[Illustration: LANDSEER’S FANCY]




TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

      VOL. 1.       NASHVILLE, TENN., NOVEMBER, 1905.        NO. 2




THE UNAFRAID


    Only the lion kings the land
      Who is whelped in the desert’s fire;
    Only the stallion lords the band
      With the hoof unsmirched with mire.
    The peak for the eagle to preen and to dream—
    Only the game fish swims up stream.

    Only the ocean carries a sail
      That foams to the blizzard’s breath;
    The silent seas that sleep and quail
      Are a-creep with the curse of death.
    The sky for the rocket to glow and to gleam—
    Only the game fish swims up stream.

    Only the stars are suns which burn
      By the heat of their own heart’s light;
    The million worlds which round them turn
      Float dead in a nebulous night.
    The meteor’s burst is its funeral beam—
    Only the game fish swims up stream.

    Only the man is made for fame—
      Ocean and eagle and sun—
    Whose soul, by Fate, is dipt in flame
      And winged with the winners who run.
    Fame for the Faithful—death for the dead—
    The peak and the star for the Unafraid!

                       JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.




Solomon

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE

(Author of “Ole Mistis,” “Songs and Stories From Tennessee,” “A Summer
Hymnal,” etc.)


Chickamauga Creek had no place on the map until September, ’63. Then it
ran blood and became history. For it takes blood to make history.

When Bragg went to pieces two months later, after the shambles of
Missionary Ridge, Hooker’s Corps was the pack turned loose to harry him
out of the valley. They rushed thoughtlessly—Hooker’s hounds always
did—and the foremost quickly paid the tax which Rashness pays to Reason.
Cleburne, the rebel general, who brought up the rear of Bragg’s army,
turned, wolf-like, at a gap in the mountains and cut to pieces the hound
that had outstripped the pack in its zeal to snap at harried haunches.
The hound whimpered and fell back, but not before Cleburne had shingled
the sides of the mountain with the dead of the Yankee army.

The General who claimed the cut-up regiment was mad, and as he rode,
with his staff, to the front, he was swearing in a deep, jerky, guttural
voice. He stopped to look at the bloody gap, the lusty, voiceless,
blue-coated forms, lying so weirdly unnatural—as trees when the hurricane
has passed: “Mountain gaps—they are little traps of hell,” he kept
repeating, and he spurred on for a guide—to a cracker cabin higher up on
the mountain side.

The General rode a clean-limbed, loosely-ribbed, long-back thoroughbred,
fresh from a blue grass paddock in Middle Tennessee. For he was weak
on horse-flesh, and had impressed this scion of a Derby winner before
Rosecrans went North.

Two mountaineers stood in the cabin yard. One was middle-aged,
sullen-eyed and stooped, but standing six feet with the stoop. He leaned
on an unmounted axe-helm, and as he stood slouching, long armed, bowed in
the legs, his hairy chest gleaming through open shirt front, he looked
not unlike a great gorilla, brought to bay with uprooted club in his
hands.

The other man was not much more than a boy, except in size. He was
larger, bigger chested, bigger fisted, and his wonder-haunted, kindly
face wore a smile instead of a scowl. Never before had he seen the flag
which one of the officers carried. Never such a horse as the one ridden
by the man in front—never such a horse, and how he did love horses!

But the thoroughbred shied at the sight of the bearded man and sprang
sideways, snorting, and wheeled to run. The boy’s face broke over in a
quizzical, familiar grin, and he drawled exultantly:

“Say, Mister, whut yo ridin’ there?” The man turned sullenly and knocked
him down with the axe-helm. He went down helplessly and with a subdued
surprise in his blue eyes. The man did not turn his body, but stood
indifferently, watching him slowly arising, wiping the blood from his
forehead and whimpering like a struck cub:

“Ef mammy hadn’t tuck an’ went an’ died—I promised mammy I’d nurver
strike ye, dad.” He blew the blood from his nose and stood scratching one
leg with the bare foot of the other, whimpering still, and dazed.

“Solomon Hosea Hanks, ye’re a blatherin’ yearlin’ an’ ’ll allers be one.
Ain’t I knocked ye down often fur buttin’ in ye horns befo’ ye’re axed up
to the trough?”

