brought by some Guinea negro, from the coast
of Africa, when he first came over to servitude, with silver rings in
his nose and ears. And though he failed to bring his idols and his
household gods along with him, yet did he not forget the melon of his
naked ancestors. Planting it as he hoed his first crop of cotton for a
new master, it has never deserted him since, and so, year after year,
it comes up amid the cotton, to remind him of the days it grew wild in
a sunnier clime.

And there you find it this November morning. Boy like, you pounce on
it with a shout and soon it is laid open, as red as your first love’s
lips and as sweet; and so cold it seems to have been raised in the
deep-delved cellars of all the centuries. I am sorry for the boy who
has grown to be a man and never, in a November morning’s hunt after Old
Mollie, had the exquisite sweetness of this satisfying surprise--the
like of which is not equalled by the sweetness of any other surprise on
earth. No--not even should he grow to be a man, and awake some morning
to find himself famous and the father of twins!

Every darkey of any standing in Tennessee “gives a treat” at least
once in his life. He will stint and economize for months to save money
enough to invest in watermelons and tartaric acid (the acid makes
the lemonade). Then, when the glorious day arrives, Nero, giving free
entertainment to the citizens of Eternal Rome, is not in it with that
darkey. Henceforth he can get anything in that community he wishes,
from constable to presiding elder, while the widows of the church are
his’n by a large majority!

I had heard that old Wash was going to run again for justice of the
peace and the “deaconship of Zion” over in the coon district of Big
Sandy, and that he was going to give his annual treat.

These had always passed off beautifully and ended in the unanimous
election of the old man to both offices and anything else he wanted. I
thought it was all over and entirely harmonious until he came in the
other night, looking like Montejo’s flag-ship after Dewey’s ten-inch
shell went through her, “a-rippin’ out her very innards”--as Old Wash
himself described it--“from eend to eend.”

But when I saw the old man, creeping into my library, I was certain he
was in the last stages of Asiatic cholera, and I rang the telephone
hastily to get my family physician. But he feebly raised his hand, and
beckoned me to desist.

“No, no, boss; he can’t do me no good--no good,” as he feebly sank into
a chair. Then he whispered:

“Jes a drap, a leetle drap, on my tongue, boss--jes’ to let the old man
shuffle off dis mortal coil wid a good taste in his mouth. It’s all I
wants.”

Under the stimulant of that eternal beverage of moonlight and melody,
he revived a little.

“What’s the matter with you? Anybody been giving you a hoodoo,” I asked.

“No, no, boss”--feebly--“I--I--I gin a treat at Big Sandy.”

“Well, you have given many a treat at Big Sandy. Why should this one
make you look like a piney-wood coal-kiln after a cyclone had struck
it?”

It took another dose from my side-board bottle to put enough life into
the old man to make him take any interest in things. Then he brightened
up and said:

“Dat’s jes’ hit--a man may go on doin’ de same trick year arter year,
ontwel it looks lak he cud do it wid his eyes shet, an’ den at last, if
he ain’t mighty keerful, hit’ll buck and fling ’im! De hardes’ luck,
I take it, in dis wurl’, am when a man dun shuck de dice ob success
ontwell dey seem to bob up at his word, only to play off on him an’
bust ’im es his palsied han’ shakes ’em fur de las’ time.”

His tears were flowing so freely and his remarks seemed so true and
heartfelt, I did not have it in me to fail to brace him up with
another pull from the side-board bottle. Then I saw he was ripe and
reminiscent, and I lit my cigar, struck an easy attitude, and let him
do the rest:

“On de Sundy befo’ de fust Mundy ob de full moon in September,” he went
on, “cum off de ’lection fur ’ziden elder of Zion, an’ de next day
am de day sot by law fur de ’lection of jestus ob de peace. So las’
Sat’d’y I gin a treat. I axed ebry nigger in de deestrict dar, an’ all
de members of Zion, an’ Br’er Johnsing wus to preach de watermilion
sermon.

“Ain’t nurver heurd ob de watermilion sermon? Hit’s de sermon preached
at de feast ob de watermilion jes’ befo’ de new moon in September,
an’ it am one ob de doctrines ob Zion to kinder take de place ob de
feast ob de Passober ’mong de Jews--only in dis case we don’t pass
ober nuffin’, ’specially de watermilions. Now, hit tain’t eb’ry nigger
kin preach de watermilion sermon. Hit takes a mighty juicy nigger to
do hit, yallar with dark stripes, juicy at de core, full of tears an’
sweet penitence an’ easily laid open by the blade of grace, an’ brudder
Johnsing am de slickest one I eber seed at it.

“Now, dat wus my time to git in my fine Italyun han’, an’ so I gin
it out that hit wus to be my treat, an’ I axed all de voters ob de
deestrick an’ all de members ob Zion ter be on han’ fur de revival ob
de speerit an’ de refreshment ob de flesh.

“’Cordin’ to my custom, jes’ befo’ de time fur de sermon I had all
de watermilions laid out on de grass, one hundred ob de bigges’ an’
fattes’ ones you eber seed. You see, boss, I am constertushunally
upposed to long sermons,” he winked, “an’ I knowed dey wa’n’t a
nigger libin’ c’uld preach ober ten minnits wid all dem watermilions
a-layin’ dar a-winkin’ at ’im an’ waiting to be led, lak’ lambs, to de
sacrifice. Does you see de p’int?”

I saw it.

“Wal, suh, you orter jes’ heurd de prayer Br’er Johnsing put up--it
wus short, but mighty sweet. De flavor ob de watermilions seem ter
git into hit, an’ de ’roma ob hits juice b’iled outen his mouth. Boss,
you’ve seed dese kinder preachers dat talks to de good Lord wid all
de easy fermileriaty ob a deestrick skule-teacher axin’ de presedent
ob de skule board fur what he wants, an’ wid all de sassy assurance
ob de silent partner in a lan’-offis bisness, ain’t you? Wal, dat’s
de way Br’er Johnsing prayed, an’ I wus de speshul objec, ob his
conversashun wid de Almighty dat day. He tole ’im whut I’d dun fur
dat community, informed ’im very posertively ob de fac’ dat I wus a
Godly man, refreshed His mem’ry in a gentle way consarnin’ sum’ ob my
long-furgotten deeds ob cheerity, an’ gin Him sum’ good, brotherly
advice on how to git eben wid me, an’ in a measure pay off de debt
of gratitude He owed me by makin’ it His will dat I wus erg’in to
administer de law ob de lan’, both spiritual an’ temper’l, an’ fur
ernudder twelvemonth ter be de venerbul ram ob de flock ob Zion, to
lead His sheep to de fold an’ by de still waters. Wal, suh, when he
finish, mighty nigh eb’ry nigger dar said Amen, an’ den dey lick dey
chops an’ look sorter dreamy lak ober whar de watermilions lay ’n de
col’ spring branch.

“Dis wus my time to spring de s’prise ob de ebenin’ on ’em, dat I’d
fixed up. An’ so I riz up wid de most sancterfied look on I c’uld git,
one ob dem onworthy, miserbul-sinner sorter looks dat we elders allers
carry aroun’ in our coat pockets along with our bandanna handkerchiefs
fur enny emergency, an’ I sez: ‘Brudders an’ sistrin, befo’ we listen
to de soulful sermon in store fur our spiritual natures, which Br’er
Johnsing gwineter gib us in his ellerquent way, I’ve sprung a letle
s’prise on you, an’ I wants you all to retire wid me an’ refresh de
innard man a leetle. Brudderin’ knowin’ my onworthiness an’ de many
obligashuns I am under to dis enlightened community ob Christian saints
an’ godly men an’ wimmen, I’ve made two bar’ls ob ice-cold lemmernade,
an’ you’ll find ’em asettin’, es a big s’prise,’ sez I, ‘on de houn’s
ob my ox-waggin, in de cool shade by de spring, wid plenty ob tin
dippers fur all. We’ll now adjourn twenty minnits fur refreshments.’

“Wal, suh, you sh’uld a heurd de shout. Ef de ’lection bed cum’ off
den, I’d a got eb’ry vote in de deestrick an’ a fair sprinklin’ ob sum’
in all de yudders. I went wid ’em an’ drunk, too. An’ we all drunk ter
one ernudder’s health. I drunk to Sister Ca’line, an’ Br’er Johnsing he
drunk to Dinah, an’ de leetle niggers drunk, an’ de ole niggers drunk,
de gals an’ de boys. I hilt up my dipper an’ laugh, an’ sed to Br’er
Johnsing, ‘Br’er Johnsing, here’s to you,’ sez I, ‘an’ all dat goes up
must go down.’ An’ wid dat I swallered down.

“Den Br’er Johnsing--he’s mighty funny--an’ he hilt up his’n and laugh,
an’ say: ‘Br’er Washington, here’s to you,’ sez he, ‘an’ all dat goes
down nurver comes up ergin.’ An’ den we all laugh.

“But dat wus one time he wus terribly mistaken, es you will see.

“Wal, suh, when we all hed drunk enough we went back to hear de
watermilion sermon, an’ den eat de fruit ob whut we heurd. ’Tain’t
eb’ry man kin say dat, boss, dat he eats de fruit ob whut he hears;
digests de fustly, an’ de secondly, an’ de thudly, assimmerlates
in de juicy rime ob de tangerbul thing, de logical konclushun ob
de intelectual fac’. An’ darfore I’ve allers sed dat drawin’ yo’
konclushuns frum de heart ob a watermilion makes de bes’ sermon in de
wurl’.

“I b’leeve I tole you, boss, dat dat lemmernade wus intended fur a
s’prise fur ’em, didn’t I?”

“Yes, I believe you mentioned that it was a little surprise of yours in
store for them.”

The old man groaned. “Boss, fur heaben’s sake, annudder drap outen dat
bottle! I’ll hafter brace up erg’in to tell de sorrowin’ scene dat
follers. Thankee, thankee! I’m better now, an’ maybe I kin finish, fur
dat lemmernade turned out to be de bigges’ an’ sorrerfullest surprise
dat ever come down a pike.

“Br’er Johnsing tuck fur his tex’ de sermon ob Noah an’ de ark,
an’ whilst Noah wus de man menshuned, hit wus plain dat I was de
applercashun. He went on to show dat I wus a godly man, jes’ lak’ ole
Noah, an’ dat I wus to de community ob Big Sandy whut Noah was to
Jeerruselum. He wus makin’ it short, but a-gwine in two-minnit time,
a-pacin’ lak’ ole Joe Patchen at a matternee fur a silver cup an’
wreath ob roses, an’ den all at onct he lifted up his voice an’ sed:
‘Yes, brudderin, de waters ob de g-r-e-a-t deep riz up, an’ de bottom
drop outen de clouds; de w-i-n-d-e-r-s ob heaben wus flung open, an’
de upheaval ob de u-n-e-v-e-r-s-e begun----’

“Dat wus es fur es he got, befo’ de word upheaval wus outen his mouth,
sho’ ’nuff, de upheaval did begun. I seed ’im stop so suddenly he
kicked up behind, clap his hands on his stummick an’ try to bolt fur a
locus’ thicket, but he c’uldn’t--he jes’ turned a complete summerset,
athrowin’ up his immortal soul es he turned. Den I heurd a turrible
commoshun in de congregashun, an’ I look erroun’, an’ eb’ry nigger dar
wus in de same fix es Br’er Johnsing. Dey wus whoopin’, an’ barkin’,
and layin’ out in eb’ry kinder way, an’ all on ’em bent on de same
thing. An’ whut dey wus doin’ to dat groun’ wus a-plenty! Dey thought
dey was pizened an’ wus gwineter die, an’ den sech s’archin’ prayers
es went up to de throne ob grace, mixed in wid moans, an’ groans, an’
ice-cold lemmernade dat seem to think hit wus time ter rise erg’in and
fetch eb’rything else frum de grabe along wid it. By dis time I wus so
’stounded I didn’t kno’ whut ter do. I look erroun’ an’ I seed dat me
an’ ole Aunt Fat Ferreby wus de onlies’ ones dat wa’n’t tryin’ to turn
inside out. She wus lookin’ mighty ashy erroun’ de gills, but she brace
hers’f up an’ started out ter raise dat good ole hymn:

  ‘How firm a foundation’--

But she hadn’t more’n got to ‘foundahun’ befo, her foundation was
shaken, I seed her gag an’ double up an’ start in on:

  ‘My risin’ soul leaps up to sing,
    A song of praise ter day.’

“’Bount dat time I felt a ’tickler kinder mizzry in my own innards,
an’ de nex’ thing I disremember I had Sister Ferreby ’round’ de neck
an’ we wus singin’ dat hymn tergedder. Lor’! hit wus awful. I’ve seed
menny a sight, but I nurver expect erg’in ter see three hundred an’
sixty-five niggers throwin’ up at de same time. When sum’ on ’em got
dey secon’ wind dey wanted to lynch me, but by de time dey got erroun’
to me wid a rope dey ’cided I wus too nigh dead to need killin’, and by
dis time dey all had to ’zamperfly de truth ob de biblical sayin’ about
de dog an’ de thing he would go back to. By dis time eb’ry doctor in de
country wus dar, fetchin’ all de querrintine offercers, an’ pest-tents,
an’ disenfec-tents, an’ preparin’ fer c’olera an’ fever. An’ den we
foun’ out what ailed us.”

“In the name of heaven, what was it?” I asked eagerly.

The tears rolled down the old man’s cheeks as he feebly begged for
another drop to enable him to finish his tale. Then he said:

“Ain’t I dun tole you hundreds ob times it am de leetle mistakes we
make in life dat turns de tide? Ain’t I? Wal, dat’s whut ruined me
dat day, an’ terday I am a man widout offis an’ widout honor in my
ole age. Dat mornin’, ’stead ob gwine down to de sto’ myse’f to get
de poun’ ob tartar acid ter make up dat lemmernade wid, I saunt dat
trifflin’ Jim Crow gran’son ob mine, an’ he got de names twisted, an’
’stead ob fetchin’ me back tartar acid, he fotcht me back a poun’ ob
tartar emetic, an’ I didn’t do a thing but make up dat lemmernade wid
it!”

“But, surely, they wouldn’t treasure up such a mistake against you,
seeing that you suffered with the rest,” I said.

“Boss,” said the old man, rising, “how long you gwine ter lib wid
niggers, an’ den hafter be tole ober an’ ober ergin de same thing? In
course, dey didn’t beat me fur offis on ercount ob dat fool mistake,
but jes’ lemme ax you, whar is de nigger libin’ dat gwinter vote fur
enny man dat’d lay out a hundred watermilions in de spring branch, let
’em look at ’em an hour, an’ den turn dat nigger’s stummick into a
green-persimmon fur a week? Whar is he, I ax?” And the old man crept
feebly out to find him a cheap coffin.

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

       *       *       *       *       *

  _We never give, but giving, get again;
    There is no burden that we may not bear;
  Our sweetest love is always sweetest pain,
    And yet the recompense--the recompense is there._

       *       *       *       *       *

_The sweet things of life do not lie so much in sight as in the heart
that sees them._




Stories of the Soil


  The Little Things of Life, Happening All Over the World and Caught in
  Ink for Trotwood’s Monthly.


TIM’S EASTER.

The first streaks of day were breaking. It looked to the fireman of
496 that the old engine was sticking her nose into the red dawn as
she plowed ahead hauling her fast freight South on schedule time. Tim
Doogan was at the throttle--an old engineer who stood at the head of
the road’s list; for Tim had been in service longer than any of them,
had never failed in his duty and for twenty years had never taken a day
off except one--to bury his wife.

He had never even asked for a promotion, and when it had been
offered--the highest post of the engineer--Tim shook his head and
declined.

“I guess I’m used to this old route and I’d feel lost if I didn’t pass
through the Little Town every few days.”

They were now approaching the Little Town, and Tim had not spoken
since he left the city, a hundred miles back. He was naturally quiet,
but the fireman had never known him to make the run before and not
say something. Something told the fireman that Tim had struck sadness
somewhere, and so at intervals he fired up but said nothing to the big,
begrimed man in overalls and cap who stood silently at his post, with
one hand always on the throttle of his engine.

“I’m goin’ to stop twenty minutes in the Little Town, Jim,” said Tim
as they began to pull into the station.

“Any orders?” asked Jim, surprised.

“No, but it’s my orders--ever’ Easter--been doin’ it for twenty years.
Company don’t like it, kin lump it,” Tim added dry.

This was Jim’s first year, and he had never heard.

“No. 3 may be late an’ give me the chance. If she don’t, why, we stops
anyway, Jim.”

“Why, I’d rather she’d be on time, so we can go on. Don’t you want to
go on?” asked Jim.

“Not for twenty minutes, ef I can he’p it. Fact is, we’re goin’ to stop
here a little while anyway.”

The fireman said nothing, and Tim slowed up No. 496 in the yard. Then
he jumped down and went in to report.

“No. 3 twenty minutes late,” he said, as he came back. “Take keer o’
things till I git back. I’ll not be gone long.”

“You ain’t that there thirsty for a drink this mornin’ are you, Tim?
You don’t drink to speak of, and I never knowed you to leave old 496
befo’.”

Tim said nothing, but climbed up and opened his big box. The fireman
smelt something sweet, and very tenderly Tim took out a longer
pasteboard box.

“Flowers,” said the fireman. “Say, Tim, old man,” he laughed, “I’ve
caught on--it’s a gal.”

“She _was_ a gal,” said Tim, quietly, “and the pretties’ and sweetes’
one that ever hit the soil o’ this wurl. An’ the little boy wa’nt no
fluke.” He brushed at his eyes as he spoke, and left another grimy
smear there.

“I’m a-goin’ over to the little cemetery a bit, Jim--yes, you stay with
496. They’re buried over there. We lived--her an’ the little ’un--we
lived here after we was married. She was allers sweet on Easter, and
for flowers and sech, an’ I love to do this for her an’ the boy. Been
doin’ it twenty year’. We don’t know nothin’, an’ maybe it’s all
so--an’ if anybody’ll rise again it’ll be her--with her faith--for I
tell you, Jim it was as a little child. Yes, they was both my children.”

He was taking the flowers out, lilies and roses and carnations and
cultivated violets, big and blue and beautiful. In his big, grimy,
black hands, and amid the soot and dust of 496 they lay beautified and
glorified, and the sweet odor went through the rough fireman until he
saw pictures of a far-away home.

Silently Tim trudged across the hill to the little cemetery. The
village was asleep, the unkept streets empty, the cold, gray mist hung
low over everything, and finally Tim disappeared in it. But twenty
minutes later, when the sun had risen and 496 was butting through the
gray, her throttles open, the smoke belching from her stack, Tim stood
at his post, a smile lighting up his grimy face, his eyes fixed on two
graves amid pines, far up on the hill upon which shone lilies and
roses and violets.

They thundered past, and the old engineer took off his cap and, turning
to the fireman, said, above the roar of wheels and steam:

“She used to say it this-a-way, Jim--I’ve heard her so often, an’ fer
five years she taught it to the little boy befo’ he left.” He looked
toward the sun rising through the mist, and said slowly:

“_In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn, toward the first
day of the week came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the
sepulchre._

“_And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord
descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door
and sat upon it.... And the angel answered and said unto the woman,
Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus that was crucified. He is
not here for He is risen._”

He shut off steam as he pitched down a steep grade, and then Jim heard
him say:

“That’s the way she said it, an’ we don’t know nothin’, Jim, nothin’.
But we do know that stranger things is happenin’ ever’ day than jes’
the spirit livin’ agin. What’s light? What’s heat? What’s love? What’s
that wireless talkin’ through the air but things to tell us how little
we know, how small our minds is an’ how easy it ’ud be to be true, an’
we not know how to explain it with our little standards.”

He threw a kiss at the vanishing hill of pines. “No, I’ll keep on
sayin’ it as she sed it, anyway, true or not: ‘I am the resurrection
an’ the life.’”


HO! EVERY ONE THAT THIRSTETH!