He was talking to the boy, but saying it for the men in front:
“Gentlemen, ’light an’ look at yer saddles. I’m jes teachin’ the lad some
manners—you hafter teach ’em to some folks with a club.”

The boy suddenly straightened up. Half defiantly, and with quick
eagerness, he leaped across the path where sat the color-bearer. He
stopped beneath the flag and began to fondle it as a child would—the
pretty stars, the gold cord that fell from the eagle above: “Ye’ll nurver
knock me down ag’in, Dad. Ye’re a g’erriller an’ ye know it, an’ ye
wanter make me one, but I’ve seen my country’s colors to-day an’ I’m
goin’ ter jine.”

He turned to the group: “I know whut you want, Mister-men, an’ I’ll
lead you over the mount’in ef you’ll let me jine. ’Taint uverbody
I’ll let knock me down”—he wagged his head at the man with whimpering
apology—“promised mammy afo’ she tuck an’ went an’ died I’d nurver strike
him”—

A rattling volley of shots rang out across the mountain, down in the next
valley. They were echoed back, then shouts, and when the General wheeled,
the boy had struck out toward the firing, his tough, bare feet crounching
the gravel as he strode on in his shambling way. They followed him, but
could not overtake the long, swinging trot in the crooked path amid the
boulders and clay roots. On a projection beyond the ridge he stopped,
calling back to the man:

“Far’well, Dad—you’ll nurver see me aga’in onless I hear you’ve beat
little Dinah Mariah—then I’ll come back an’ forgit I urver had a mammy.”
He shook his great fist at the man still standing immovable, then: “Come
on, Mister-men—Bragg’s a good dog, but Holdfas’ is better.”

And that is how Solomon came into the camp of the Tenth.

He led them to the firing line, where the General suddenly found plenty
to do. So much that he forgot Solomon until the brigade went into camp
five miles further, on the trail of the retreating enemy. Then Solomon
staggered in through the darkness to the camp fire carrying a half dead
Confederate on his back. He laid the man down on a bed of leaves near
the mess tent of the Tenth. He lifted the helpless head very tenderly
and gave him water while the stricken one kept whispering, “Water—more
water—for God’s sake—and death!”

The staff had been laughing and swearing before, with tin cups full of
mountain whisky. For they were tired, and death had sprung up so often
and so suddenly that day from batteries and trenches and mountain gorges;
and from still, restful copses of silent woods, peaceful and inviting,
until—Spit! Spit!—and the rattlesnake of sharp-shooting rifles spat out
the virus which had put comrades and mess-mates to sleep. But now the
silence and the night fell from the deep treetops together. That dying
man in the camp, that strange, solemn giant of the woods—

The General, his tin cup half emptied, spoke first, in a voice strangely
soft, the staff thought, for the old fighter:

“Any kin to you, Solomon—the man there?”

“He’s mighty nigh to me—mighty nigh.”

“Ah—sorry—sorry. And who is he?”

“Jes’ my brother, that’s all.”

“Oh, too bad—sorry—sorry”—and the staff muttered the echo.

Then the General put down his cup, went over and glanced at the man.
He stepped back quickly and hastily drained the tin cup: “Nasty fix,
Solomon—sorry—but we’ll do what we can for him. When did you see him
last?”

“Nurver seed him befo’—but thar’s hund’erds of ’em—all our brothers,
’specially when we’ve shot ’em an’ they’re helpless an’ dyin’.”

The General winced and turned quickly to the fire. The staff went after
another drink. Solomon’s eye fell on the mess table—the supper set forth
and waiting; then Solomon fell on the supper. Between mouthfuls he
growled out:

“You fellers orter be ashamed o’ yerselves to shoot a man’s innards out
like that. I found him three miles beyant the mount’in whar you-uns fit
thar this mornin’ an’ I fetch’t him over on my back.”

That reminded him. He picked up some hardtack and bacon and started
toward the groaning man. Then he stopped, disappointed: “Whut’s the
use—he’s got no whur to put it. You-uns done shot his innards out. The
fust lickin’ Dad gin me was fur shootin’ a b’ar in ther innards.”