The corn crop up in the Bigbyville neighborhood is clean, the cotton
shows not a spear of grass. The potato field looks as clean and green
as a billiard cushion floor and the darkies are still, still hoeing.
All this was caused by a sermon old Wash preached there on foot-washing
day last month, a literal extract of which I got from the old man
himself:

“Brudderin’ an’ Sisterin’--You’ll find my text in de six chapter of
Noah’s pistols to de Gentiles. _Ho! every one dat thirsteth! Ho!_

“De commandments we get from de Bible am beyond de scrutiny of man, an’
we natchurly think dat when a man gets hot an’ thirsty de thing fur
him to do is to hunt de spring branch an’ quench his burnin’ lips. But
not so. Here it is sot down in black an’ white in de book ob books,
dat when you git thirsty, _jes’ keep on hoein’. Ho! every one dat
thirsteth! Ho!_ And dat is right; de Bible is allers right. Hoein’ is
good fur de limbs, good fur de wind, good fur de crap, an’ good fur de
soul. De sun am hot now, but de wind’ll be cold agin. De rays pour down
now, but de sleet’ll come bye an’ bye. Dese am de rays of drought an’
thirst, but ef you want to set back when de rains come, smoke yo’ pipe
an’ sing dat song--

  “Bile dat cabbage down
  For it ain’t gwine to rain no mo’--

jes’ take off yo’ coat, shed yo’ shirt, an’ foller de corn an’ tater
row, an’ ef you git thirsty don’t stop to drink, but jes’ keep on
a-hoein’!

“_Ho! everyone dat thirsteth! ho!_

“An’ ain’t dat de law an’ de sense? Whut you wanter stop an’ drink fur?
Won’t you jes’ get thirty agin? Keep on a-hoein’!

“What did old Noah do when de windows ob de heabens was opened an’ de
flood ob de great deep began to kiver de earth, an’ de fools got round
him an’ laughed an’ ax him whut he buildin’ dat ole ark for? He was
tired, an’ thirsty, an’ hot, but he kep’ on a-hoein’, for he knowed
he’d get water enough bye and bye. _Ho! every one dat thirsteth! ho!_

“What did Abraham do when dey got roun’ him an’ tried to stop him from
gwine to de Promis’ Lan’? He kept on a hoein’ for Jordan.

“Don’t let de flesh ob dis wurl’ fool you. Things ain’t whut dey
seem. Water looks mighty good, specially to Baptists, but whut we
Meferdists want to do is to keep on a hoein’. De wicked of Noah’s
day didn’t hoe any. Didn’t dey git water enough? De Egyptians didn’t
hoe enny, but follered de Israelites into de Red Sea. Didn’t dey get
water enough? Ole Jonah didn’t obey de Lord an’ hoe to de mark, an’ de
water swallowed him fust an’ de whale swallered ’im next. Let dat be a
warnin’ to you to stick to de tex’ of de Bible an’ de doctrine of de
church, an’ when you get thirsty keep on a-hoein’. It’s hard now, but
it’ll be sweet bye and bye. It’s hot now, but it’ll be cold bye and
bye. You git mighty thirsty an’ you think de taters ain’t never goin’
to come, but when de winter rains come, an’ de winds blow, an’ you sot
down round de big fiah wid de sweet brown ’possum an’ dem taters, you
work so hard fur to get in de heat, an’ sweat, an’ thirst ob summer,
den will de heart ob de faithful be glad, den will you shout an’ sing:

  “Ho! every one that thirsteth, ho!”

This last appeal was too much. The congregation arose in a body at the
words ’possum and potatoes and went off to hoe, leaving the old man
with no one to pass around the hat.


A RACE FOR LIFE.

I saw a race--a race for life, too--that interested me the other day
more than any that I have seen this year. It occurred in mid-air, in
a kingdom not our own; but the fresh air was sweet where the race for
life went on, and the fields were green beneath, and the brooks purled
below and the sun shone gloriously over all, and to the poor creature
who raced for his life I doubt not but he took it all in and life was
as sweet to him as it is to us.

It was a golden-winged butterfly, one of those beautiful creatures
that is more of heaven than of earth, more of the blossom than of the
brown heath, and it seemed cruel to me that this beautiful thing,
thrown off from the film of a rainbow and made with an organism so
spiritual that it lives on the nectar of flowers, dwells on the bosom
of a nodding lily and floats on the breath of a zephyr, must come under
the great selfish law of life and be forced to fight for its brief but
beautiful existence. Man must fight, we know--and all history, if it
lie not, is but a chronicle of battle, blood and death, in which the
survival of the fittest and the achievements of human destiny have been
gauged by the brains that were behind gunpowder, and the courage that
comes of God. Man, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes--it is a survival
merely--and “nature, red in tooth and claw,” has been demonstrated to
be more merciful than nature rotting in the decrepitude of age. But, O,
that this ethereal thing--half rainbow and rose, half light and lily
blossom, half child and cherubim--might have been spared!

And who were its enemies--two glorious mocking birds, that had sung
like spirits from an angel choir around my home all spring and
summer--that had reared their young in contentment and happiness and
should have had nothing against any of God’s creatures, whose life had
been a poem, whose breath a summer song--alas, that these should have
been its murderers! It almost makes me despair of the ethics of life. I
feel like saying to man: “Go, murder your fellow men--it is nature. Go,
rob, steal and plunder--it is law.”

And is it not law? In spite of the ethics of religion and dictates
of equity, is it not at last a question of one getting and the other
giving--of money, love--ay, even life?

Golden Wings was in my garden and he was content until that which
sustained his life gave out--food. He had sucked every flower--he
must go to pastures new. The distance to my neighbor’s garden was
some two hundred yards, and there was nothing but air between us.
He thought of it a long time--he hovered from flower to flower and
thought--of his mate, of life, of death. Had he been all spirit he
had stayed forever among the flowers. He had run no chance of death.
But he was half spirit and half life and that life was rebelling
and begging for food. He must go. It was life or death. He rose
reluctantly--frightened--straight up--every sense awake--every nerve
keyed--every eye on the lookout for an enemy--the spirit which had
never harmed even a flower, and which should have had no enemy. Up,
straight up, he arose--quivering, scared, frightened--then winged his
way across the blue ether in a flight, as it proved, for its life.

The mocking-bird is a fly catcher, but not an expert one. Compared
with the swallow, the marten, the crested fly-catcher, the expert king
bird, the wood pewee, and Phoebe, he is a poor imitation. But the
mocking-bird is a poet, and everything is grist that comes to a poet’s
mill--from the grasshopper on the ground to the butterfly in the air.

The male bird saw Golden Wings first and gave him the first heat for
his life. Up in the air he darted, circled and swooped. Poor Golden
Wings fled, turned, ducked, dived--and escaped. The poet dropped to
his twig in disgust, and his mate took up the race. Golden Wings saw
her coming and his heart bursted with fear. He fairly quivered in the
air. He knew not which way to turn. She darted, and all but caught
him. For a moment, in mid-air, I saw them whirling and twisting and
tumbling--poor Golden Wings panting and fluttering for a chance once
more for home and life, and the poetess for a morsel to eat. It ended
in the butterfly getting above the bird--which seemed always its
tactics--while the latter dropped down in disgust to her mate. Then
they both started after poor Golden Wings, and it looked as if his time
had come. But all the time he had been heading straight for the thick
trees beyond, where rested, perhaps, his distressed mate, waiting for
his return.

It was a terrible chase the two poets gave him--the tumbling, darting,
circling of the birds in fiendish delight, in maddened earnestness.
Their very wings were often so close that they fanned him about until
he looked like a speck of gold tissue paper hurled about by contrary
winds. Twice they got above him, dropped on him and--missed. Twice I
lost him altogether, and, except that I saw the birds fluttering and
darting in the air, I had thought he was lost. When I saw him again
he had gotten above his enemies and was safely pursuing his zig-zag,
frightened, graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the trees and life.

“Success to you, O, Golden Wings,” I said, “for already have you taught
me a lesson in life. Let us keep above our enemies, if we would be
safe--not beneath them, for there we are a prey to their dirty talons;
not on their level, for then we are no better than they; but above
them where they cannot reach us and where we may go on to our destiny
with only the sunlight around us and the stars above us.”

The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar maple.
They had evidently lost their tempers, and, between panting and hard
breathing, I could hear them quarreling: “It was you,” said the
wife--“you conceited thing--all your fault. I had him once if you had
let me alone.”

“O, you had him, you did--‘over the left.’ If your talents equaled
your tongue we’d be better off.” They screeched and shuffled about and
almost spat at each other. They were beaten, chagrined and mad, and
they took it out on each other.

And if you want to see the refinement of ill-temper, stir up two poets!

Golden Wings was safe. He was high in the air, his very flight was now
the flight of victory, his poise the poise of one who had won. Twenty
yards more he would drop down into the green trees where his mate,
perhaps, awaited him, and be safe.

I was about to hurrah with delight, when I saw a lightning bolt of red
and white drop from the jagged bark of the dead limb of a towering oak
in the midst of the forest and high above poor, weary, fluttering yet
happy Golden Wings. I paled at the thought, for I knew no butterfly
ever escaped him. Even Golden Wings recognized his doom and, paralyzed
with fear, stopped his flight in mid-air and, in a few yards of his
goal, and lay floating in the air in hopeless fear. And well he might,
for the red and white bolt was the red-headed woodpecker, not generally
known to be a fly-catcher, but an expert in it, nevertheless. Often had
I seen him poise above a luckless moth, drop like a plummet, and no
moth would be there. I despised him as a marauder, besides, for only
yesterday I’d seen him pounce on a helpless young humming-bird and rend
it as if it had been a worm.

Straight at poor Golden Wings he came. The race was up.

He performed his old tactics, darted above the butterfly, some two
yards higher in the air, gauged instinctively a plummet line from the
point of his own beak to Golden Wings and then drops with folded wings
like a ball of lead.

I forgot to say that I was out that morning with the twelve-gauge,
smokeless shells and one and a half ounces of No. 7 chilled, thinking I
might see a certain thieving crow that I had a grudge against.

Thoughts are lightning--words thunder, and when I caught the first
glimpse of the red-headed marauder of the air all this went through my
mind: “Nature is nature--tooth and claw. And yet there is a God who
says even when a butterfly shall fall. He makes our lives and marks out
our destiny. Sometimes amid injustice He calls Himself Retribution, and
then He has been known to raise up a man and a gun, invent smokeless
powder and deadly chilled shot, give accuracy of aim and, most
wonderful of all, the voice of a purpose to say that harm shall not
happen even to a butterfly.”

There was no smoke from the report and so I distinctly saw Golden Wings
drop joyfully among the green leaves. But a red-headed marauder lies in
the field where he fell.

And if some one who knows, will tell me why I happened to be there, why
I carried my gun that morning, why I fired, I will tell him who God is.


HIS CHANCE.

The summer day was nearly gone, and only a few clouds caught the gleam
of sunset in the west. A woman of thirty, with a sweet, sincere face,
came out of a cottage and walked to the little farm gate that opened
on the main road winding across the Iowa prairie. The cottage sat in a
small grove of trees, and farther off were neat outhouses, a stable and
dairy. Flowers bloomed in a little bed near the front gate, and several
hives of bees sat under cherry trees in the front yard. Everything
around the neat cottage, from the well-kept vines which climbed over
the porch to the orchard and fields of corn, clearly showed that Thrift
and Industry were the handmaidens that lived there.

The woman was not pretty, neither was she handsome, but her face was
of unusual intelligence and strength. Her hands showed work, and a few
gray hairs shone over her temple.

At the little gate she stood while the shadows grew darker around
her. There were chirpings of summer insects, and presently down the
walk stalked a huge St. Bernard, looking like a great bear in the
twilight. He seemed to think the woman had been out alone long enough,
and his very way of walking showed that he knew he was her protector.
He stalked up and thrust his big cold nose into her hand as it hung
listlessly by her side. She started, but closed it over his mouth with
a caress, saying:

“Rex, you are silly about me.”

A buggy came out of the gloaming down the road, and stopped at her
gate. The woman turned pale in the twilight, as she recognized
the middle-aged man who came toward her, holding out his hand:
“Jennie--I--well--it’s me!”

He would have opened the gate, but the dog growled savagely, and she
hooked the latch hastily, as she said:

“Ralph--why--why--I thought--but don’t try to come in--Rex--I could not
control him.”

She was so agitated she could not speak further. Her knees shook, and
she clung to the gate, half leaning.

“I have been back a week,” he said slowly. “You haven’t changed much,”
he added, eyeing her closely while she flushed under his gaze. “I never
expected to see you again.”

“No--no--don’t try to come in--Rex--Rex!”

The great dog had rushed at the gate as the man tried to open it again,
and she held her hand on the latch.

“He don’t seem to know your friends from your enemies,” said the man
with a cynical laugh.

“I think he does,” she said quietly, “better than I have ever known
them.”

He looked at her quickly. Then he tried to laugh.

“Why--Jennie--you know I haven’t seen you in so long.”

“I never expected to see you again. I was not looking for you now,” she
said.

“I never thought I’d ever come back, but the Klondike--well, a man pays
two dollars for every dollar’s worth of gold he finds there.”

“Tell me about yourself,” she said, still leaning on the gate, one knee
resting on the lower plank for support.

“Well, Jennie, after we had our little quarrel and you broke off with
me--”

“You are mistaken,” she said quietly. “You left, Hugh, without a
word--without telling me good-bye. There was nothing left to do but to
send you your ring.”

“We won’t quarrel again, now, Jennie. I have come back to you to tell
you--”

She had been looking closely in his face, and her heart beat wildly.
She had seen it all--the bravado way, the flushed recklessness, the
sign everywhere of dissipation, of modesty gone, of truth, of the old
manhood.

“Not that,” she said, quickly interrupting him, “but of yourself. Tell
me where you have been and--and what doing.”

He laughed coldly.

“Well, after we split up I went West, then to the Klondike. But it was
a nasty life. As I said, I have made nothing, and I hoped all the time
to make a fortune and bring it back to you, Jennie.”

“Was it true--that I heard--the trouble?”

“Why, yes, I did get to drinking too much, and got into trouble--but
the papers had it overdrawn. I returned him his money. Now I have come
back to you--to tell you I still--”

“You need not tell it,” she said quickly. “You could tell nothing
I would believe now. You are not the man you were before you left,
and never will be. Then you were weak, but honest and sober. Now
you are weak, but dishonest and a drinker. And you must not come
in--no--no--you are not the Hugh I once knew and loved.”

She sobbed in a quick way as she said it, but went on quietly:

“After you left you know mother died, then father, and I was left
alone. Our little farm--well, I’ve paid off the mortgage. It was hard
work, but the five years have passed so quickly. They always do when
one works for love. I changed the old-fashion farming ways. I planted
orchards and raised bees. I diversified my crops. I--well--” she
laughed hopefully for the first time--a laugh which brought a pang to
his heart, for it was the old laugh. “I am not yet started in that, for
I am so enthusiastic a farmer and poultry raiser and stock woman that
I’ll talk shop all night if you let me. Anyway, they say I keep posted
and up with the times, and I have time, too, for good reading.

“Hugh,” she said quickly, after awhile, “really I have thought of you
often, but I will not deceive you. You have gone out of my life. I
have heard enough--before you came--heard it, seen enough. In all our
lives, our romances I mean, it is imagination that counts more than
the reality. Common sense and farm work,” she said, “will cure it, and
I--think--I know I am happier than if I were now married to you--to you
as you are, Hugh,” she added more tenderly.

“But--but, Jennie, I’ll change; give me a chance.”

“Why, Hugh, that is what you had, and I mine. I have watched nature
since I’ve been a farmer, and I notice she never gives but one chance.
There are too many of her children that must have a chance.”

He turned with a rough laugh and oath and walked off.

“I’ve come home jus’ to make a fool of myself,” she heard him say with
another oath.

But she did not pale even. She turned and walked in, the dog following
her.

“I am so glad I saw him anyway,” she said, patting the dog’s head.
“Now, I can forget him so easily. Oh, Rex, life--life--how strange it
is, but we all have one chance. Oh, I am so glad I had mine, and it has
given me this sweet home and you. For it were better to love a dog that
is honest and true than a man who it not.”


BLUE JOHN.

A Mississippi planter, and a gentleman of the old school, sends me
this one from a little town in the Delta:

“My dear Trotwood, do you know what it is to get out of whisky
Christmas morning in a little one-horse Mississippi town where you have
to put a darkey on a mule and wait until he rides five miles through
the mud before you can get your Christmas toddy? Well, I hope you never
may, for that thing happened to me last Christmas.

“The truth is, there was no need why we should have been out of the red
ingredient of Christmas jollity, for when we turned in the night before
we had a fine, big jug of it. But the Major was there, and the Colonel
and the Doctor, and somehow, before we knew it, it was gone.

“I am a bachelor, you know, on a big Mississippi cotton farm, and these
were my guests and we went to bed with our boots on. About daylight
Christmas morning we all woke up with one impulse and an awful thirst.

“The Doctor got to the jug first, and we heard him growl:

“‘What infernal hog drank all this whisky last night?’

“This stirred up the Colonel, and he sat up in bed and remarked, with
his usual emphasis:

“‘That licker gone a’ready? Christmas mornin’, too?’

“By this time we were all investigating it, and some of the talk
indulged in concerning the man who did it ought to have made him feel
anything but white.

“By this time we would have given a dollar each for a drink. The
nearest whisky was five miles away, where Ikey Rosenstein, a little
Mississippi Jew, kept a cross-roads grocery. It was raining, and cold,
too, but there was nothing to do but to call Blue John and send him on
old Kit, the pacing mule, for a new jug of it.

“‘Blue John,’ I said, when he poked his head in the door, ‘you’ll find
my bridle and saddle hanging up in the carriage house. Saddle old Kit
and take this jug up to old Ikey’s and bring it back full, p. d. q.’

“‘Yassah, Boss.’

“‘Blue John,’ yelled the Doctor, ‘don’t let old Kit throw off on us
this heat and we’ll give you first drink.’

“‘Yassah, Boss.’

“‘And, Blue John,’ said the Major, as he started off, ‘remember it’s
Christmas, old man, and get about in a hurry. Here’s a quarter to help
you along,’ he said, tossing it across the bed.

“‘Yassah, Boss, yassah.’

“We all laid down again to wait for Blue John.

“‘Boys,’ said the Colonel, after ten minutes of thirst, ‘I’ll bet I can
trace every step that old darkey takes. Let’s see, now: He’s got to the
barn door, hasn’t he? Now he has found the bridle and has caught old
Kit. Now the saddle goes on and he is mounting.

“‘No, he ain’t quite up in the saddle yet,’ chimed in the Doctor. ‘He
has stopped to take a chew of twist tobacco and spit on his hands.’

“‘That’s a fact, Doc, but he’s up now, isn’t he?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Now he’s pacing down to the big gate. He’s opening it----’

“‘No,’ put in again the Doctor, ‘he got down off of old Kit and opened
it. Hang the old fool, but isn’t he a slow one?’

“‘Well, he’s going up the road now, ain’t he?’ said the Colonel.

“‘Yes, and he’s got to the big swamp. He’s creeping through it. Dad
gast, but ain’t it muddy there? Gehew, but I am thirsty,’ broke in the
Doctor.

“Ten minutes later he added joyfully: ‘Well, he’s out of the swamp, and
he has spurred old Kit into a gallop, thinking of that drink. Oh, old
Blue John is a good one!’

“‘He’s at the three-mile post now,’ said the Major, twenty minutes
later. ‘Lord, but that old mule can hump when he tries!’

“We all smiled in satisfaction.

“‘Where is he now, Doc?’ said the Colonel, after it had seemed an hour
of silence.

“‘At old Ikey’s, boys. See, he’s handing old Ikey the jug. Now old Ikey
is fillin’ it.’

“‘From what barrel?’ asked the Major, excitedly.

“‘Lincoln County, Tennessee.’

“We all grunted our assent in chorus.

“‘He’s started home now,’ went on the Colonel, ‘and the way that mule
can pace! Blue John is settin’ up in that saddle, holdin’ that jug
under one arm and a-larrupin’ old Kit every yard. Scott, but ain’t he
comin’!’

“‘He’s got to the swamp again, Doc,’ said the Major, after twenty
minutes had passed. ‘He’ll get here directly.’

“‘Boys, he’s reached the big gate already. I hear him coming,’ said
the Colonel, excitedly.

“Sure enough, we heard him. There was no mistake--Blue John was now
coming down the hall.

“‘Open the door and let him in quick!’ said the Major, ‘By gum! but
ain’t he and that old mule a pair of buds?’

“By this time we had all jumped out of bed and were hunting for
tumblers and sugar. Blue John poked his head in the door.

“‘Boss,’ said Blue John.

“‘Come in, Blue John!’ cried the Major. ‘Fetch it right in. You’re a
good old man. Colonel, lend me your spoon a minute.’

“‘Boss, whar--whar----’ stammered Blue John.