He sat down again and ate everything in sight. The General and staff got
busy at something else. Solomon gave the dying man another drink and
began looking around like a huge bear-dog for a spot to roll up on, and
sleep. He found it in the General’s blanket, his huge feet sticking out,
bunion covered and black. They thought he was asleep and coming quietly
back one by one, sat down, and were eating in silence when a shock of
hair blurred up out of the blanket:

“Say, Mister-men, but ain’t war hell sho’ nuff? But tell the boys not to
shoot ther Innards out—’taint fair.” Then he slept.

The General waited till he heard him snoring: “Major, if you happen to
lose him to-morrow in the first skirmish—really, I don’t think we need
him, Major?” The Major was sure they did not—so were the others.

They made the dying man as comfortable as they could, the General sparing
his own warm rain-coat for the limbs now rapidly chilling. But his groans
kept them awake: “Water—water—oh, God—water and death—kill me, somebody!”

The cry fell out of the silence with the starlight, mingling strangely
with the shivering wail of a screech owl—so uncannily mingling that they
seemed as one.

It was nearly midnight when the General saw the foot withdrawn, the big
form arise and slouch over to the dying man: “Water—water—and, oh, for
God’s sake—have mercy and kill me.”

Solomon tenderly lifted the gasping lips to the canteen: “Do yo’ means
it—want me to kill ye sho’ nuff, brother?”

The man’s eyes were beseeching as he gasped: “I——can’t——live——death
every——minute——put me——out of misery—God will——reward you.”

Solomon’s eyes were wet with tears. His great pitying heart thumped
loudly: “How, brother? Whut with?”

The dying man nodded at a bayonetted rifle near by: “That——push
that——through my heart——quick!”

The General arose just in time. Solomon, with a strange sob in his
throat, stood over the man, the gun poised, the bayonet’s point—

“My God, Solomon!”—and he grasped the descending gun by the barrel. “This
is murder—I’ll have you shot!” The giant turned on him astonished: “He
cyant live—you-uns shot him to pieces. That’s war. I put him out o’ his
misery—that’s murder. Strange—strange! Brother,” he stooped and whispered
regretfully to the man, who beseeched him with fixed, unwinking eyes,
“Brother, I’d do it—God knows I’d like ter ’commodate yer, but ye heurn
yo’self.” Still lower: “But say, brother, ef you fin’ ye cyant stan’ it
no longer—when they sleep—call Solomon—an’ I’ll sho’ ’commodate you in
this. God bless ye.”

Later there was a rigid stiffening and gasps among the leaves and Solomon
knew there was no need for his bayonet.

The next morning when the General arose, Solomon had fed and rubbed down
Ajax, the thoroughbred. He stood talking to himself—he had forgotten the
war: “Whut a hoss—whut legs—whut muscles, like bees a swarming! I’ve
allers dreamed o’ keerin’ fur sech!” He turned to the General: “I’ll
take keer o’ him from now on.” The General was touched and when he shook
Solomon’s hand the bond was sealed.

“How long have you been up, Solomon?”

“Two hours b’ day—Gen’l.” It was the first time he had used the word and
the old fighter inwardly scored one more point for the horse—that could
prune the pride of the mountaineer—he who knew no titles, no superior.

“Ye see, Gen’l, forgot yistiddy to kiss Dinah Mariah good-bye. She’s the
little deef-mute mammy lef’ befo’ she tuck an’ went an’ died. I raised
her—gi’n her urver rappin she had ’cep the milk she drunk, an’ wish’t I
c’ud er gi’n her that. Dad’s been so tarnel mean to her. D’ye know I had
an idee that he wanted ter put her out o’ the way? So I steps back over
the mount’in an into the cabin whur they all sleeps—all ’leven on ’em.
But ye know I couldn’t kiss ’er good-bye, seein’ ’er sleepin’ thar so
sweet?” He struck savagely at his eyes with his big-knuckled fist. “But
I fetched this—I’ve jined fur the war an’ I wants my own gun—don’t like
ther blunderbusses you-uns shoots. This un’s a Deckerd—been thro’ ther
Revolushun, an’ with Ole Hickory at New ’leans. It’s fittin’ fur it to
fit ag’in fur the Union. Thar—see!” and he pointed the gun high up at the
limb of a big oak.

The General saw nothing until the great flint and steel snapped together
like the jaws of an alligator, and he had a tender but headless fox
squirrel for his breakfast, cooked, later, by Solomon’s own hand. “An’ I
don’t shoot ther innards out, nurther,” he growled.

“You needn’t lose him, Major,” chuckled the general, as he pulled off
a succulent hind limb, roasted on a green stick-spittle over a pit of
coals. The Major having the mate of it in his own mouth, could not speak,
but nodded vigorously.

A hard winter and deadly fighting between Missionary Ridge and Atlanta:
but Solomon enlivened it for the Tenth. For he was their brother and his
quaint sayings became their intellectual stock in trade. For instance:
“The —— Iowa flickered at Dug’s Creek. Then they sulked.” They had done
it before. “What shall I do with them?” snarled the General that night in
camp. Solomon drawled in:

“’Pint ’em ter bury ther dead—they’re nat’ul born pallbearers. I’ve seed
lots o’ folks that was.”

When old Tecumseh Sherman heard of this he offered to promote Solomon to
a corporalcy:

“Nun—no,” said Solomon, “then I’d hafter wear boots an’ a unerform. An’
say, them thar unerforms you-uns wear meks you-uns look jes lak them
little flyin’ stink-ants that swarms out in the spring. God didn’t inten’
no two fol’ks ter be alike. Es fur boots, they fus’ jes make yer feet
tender an’ then wears out. I’ve got on a pa’r thet nurver wears out.”

He figured next in a horse race with a Kentucky regiment which was first
unwise enough to cast aspersions on the speed of Ajax and then bold
enough to back them with the long green. It was a great race run between
two lines of howling blue. “Nurver bet agin natur’,” said Solomon dryly,
as he pocketed all the money of the Republic which the unwise Kentuckians
had. “Ajax is by natur’ a horse an’ your’n ain’t.”

For a week after that the Tenth indulged in vain and effeminate luxuries.

Spring brought the fighting and the tragedy—of the latter, Solomon was
the ink.

They made him color-bearer—he was so strong, and it was so easy to see
him in his coon-skin cap, his Deckerd strapped to his back. For he would
not lay it down even while carrying the flag. At Resaca he took the
colors through balls which came thick enough to stop a bluebird. Mines
cut the tail from his cap, a buck-and-ball cleared one foot of bunions,
and canister carried his canteen bodily from his body; but in the thick
of it he yelled out savagely at the General: “Say, thar, Gen’l, get out
o’ thar on that hoss! You mout get ’im hurt!”

He spent the next week nursing the wounded enemy: “For ain’t they our
brothers?” he asked, and the scoffers in blue were silent.

A beautiful valley beyond Resaca and Solomon had never seen such rich
land. A grand mansion in the valley and Solomon had never seen such a
house. The General had pitched his camp near by. A thousand other camps
dotted the valleys and hills. A hundred battle flags fluttered from their
staffs. There was planning, priming; trenches crept across the hills in
the night, like mole-paths in a garden, and the valleys were billowed
with them, cannon crowned and picketed with steel. They would give little
Joe his death blow.

Solomon stood sentinel that night by the big house on the lawn. It was
never the color-bearer’s duty to stand sentinel—but “Yer see, Gen’l,
Ajax is stalled right over thar beyant, an’ them brothers o’ our’n from
Kentucky loves a good hoss.”

It was past midnight and the army was asleep. There was a light
suspiciously faint in the window of the big house. Solomon slipped up and
peeped in through a blind slat, awry. He stepped back blushing, ashamed
that he had peeped. He picked up his Deckerd. The light went out and the
door opened silently and a handsome man dressed in citizens’ clothes
kissed a Beautiful One good-bye. Then he slipped out into the dark and
mounted a horse hid so securely as to surprise Solomon, with his keen
mountain eyes.

“Halt, thar, brother, an’ gin the countersign.”

Pistol shots buzzing from the cylinder of Colt, and that quick grapple
of horse hoofs in the gravel which tells of a rowel driven in suddenly;
then the sound of a flying horse through the lane.

Silence, then quaintly as if talking to himself: “A cyclone spiked with
hell-fire! Solomon, yer nurver had so narrow a shave—yer’ll be keerful
ther nex’ time yer brother a gatlin’-gun buckled to a thoroughbred.”