“‘Come in, Blue John!’ cried the Doctor, ‘come right in.’”

“‘_Boss, whar de debbil you say you put dat bridle in de kerridge
house? I been huntin’ fur it fur er hour an’ I can’t find it ter sabe
my life._’”


A DRUNKEN WOMAN.

I saw in a neighboring city not long ago a drunken woman. She was in
a fashionable hotel and stood beside a post in the little gallery
that ran around the court. She was not three feet above our heads,
was dressed in the height of fashion, wore a hat that looked like a
huge poppy and altogether she was not unlike a beautiful tiger lily
that seemed about to fall over into our arms. Instantly that wave of
romance and reverence as natural to man, when he sees beauty clothed
in purity, as the tides that do follow the midnight moon, swept over
me. Her form was faultless, her gown perfect, her face beautiful.

At least I thought so until I looked up and happened to catch her eye.
She smiled the sensual smile of a wood-nymph and leered as disgustingly
as ever Bacchus through a glass of old Falerian. In a moment it all
changed. Her face was no longer beautiful, but hard and cruel. Her form
was made--her gown the gaudy thing of a demi-monde.

I blushed when she singled me out and leered, and ducked my head, for
fear someone had seen me. But I soon saw that she leered at all alike
and knew no difference between a man and men.

For a half hour she stood there, scarce able to cling to the post she
stood by, the observed of every man in the court, the disgusting moral
that pointed the old story of the fallen angel.

It is bad enough to see a drunken man. Nothing so quickly robs goodness
of its sweetness, genius of its charm, greatness of its colossal form,
than to behold it drunk. There are some great men I know who, if I ever
saw them drunk, never again would I believe they were great. They say
Poe was a drunkard. I cannot imagine it. And S. S. Prentiss--I cannot
believe it. I cannot think of DeQuincy and Coleridge as opium eaters,
Byron and Burns as whisky-heads. If I did I could never again read
anything they wrote. For of all things that levels man to the beasts
and makes knowledge a strumpet and genius a bawdy, it is the maudlin
rottenness of a plain old drunk.

Whisky and not death is the greatest leveler with the dirt.

But to see a drunken woman--Good God! Nature is partial to a man. She
has made some laws for him she has not made for woman. She has filled
him with passion and strength and capacity for work and great things.
She overlooks it, perhaps, when he steps aside, under the burning law
she has forced on him for reproduction, and she sighs and smiles when
he drowns his strenuousness now and then in the forgetfulness of the
cup. He may do all that, and if his wife be pure still may he sire sons
who will be brave and honest, and daughters who will be pure and noble.

But let the woman be weak and fall, and see how quickly nature revenges
herself for the desecration of her unwritten law by throwing back on
humanity sons who are thieves and daughters who are impure. This is an
unwritten law, but it proves that the mother is the great moral force
of the world. Let her violate it and the punishment comes quickly on
the race.

As I looked at this woman I could not help thinking: “I hope, as one
who, interested in stock, is more interested in the human race, that
you carry in your life that penalty of impureness--barrenness. For it
were better for mankind that such as you should never be mothers, to
fill prison pens with thieves and forgers and bawdy houses with painted
Magdalenes. Indeed, it is up to you to pass off the stage of life and
cease to encumber an earth on which not one single womanly law is left
you to fill. The honest matron of the noble horse brings forth yearly
and within the sacred laws of nature an animal that is the pride of
man and the glory of his kind. The gentle mother of the dairy is an
inspiration and a blessing to the earth. The very brood sow of the pen
suckles her hungry brood begot in honorable wedlock. But you, O, being
of a higher world, O breeder of immortal beings, made in the image of
God and endowed with the reason of the angels, you from whom nature
expects so much, you fall below all of these and brand yourself the
harlot of humanity!”

       *       *       *       *       *

We want a good live agent in every town in the United States for
“Trotwood’s Monthly.” Write for terms to agents. Address Trotwood
Publishing Company, Nashville, Tenn.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Depravity is not so much a creature of inheritance as of environment._




Geers and Walter Direct


The most talked-of pacer in the light harness world to-day is Walter
Direct. The greatest living reinsman is Ed F. Geers, his breeder, joint
owner, trainer and driver. The object of this sketch is to tell the
story of these two--the one a horse, the other a man. For when it is
all sifted down at last, it will be found that there are many parallel
lines between a great race horse and a great driver. Each to succeed
must possess certain qualities in common which make for success.

[Illustration: ED GEERS The silent man from Tennessee.]

And first, each must be born for greatness. This may seem strange to
the uninitiated, but no man knows the truth of it more than he who has
spent his life in breeding great horses and in studying great men. It
is pedigree that counts in man and horse, and by pedigree I do not
mean blood lines only, though they count more in the life of the lower
animal, the horse, than in the life of the higher animal, the man.
Blood lines alone will not carry a man through the battle of life and
bring him out victor at the end. For there are two pedigrees in every
man which count for greatness or weakness in him. One is the pedigree
of his body, the other is the pedigree of his soul. With horse, the
pedigree of body counts most. With man, the soul. For it is that which
counts for honesty, for singleness of purpose, for truthfulness, for
silence, for thought, for right living, for that deathless spirit which
never says die. In victory, calm; in defeat, silent, but saying proudly:

  “Out of the darkness which surrounds me,
    Black as the pit from pole to pole,
  I thank whatever gods there be
    For my unconquerable soul.”

Unfortunately for man--outside of the pygmies which some call kings--he
keeps no record of his pedigree. This is wrong, for man should at least
take as much interest in his own pedigree as he does in his horses’ or
his dogs’. And so, now and then, a master, in his craft, comes out of
the great mass of humanity, with no extended pedigree but the product
of earnest and honest and strong God-fearing fathers and mothers
of many, many centuries. The child may not know them but for one
generation, but they are all there--there in his blood and his brain
and his brawn.

And so he is born honest and earnest and strong. Such is Ed Geers--a
man who has come up from the common people. Common people of a century
ago, but O, how uncommon now in these days of trusts and steals and
grinding graft! In these days, when a millionaire is a poor man, these
days of the Equitable, these days of Rockefeller, these days of the
cursed trusts and tariff and the unspeakable graft-days when man is
nothing and money all. God of our fathers, give us back again the days
of the honest common people!

From such source comes Shakespeare, whose genius was also the product
of honesty, of brawn, of rest. Shakespeare, who has written and left
nothing else to be said! From such a source came James Knox, and Andrew
Jackson, and John Wesley, and Abraham Lincoln--these and every other
great man whose silent statues now stand as the mile-posts of human
progress, each marking an era in the epoch of the thing God made him
for.

And so, as I said, from such a source came Geers, the honest man
and the master reinsman of his age. And so, as I said, counting
the recorded pedigree, Walter Direct has it over Geers, for man,
who foolishly lets his own pedigree slip, has been very careful in
preserving that of his horse. Strange, isn’t it? And yet we are all
doing it. Ah, well, perhaps it is best for many of us that it is so.
For, as we say of the horse, in the fifth generation each one of us
would have to count for sixty-two fathers and mothers, landing us back
two hundred years ago in Scotland and Ireland, and out of that number,
in that age and country, fortunate is he who was not sent up for
poaching, for cattle-lifting, for breaking heads and, perhaps--locks!

Walter’s pedigree is blue-blooded. His owners, Chaffin & Gears, saw to
that. We can make our horse’s pedigree better than we can make our
own--for that is made for us, and often, in the making, when two warm
youngsters fall in love and decide to marry, nothing but the grace of
God, or the breaking of a midnight ladder, has saved us.

In _The Horse Review_ of 1900, when Walter Direct was then a suckling
at his mother’s heels, I wrote a description of him and predicted from
his blood lines that one day he would be the greatest of pacers. It
sounds prophetic now, but I rise hastily to disclaim it. Any horseman
posted in the pedigree and achievement of his sire and dam, and of all
his bluelines, would naturally have said the same thing. His sire,
Direct Hal, was the greatest horse of his day. His name and career are
household words in horsedom and will not be extended in this article.
But later on, in “The History of the Hals,” now running as a serial in
this Monthly, a chapter will be devoted to him in its proper place. It
is enough here to say that he was unbeaten and that his sire, Direct,
before him, was the greatest pacing stallion of his day, and that
beyond that lies the great Director, Dictator and Hambletonian 10--an
unbroken line of greatness--and in a horse greatness means gameness,
soundness, honesty, speed.

Isn’t that enough to give us a tip on the breeding of boys and girls?

Walter’s dam is a homely little mare called Ella Brown, with a record
of 2:11-1/4, made in 1893, to high-wheel sulky. With the sulky of
to-day it would have been 2:05. Never have I known a gamer, sweeter
little mare than Ella Brown, and well do I remember when she first came
out, and though suffering acutely, all through her racing career with
nervicular disease of the foot, often so lame that she could scarcely
score down for the word, yet, when she was in the fight, and the
clatter and hot breath of her competitors sounded the warning in her
ears, she would forget her lameness and her soreness and race like the
game little thing she was.

And, like all other great mares, the pedigree of Ella Brown was no
accident. She was sired by Prince Pulaski, Jr., and he by old Prince
Pulaski, the sire of the old queen, Mattie Hunter, 2:12-3/4. The dam
of Ella Brown has only lately been correctly established. She was by
Evans’ Joe Bowers, son of Joe Bowers 2:32, son of Traveler. Her second
dam was by Tom Hal, sire of Brown Hal, and her third dam was said
to be by Brooks, sire of Bonesetter 2:19. Every horseman knows what
these mean. Mated with Direct Hal, and hence doubled in strength and
greatness, and behold Walter Direct, champion green pacer of the year.

This is the pedigree of Edward Geers--this is the pedigree of Walter.
Both honest.

Geers’ honesty is proverbial. His surname is “Honest Ed Geers, the
Silent Man of Tennessee.” Did you ever notice how naturally greatness
and silence go together? Let that greatest of all great men,
Shakespeare, tell it:

  Silence oft of pure innocence
  Persuades when speaking fails.

There are many stories told of the honesty of Ed Geers. It must be
remembered that in the life he has led, the terrible, bruising,
fighting battles of the turf, when fame and fortune often hang on the
wire for which hundreds of others are driving as well as he, that he
is often sorely and terribly tempted. Men are human at most, and in a
fight for money, for fame, for the joy of victory, all combined in one
race, all the great stakes of life, is it a wonder that millionaire
horsemen have tried to buy him, that rich breeders have tried to bribe
him, greedy owners corner him and tricksters and knaves foul him? Think
of twenty-five years of this and then coming out without a stain on his
name, a breath of suspicion and the pseudonum of Honest Ed Geers--won,
too, in the light of the fiercest conflict.

Walter is game, so is Geers. In the many years in which the latter has
been in the sulky he has met with accidents which, if they failed to
break his neck, would have broken the heart of an ordinary man.

All horsemen will recall the bad accident he had with Searchlight and
the one that sent him to the hospital at Memphis a few years ago, with
a broken ankle. But a few weeks ago he was in a bad mix-up at Buffalo,
when King Direct’s foot went into the sulky wheel of the contending
horse. The Nestor of the turf was unconscious when picked up, but
quickly revived and dryly remarked, “Now, don’t make a hurrah of this
thing and scare everybody to death for nothing.” That remark is an
index of his character. He hates a hurrah. The plumage of the peacock
has never become the pit game trimmed for the fight. He is loyal to
his friends, modest, quiet, honest, and with reverence for all that is
sacred and good. He is one of the large men of his calling.

The training of Walter Direct has been in keeping with Mr. Geers’
theory that colts should be trained early but not hard. From the May
night when he was foaled in a terrific thunderstorm, so fierce that
Old Wash, who acted as his midwife, was scarcely able to keep him from
drowning, until to-day, he has had the best of attention. His dam was
fed grain during the nursing period, and Walter soon learned to eat it
with her. He was broken to halter as a weanling, and the next spring,
Negley, the colored caretaker, broke him to harness, with occasional
jogs. The fall after he was a two-year-old he was sent to Memphis to
Geers and given his first real lessons, and so trained each winter,
with joggings in the summer by Negley at Columbia. Mr. Geers’ rule is
to keep them feeling good with a brush now and then for speed. He has
a horror of overworking colts. Indeed, his stable is never asked to go
the fast heats that many other owners delight in before being shipped
to the races. He saves their speed and vital force for the time when
it is needed most. In the spring when Walter was a three-year-old he
was asked to go a fast mile in 2:14, and was sent to Columbia to be
jogged and turned out. The next spring he paced his mile in 2:08-3/4,
when he was sent back home again. On September 15, 1904 he was sent
again to Mr. Geers and to fame.

       *       *       *       *       *

LORD ULLIN’S DAUGHTER.

(Revised by Trotwood and brought up to date.)

  A chieftain to the Highland bound
    Would steal Lord Ullin’s daughter;
  He bought a new machine in town--
    A thing he hadn’t auto.

  He sought the castle by the sea
    And stopped behind the kitchen;
  “This beats a pony bad,” said he,
    “Because it don’t need hitchin’.”

  He got the girl and started out
    By pullin’ of a lever,
  And then that auto turned about--
    It was a gay deceiver.

  It snorted, backed, went round and round,
    Broke belly-band and breechin’,
  Reared up and kicked--then, with a bound,
    It started through the kitchen.

  In there was Ullin fast asleep,
    His stomach full of mutton;
  That auto knocked him in a heap
    It broke his only button.

  “O, haste, thee--haste!” the Lady cries,
    “Tho’ steams around me gather,
  I’ll meet the ragings of the skies
    But not a naked Father.”

  “Aha--farewell--and now we’ll go,”
    Said Laddy, smiling grimly;
  He tried to head her for the door--
    She started for the chimney.

  “Come back--come back!” old Ullin cries,
    “Not up there--that’s my larder;
  You’ll ruin my meat and pies--
    Come back an’ take my darter.”

  By this the thing grew loud of pace,
    Its waterworks were shrieking;
  It started for the old staircase,
    While Ullin was a-speaking.

  It met Mrs. Ullin coming down--
    She’d tucked the kids to cover;
  She wore her night-cap and her gown--
    She never wore another!

  It buzzed amid the trundle beds,
    Ran over lairds and lasses,
  Went through the window, down the sheds,
    And waked up all the asses.

  It chased the hound-pups round the yard,
    Ran over kairn and cattle;
  The clans turned out with tunics barr’d,
    And pibrocks, armed for battle.

  The girl had fainted, sore dismayed,
    Twice had it turned her over:
  One lovely arm was stretched for aid,
    And one was round her lover.

  Up spake a hardy Highland wight--
    (A rope was round him, ready):
  “Just watch me rope her hind leg tight
    And stop her, staunch and steady!”

  He threw and caught her fast and fair,
    It set their blood to fighting--
  They saw him sailing through the air,
    A tail he was--and kiting!

  Now Ullin had a mother-in-law,
    A saint she was from Zion;
  Her lungs were rubber, cheeks were bra’,
    Her body--well, SCRAP iron!

  She waked and heard the dreadful din,
    Ran down, the thing to worst it;
  It struck her, knocked its inwards in,
   It wheezed and groaned--and burst it!

  They slew poor Laddy where he sat
    With blunderbuss and bullit;
  “’Tis not,” said Ullin, “’cause the brat
    Was monkeyin’ with my pullit,

  “But comin’ here in this vile car
    To run off with my darter,
  An’ not like neighbor Lochinvar,
    On hoss-flesh, as he orter.”

  --JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Humor is a great thing, but it has never yet won a battle, built a
city or bred a horse._




The Meaning of Sorrow


BY REV. W. D. CAPERS, RECTOR ST. PETER’S CHURCH, COLUMBIA, TENN.

“Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now have I kept Thy word.”
(Ps. 119: 67.)

From one point of view there is no mystery so impenetrable as that
involved in the suffering and sorrow which exists in every department
and sphere of life. The suffering of humanity, the fact that “the world
groaneth and travaileth in pain until now” presented to the sensitive
mind of Dr. John Hall the supreme difficulty with which he struggled
during a great part of his remarkable ministry, until courage, faith
and experience taught him to understand and to recognize suffering
as having its mission in life and in the development of character,
just as happiness has its place, each acting as one of the two great
interpreters of moral and spiritual development. It is impossible to
have a creed or to form an adequate philosophy of life and overlook
the really essential and universal place suffering, in one form or
another, occupies therein. Just try and think, if you can, of a world
in which there is no suffering, no sorrow, no pain; a world in which
there are no tears, no bitterness, no woe. The thing is unthinkable,
it is simply inconceivable, and as a condition of life, utterly and
eternally impossible. Why? Because pleasure and pain are relative.
Suffering and joy face each other in a blessed contrast. There has to
be a standard of comparison by which we are to make the proper estimate
of these things, otherwise we would be unable to distinguish between
them; otherwise happiness would have no reality to it, no vitality
in it, and neither strength nor power of growth, while life would be
without an essential variety of emotions, and therefore necessarily
become “stale, flat and unprofitable” indeed. A remarkable description
of hell’s severest punishment, though very fanciful, is that, wherein
the victims are made to do that which they most loved to do here in
this life, incessantly, continuously and strenuously. The suggestion
to my mind is very significant and teaches that the most tortuous and
horrible suffering is just that which comes through uninterrupted
monotony. To dance your life away, to drink your life away, to play and
fritter your life away in purposeless amusement and never to suffer a
reverse or be conscious of a struggle, never to know a pang of pain
or experience a momentary disappointment, may seem to those who have
just sipped an occasional drop from the cup of pleasure and mirth an
enviable existence, a consummation in life devoutly to be wished. But
to dance or play or laugh or sing through endless eons of time and to
experience not one inspiring struggle which brings moral and spiritual
strengthening, to have to live through eternity would be misery indeed.
Suffering then, in the first place, heightens and intensifies our joys,
it helps develop the power of enjoyment, and it makes a larger and a
more real happiness possible. To illustrate: There was unspeakable joy
in the home of the prodigal, as the aged father rushed out to meet and
greet his wayward boy, for to the old man his son had been dead, and
behold he was alive again, he had been lost and was found. It was the
suffering of the separation which alone made possible the intense and
glorified happiness of their reunion. And how often it happens that
not only are “troubled times praying times,” but that “man’s extremity
is God’s opportunity.” Thus suffering often brings a man to his senses
and makes him conscious of his dependence upon God. As we read, it was
only when the prodigal “came to himself” that he concluded to arise
and go to his father, and we must conclude that it was the suffering,
sorrow and bitterness of privation and disappointed hopes that drove
him to a realization of his true condition, and in the end brought
to him a real and lasting happiness. In this and in similar acts of
conduct history never fails to repeat itself in every age, in every
epoch, in every generation, as well as yearly, daily and hourly in the
life of individuals and of nations. Opulence, ease, prosperity and an
unwholesome peace have repeatedly rushed peoples and principalities to
a shameful and untimely ruin, wherein men have lost their reason and
nations drunk with a sense of power have reeled and staggered to and
fro like a drunken man and then lay prostrate in the dust. In support
of this I appeal to history. In support of this Mr. Kipling appeals to
history when in his recessional poem he said:

  “Far called our navies melt away--
    On dune and headland sinks the fire--
  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
    Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
  Judge of the nations, spare us yet
  Lest we forget--lest we forget.”

Suffering then, often serves to give us a fuller, freer, wiser and
wider view of life. It was only when through suffering that the
prodigal “came to himself,” and when he received this self-revelation,
then he “arose and went to his father,” and in like manner when man
“comes to himself” he goes to God. But mark you, self-revelation seldom
if ever comes to one while sailing the seas of glory and sounding all
the depths and shoals of mere worldly splendor and prosperity. “Before
I was afflicted I went astray, but now I have kept my word,” said
the Psalmist, and when Job came to himself through the trial of his
faith and patience, he ceased to question the ways of Providence, he
reverently placed his hand upon his mouth and would “speak no further,”
for fear he now no longer knew God “by the hearing of the ear,” but by
the “seeing of the eye,” and he went to his knees in supplication, “and
the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends.”

Again, we are to notice that suffering brings us courage and broadens
and deepens and intensifies our sympathies. “Pity makes the whole world
akin,” and so quickens our consciousness of brotherliness. “At sea when
the ship is in great peril the passengers crowd together, not because
they can escape peril by facing it in company, but because they can
gain courage by companionship. The sense of human kinship grows fresh
and keen when men stand together in the face of a common danger.” It
is therefore through suffering that men gain courage through a vivid
realization of the brotherhood of man and the solidarity of the race.
It often is as Dr. Mabie has said: “Through sorrowful ways men have
climbed to the heights from which they now look into the heavens and
over the landscape of life.”

And this brings us to our final thought which is that suffering in some
of its manifold forms gives that variety to life which is essential to
the proper development of all the faculties of heart, soul, mind and
body. By way of illustration, let us suppose that you could take from
the public and private libraries of the world every book that contained
a poem, a reference or a treatise touching the theme of sorrow, and
what a dull, dead, gloomy monotony of uninspired literature would
remain, while, in rather figurative language, the world itself could
not contain the books thus mutilated and cast away. Apply the same
test to art, and the galleries of the world would be destroyed, miles
upon miles of bare walls would greet us at every turn as we made our
heart-sick pilgrimage from gallery to gallery. Apply the same test to
music, and you will never again hear the singing of a song with genius
and power in it strong enough to stir the heart’s deepest emotions or
to cause the soul to glow with a conscious ecstacy of faith and hope
and the brain to burn with the fire of a high and holy resolution.
The organ’s rich peal, the ring of stringed instruments, the wailing
of the lute would lose the voice of melody, while “The Marseillaise,”
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Dixie Land” and similar martial airs would
never have found voice to speak for patriotic devotion or to chant the
glory of a martyrdom for home or for country, had not the spirit of
sacrifice and suffering pervaded them and given to them immortality.

No, suffering is a vital part and condition of life, and from the
right use of it we gather strength and grow beautiful in moral and
spiritual stature, while we gain the only happiness that maintains and
has power to bless mankind, happiness which is the child of conscious
strength acquired on the battlefield of conflict and in the vale of
tears. How then are you going to use the sorrows, the afflictions, the
disappointments and the trials that must come inevitably into your
life? The late Maltby Babcock has a fine passage in this connection:
“Byron eagerly coveted a place among the immortals, yet accepted
his club feet with cursings and bitterness; while St. Paul accepted
his ‘thorn in the flesh’ with sweetness and was thereby exalted and
transfigured. The poet wishes to become a hero for the public while
privately tasting of the sweets of profligacy. Sinning against his
finer feelings his art steadily declines, until at thirty-five it has
passed into the sear and yellow leaf.” Let us strive to emulate the
example of St. Paul, and when having no power to expel from our life
that which brings pain and suffering, let us endeavor to accept such
sorrow as an opportunity to develop character, and thereby be exalted
and made strong, remembering always that since “The Man of Sorrows”
hung upon the cross, transfigured sorrow is that which has blessed
humanity most, and brought men nearest to the heart and mind of the
Master. And train yourself to believe that.

  “Sometime, when all life’s lessons have been learned,
    And sun and stars forevermore have set,
  The things which one weak judgment here has spurned,
    The things o’er which we grieved, with lashes wet,
  Will flash before us out of life’s dark night,
    As stars shine best in deepest tints of blue;
  And we shall see how all God’s plans were right,
    And that which seemed reproof was love most true.”

       *       *       *       *       *

OUR STAR

(In memory of Mrs. Annie Horne Fry, who died August 13, 1905.)

  Sunset and Sorrow’s tide,
      Over the bar--
  Sunset, and daylight died
      Seeing a Star.

  Twilight, and Hope had fled,
      Fled from afar.
  Twilight, and Hope lay dead,
      Holding a Star.

  Midnight and mourning loud
      Cometh to mar.
  Midnight, yet o’er her shroud
      Shineth the Star.

  Morning, and from the mist--
      Sweet Avatar--
  Hope-crowned and Sorrow-kissed
      Standeth our Star.

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

       *       *       *       *       *

=TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY= Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.

TROTWOOD PUBLISHING COMPANY, Nashville, Tenn.

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE, Editor-in-Chief.

  E. E. SWEETLAND Business Manager

  GEO. E. McKENNON President
  JOHN W. FRY Vice-President
  EUGENE ANDERSON Treas.
  WOOTEN MOORE Sec’y.

=TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION=: One Year, $1.00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
Advertising Rates on application.

NASHVILLE, TENN. OCTOBER, 1905.




With Trotwood


There are nearly a fourth of a thousand farm papers in the United
States, all bent on teaching the farmers how to attend to their own
business. Some of these papers are good, many are bad and the others
are awful. The good ones may be had for a dollar and the others for the
asking. Looking the literary field over, everybody seems to be entitled
to something good but the farmer. From the roasts and broils of the
intellectual feasts of to-day he will get the leavings, next week, in
the shape of a stale hash, served on cheap paper, flanked with guessing
contests and patent medicine advertisements and surrounded by the
green, green cresses of the same old thing.

And yet a large and most respectable majority of the people of these
United States are farmers or interested in the soil. Their daily needs
include all the things the man in the city needs and much more, for
the man in the city does not plow, neither does he reap nor sow. These
people of the soil are progressive to the extent of their chances,
honest, and seekers of the truth and better ways, lovers of the good
in fiction and in fact. They constitute about seventy per cent of our
population and commit about two per cent of our crime. Why should not
they have a literature? Why should not a magazine laid around the soil,
come into their homes, as it comes into the homes of the dwellers in
the strenuous city, not to teach them their business but to help to
amuse, to interest, to uplift?

This is the object of Trotwood’s Monthly. If it does not tell you
when to plant your beans and when to eat your potatoes, it hopes to
give you a literature that will help you to be satisfied with your
diet of potatoes and your burden of beans. For in truth, the editor
of Trotwood’s Monthly does not know all about potatoes nor beans nor
corn. Indeed, he is willing to admit that any good farmer in all this
country who knows his business knows more about it than the editor of
Trotwood’s Monthly. For his business in life is literature. He has
made it his profession, as the farmer or stockman has made farming and
stock-raising his, and he has toiled at it through years in the heat of
the noonday sun and often--often--while the world around him slept, by
the light of a sleepless lamp. He will not try to tell you, therefore,
of the things he knows but little about, neither will he attempt to
carry intellectual coals to a new castle of newly mown hay. He will
not attempt the impossible and the ridiculous; but if, in looking over
his handiwork month after month, you find something to make you forget
for awhile the burdens and problems of life; if through his magazine
you learn to realize the unseen sweetness and independence of the life
of him who claims kindred with the soil; if you are shown nature with
truer eye, and learn to love her and all that is hers; if you catch,
now and then, a spark of that finer spirit that burns so brightly in
true literature, lighting the lamp of ambition in your boy or girl, and
carrying you for a moment from the world of soil to the world of soul;
if something in it uplifts you, and something amuses you and something
in the special features by experts in the classes, who know, instructs
and helps you, then you may know that Trotwood’s Monthly has done for
you what it started out to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

Trotwood’s Monthly will, each issue, contain special expert articles
on subjects relating to its scope. There are four in this issue,
and we have reason to be proud of all of them. This is an age of
concentration, of specialization. It is the man who concentrates that
accomplishes. Knowledge to-day is so vast and covers so great a scope
that Solomon’s wisdom would scarcely attract attention unless the
saffron press wrote him with pictures of his wives, and that might make
some think he was not wise at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

LINES TO AN AUTOMOBILE.

  Break, break, break,
    Some other man’s face with glee,
  Or shatter his collar-bone if you will,
    But, pray, don’t run over me!

  O, woe is the farmer’s boy
    As he shouts with his sister at play.
  But the chauffeur darts from a cloud of dust,
    And carries a leg away.

  O, woe is the man who drives
    Where the automobile sweeps;
  His horse butts into the wayside wall
    And smashes the cart for keeps.

  And the big machine goes on,
    A-kiting over the hill,
  But, O, for the touch of a vanished hand
    And the sound of a voice that is still.

  Break, break, break,
    Whate’er in your path you see,
  But an arm and an ear and a horse that is dead
    Will never come back to me.

  --From a Horseman.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is the page where all of those who wish to, or who have a message
to tell, may come in and talk with Trotwood. Do not be backward--you
are welcome. But be sure that what you write shall be of general
interest to our readers. Remember that they are paying for the Monthly
to be interested and instructed. So come in, but come in with something
to say, something that will help others.

       *       *       *       *       *

For, indeed, Trotwood is optimistic. He believes in men and women; he
has faith in humanity. He would have men look up, not down; forward,
not backward. He is too busy doing to garner doubt and discouragement,
those twins which come chiefly from idleness and unclear thinking.

       *       *       *       *       *

Therefore, think clearly and live purely. For one depends upon the
other. Believe in the men and women around you and they will soon begin
to believe in themselves. Get into the habit of thinking and speaking
kindly, for character as well as life is made up of habits. Believe in
humanity. Try to be patient with fools. It is the most difficult of all
things to do. Believe in humanity. Sometimes you will get a jolt, but
when you come to weigh your own life, you will find that, taking it all
in all, the world has been kinder to you than you have deserved.

       *       *       *       *       *

We may be pardoned for being often personal in this, the first issue
of Trotwood’s Monthly, but we beg you to bear in mind that this issue
was created hurriedly, and while we are not ashamed of it by any means,
we did not have the chance to give it the scope it will soon attain.
This is not a sectional monthly. Its aim is to cover the whole country
North and South. We are selling farm literature--not farm products--and
we will see that all sections, Michigan as well as Alabama, Maine as
well as Texas, is represented. If you are not in it it will be your own
fault.

       *       *       *       *       *

A bright literary woman--one who has written novels that have sold--in
a personal letter, says: “The publication of a book figures to me as
a marriage, in which the author is the woman, the publisher the man,
and it is not well to let one’s heart ache too much over mistreated
offspring in the way of books. Be glad that it is for a year. Just a
year, that the contract is not for life, and that in it divorce is no
disgrace, and with the optimistic belief that there is always to be
better luck next time.”

Was ever anything better said?

       *       *       *       *       *

The most encouraging news comes from the bedside of that veteran
breeder, Capt. M. C. Campbell, of Cleburne Farm. Capt. Campbell has
been very ill for over a month, and once it looked as if the owner of
Brown Hal and the breeder of more great Jerseys and pacing horses than
any living man, would not recover. But the life he has led has been
clean and pure, and his strength was great. Like the great Tennessee
pacers he has bred he proved game, and his friends, and they are
counted all who know him, are happy to think he is now on the road
to recovery. No man in the State has made a higher mark for honesty,
manhood and all that makes a man than Capt. M. C. Campbell, and may he
live long and prosper.

In a personal letter from his son, Mr. Allen Campbell, who is also
manager of Cleburne Farm, he writes that they have some of the greatest
colts and Jerseys ever seen at that famous nursery. Several of their
colts are showing extreme speed, among them being the young son of
Brown Hal, dam by Bay Tom, that Cleburne Farm has reserved to take
Brown Hal’s place. He is showing 2:10 speed as a three-year-old. Two
colts by Direct 2:05-1/2, one out of the dam of Twinkle 2:06-1/2, are
showing up very fast. Trainer John Walker has a dozen head of Mr.
Geers’ stable training them at Cleburne’s famous mile track.

       *       *       *       *       *

Speaking of John R. Gentry’s influence at Ewell Farm Mr. Geo. Campbell
Brown writes:

“It is the aim of Ewell Farm to breed beauty and let speed stand as a
secondary consideration, and for this reason it continues the use of
McEwen, one of the grandest individuals in the country, as shown by his
long list of showing prizes and of John R. Gentry, a horse of perfect
conformation and unbeaten in the show ring.

“The Hal strain at Ewell Farm is being perpetuated by Hal Brown,
certainly one of the most successful young sires of that breed.

“The brood mares at Ewell Farm are in proportion to the numbers owned
there, the greatest collection of producers in the United States. No
less than four have produced four each to beat 2:30, and ten are
producers of 2:10 or better horses, while one has thrown a world’s
champion.

“The blood of Sweepstakes, dam of Star Pointer, is better represented
at Ewell Farm than at any other farm in the country. Two of her
granddaughters, Mabel Best and Windsweep, daughters of Villette, sister
to Star Pointer, being owned there, and both have foals by John R.
Gentry.

“Of the dozen yearlings at Ewell Farm by John R. Gentry, only one
has been trained, and he a trotter can now show a 2:52 gait. He will
certainly make a great trotter.

“A three-year-old trotter by this great sire has beaten 2:20, and a
three-year-old pacer, Gentry’s Star, can pace a mile in 2:10. The
unparalleled beauty and speed of the youngsters by John R. Gentry
foreshadows his future fame as a sire, and it is a safe prediction that
he will more than equal his sire, Ashland Wilkes, that has for several
years been the leading sire of new 2:30 performers. Analysis of records
in John R. Gentry’s pedigree show him to be the fastest and best son of
Ashland Wilkes. This horse is in turn the best representative of Red
Wilkes, the greatest speed sire of all the sons of George Wilkes, whose
strain has been preeminent in the trotting world for twenty-five years.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Trotwood can vouch for every word of the following letter. He visited
the great Dakota prairies last fall. Such vastness, such fertility,
such lands!

  Fargo, N. D., August 15.

Editor Trotwood’s Monthly:

When I was a resident of your country I thought then that there was
only one God’s country, and that was the Central Basin of Tennessee. My
reason for arriving at such a conclusion was the land in the Central
Basin, but more particularly in and around Maury County, had maintained
its fertility and wonderful productive power for a hundred years with
only the ordinary American style of farming. That is, taking all out
of the land and putting nothing back again. But since that time a
discovery has been made which accounts for the land in your section
of country maintaining its wonderful endurance for raising such an
excellent quality of wheat over a period of seventy years, without
rotation of crops, and that is the almost inexhaustible deposit of
phosphate rock that underlies so much of your lands. But I have found
another God’s country. While it cannot boast of being underlaid with
phosphate rock like your lands in and around Maury County, but when
this country was opened up for settlement in the ’70’s it was as
rich in all the constituent elements of fertility as the lands in
the Central Basin of Tennessee. This Red River Valley is a wonderful
country, and Fargo, N. D., is the center of this granary of the great
Northwest. Although Fargo is not a very large city, the population is
about twelve or thirteen thousand inhabitants, it is a live town, and
full of enterprising business men.

This town is the third largest farm implement distributing point in the
world. That’s saying a good deal. Moscow, Russia, comes first; Kansas
City second, and Fargo third. According to the Bureau of Statistics,
United States Department of Agriculture, for 1904, the State of North
Dakota produced some fifty-four million bushels of wheat and the set
counties in the Red River Valley raised of the above amount nearly
twelve million bushels. This is not counting the Minnesota side of
the Red River Valley. The farmers in the Red River Valley seem to be
pretty well fixed. The great Dalrymple farm is in this county of Cass.
These gentlemen farm about 30,000 acres of wheat land. The soil in
this valley is a rich, black, glacial drift, and though it is not corn
country, not being warm enough, yet all other farm products do fine
(there is an immense crop this year), as wheat, oats, barley, rye,
buckwheat, flaxseed, hay and the most excellent Irish potatoes are
raised here, and 200 bushels per acre is a fair crop. But the farmers
in the Red River Valley have been raising wheat almost exclusively for
the past twenty-five years, and wheat of fine quality. But if they want
to maintain the reputation of this land as a wheat-growing country, the
farmers will have to put on their considering caps and ask you Maury
Countians to send them up some acid phosphate to put and keep their
land in balance, so that they can go on and again raise No. 1 hard
wheat.

  WM. DENNISON.

       *       *       *       *       *

TO MY FRIENDS:

Pardon this final word as the magazine goes to press, but Trotwood is
gratified to see that subscriptions are pouring in from every corner of
the United States, from Canada and from Mexico. Far away Halifax, N.
S., sends a good list in the same mail with New Braunsfels, Southern
Texas.

I am indeed proud of this, for it is the work of my personal friends,
whose loyalty and friendship have no measure; who in the past have
sent me words of comfort and cheer, in my fight through the columns of
that great turf journal, “The Horse Review,” for what I conceived to
be clean living, clean thinking, clean racing and clean and hopeful
literature.

I have longed for this day when I might talk to my many friends
through the columns of my own publication, and in the department “With
Trotwood” I want to meet you often, and I want you to meet each other.

To my old tried and true friend, John C. Bauer, of the Chicago Horse
Review, whose firm and lasting friendship has helped to make life
pleasant, and whose sterling manhood and unfailing courtesy in the
twelve years that I was associated with the Horse Review, has endeared
him to me and given me greater faith in man, I extend my hearty and
sincere thanks for the unselfish way in which he has so cheerfully and
willingly helped in starting us down the track of literature toward
what promises to be a successful goal.

To my many other friends who have responded so liberally with their
dollars and who have been so free with their expressions of loyalty and
good will, I thank you one and all, and I wish that I could meet each
and every one of you, and with a hearty handshake tell you how much I
appreciate your friendship and your encouragement.

With my very best wishes and regards to all, I am sincerely yours,

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

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A word from the Business Manager:

If you feel friendly toward Trotwood, no doubt you feel just as
friendly toward “Trotwood’s Monthly.” I want every reader of this
monthly to write us a letter, sending us the names and address of your
friends whom you think would be interested in this monthly. I will mail
them a sample copy with your compliments, and ask them to join us in
making what we hope to make--=The greatest farm and horse magazine in
the world=. Respectfully,

  E. E. SWEETLAND,
  Business Manager.

       *       *       *       *       *

TRAFFIC

A large tree has just been cut from the land of Mr. J. R. Marshall,
four miles from Columbia. At its base it was sixteen feet in diameter,
and out of it five logs ten feet long were cut, containing 7,650 feet
of lumber. The top of the tree made thirteen cords of wood.--Columbia
(Tenn.) Herald.

  And I would weep for thee, thou monarch of the wood,
  Thou king that long the scorn of Time has stood.
  King by the royal right of strength alone--
  With star-crowned head bared to the circling zone--
  Of good deeds done, of sweetness and of mirth,
  Scion of the sun, defender of the earth--
          O, I would weep for thee.

  And I would mourn for thee, ay, truly mourn,
  For what thou wast, and all that thou hast borne.
  Brother to the skies, companion to the hills,
  Comrade of the clouds and mother of the rills,
  Gatherer of dews, garnerer of herb and flowers,
  Guardian of the muse in trysting twilight hours--
          O, I would mourn for thee.

  And I would honor thee for what thou’st done,
  Scorner of winter’s wind and summer’s sun,
  Builder of birds’ nests, brewer of bubbling pool,
  Painter of shadows dark on landscapes cool,
  Wafter of odors sweet on summer’s breeze;
  Warrior of winter’s sleet and biting freeze--
          O, I would honor thee.

  And I would reverence thee, thou hoary one,
  Thou who hast stood while centuries have run,
  Thou who hast seen the Indian lover stand
  While virgin moon smiled down on virgin land--
  The ax, the rifle of the pioneer--
  All these have passed, and all had left thee here--
          And I would reverence thee.

  O, Ax of Traffic, buzzing Saws of Trade,
  Dost think for thee alone the Earth was made?
  For thee, to garner clean her fields of corn,
  With barren hills to greet the babe unborn;
  For thee, to glutton in her sweet-stored vine!
  And leave no grape on fainting Future’s vine?

  JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Fortunate is the man who has found his lifework, and--his Jonah._

       *       *       *       *       *

_Build--for if you build at all you will build better than you know._

       *       *       *       *       *

  1:59-1/2 =EWELL FARM= 2:00-1/2
  (Established 1870.)

  GEORGE CAMPBELL BROWN and PERCY BROWN
  Spring Hill, Maury County, Tennessee

  _SHETLAND PONIES JERSEY CATTLE_
  _TROTTING and PACING HORSES_
  _SOUTHDOWN SHEEP_

[Illustration: John R. Gentry 2:00-1/2.]

IN THE STUD

=JOHN R. GENTRY 2:00-1/2=, the handsomest of all turf horses. Has held
ten world’s records. Twice grand champion for one and three heats. A
winner in =Madison Square Garden=. A sire of pronounced beauty, speed
and intelligence. Sires both trotters and pacers of extraordinary speed
and destined to be the greatest sire in the world. =Fee, $100.00.=

The =SHETLANDS= at =Ewell Farm= have been selected with great care,
especial attention having been paid to beauty, uniformity in size (36
to 42 inches), and docility of temper. Not for many years have these
ponies failed to delight their purchasers. Geldings 1 to 3 years old
for sale.

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks near where they are
mentioned.

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.

p. 26: The description of the test plots is missing a description for
No. 1, and the description given for No. 1 is actually for No. 3.

The following change was made:

p. 30: delvered changed to delved (the deep-delved cellars)