The girl clutched the window—white and with eyes lit with flashes of the
weird starlight. It seemed a half hour to Solomon before he heard her
give a rippling, cut-off laugh, and the dawn sprang to her cheeks as the
starlight went out of her eyes. High up on the mountain she had seen what
Solomon had not—a splinter of light leap out of the heart of the mountain
beyond the picket lines. Solomon was still watching her—so strangely
fascinated that he had not noticed the blood running down his arm. She
closed the window with a happy laugh, and Solomon felt that it was now
night—all around him.

And so the spell of the big house was upon Solomon and he begged to stand
guard next day. It was early and he stood silent before the splendor of
the house, the marble steps, the big, hooded gables, then—

“God! she’s comin’!”

He turned—no, he was a sentinel—he could not run. She wore white—fluffy
and airy in the warm June morning. Above—

“Molasses candy hair,” said Solomon, licking his mouth, “an’, oh, Lord,
Black-Eyed-Susan eyes!”

He thought again of running. Then of the wild fawn that once ran to meet
him, off in the mountain woods, so innocent that it knew not that death
dwelt with man.

He slipped behind a tree. Never before had he been ashamed of his bare
feet. He peeped out—she was still coming—no, she had come, and he turned
pale and his knees trembled, for there she stood smiling as only an angel
could, and holding something out to him:

“I know you must be hungry, and it is so good of you to guard our house.
Now, please let me serve you your breakfast.”

Off came his coon-skin cap. Her smile, her eyes made him homesick. He
saw the summer lightning playing at midnight around the peaks of Tiger
Head. Then tears welled which made him hate himself—him a soldier of the
Tenth—and he slipped farther around the tree. She was serious instantly,
and her beautiful eyes had sized him up—gratitude, homesickness, all—and
when she peeped around the tree again—after awhile, and he had had time
to brace himself, she laughed a musical, comrady laugh, and—

“Now, please don’t be offended, for I should love so much to be your
friend.”

Again the homesickness. That laugh, that voice—it was the silver ripple
of Telulah Falls under the white stars of the mountain. That meant home
and Dinah Mariah. Trembling, dazed and choking with the swelling that
made him wish to do something—to do something grand for once in his life,
he tried to speak, but ended in bringing his Deckerd to present arms. She
laughed, saluting him in turn with a saucy military flash of her pretty
hand.

“Miss—Miss”—

“Nellie,” she said, sympathetically, helping him out.

“Do they—breed ’em—all like you-uns down here?”

She laughed and handed him the plate. Solomon knew the ham, but did not
know what the rolls and the orange were. His hand touched hers—he fumbled
and dropped the plate: “God, but I thort I—I teched fire!”

“Oh!” and the hurt look made Solomon wish to fight something for her
sake—“but I’ll soon be back with more.” She turned with a pretty gesture.

“Don’t—don’t,” he called, “send it by a nigger. Who can eat with a angel
lookin’?” She laughed so heartily at this that Solomon was soon himself.
When she brought him another plate he forgot everything except he had
seen her, that at last into his life something had come. He wished very
much to impress her—to say something grand, but everything he tried to
say ended in a brag—so unusual for Solomon:

“I was heah las’ night a-guardin’ you-uns, an’ I come mighty nigh killin’
a man.”

“Oh!”—and the fun went out of her eyes. “I am so grateful to you.
Did—did—he hurt you when he fired?”

All the brag went out of him. Not for the world would he have her know
that.

“No—but—it was a narrow shave.”

“I am so glad—you see he—was—my brother.”

“Sho’ nuff?” and Solomon guffawed. Somehow it relieved him so to know he
was only a brother. “Wal, now, how strange! But the Gen’l was tellin’ us
’bout a Johnny Scout in here, a tall feller in citizens’ clothes. Oh,
he’s played the devil with us. He knows our plans better’n we do. We ’low
we s’prise little Joe at Dug’s Gap, but little Joe s’prises us. Then we
’low we’ll trap him at Resaca an’ swing round on his flank. But he come
nigh trappin’ us. We laid for him mighty keerful at New Hope an’ saunt
Howard to turn his flank. He turned our’n. It’s all that’r scout, and so
the Gen’l sed when he saunt me out las’ night: “Solomon, shoot anything
in citizens’ clothes that tries to buck our lines. Kill him fust an’ ax
him whur he’s goin’ after’uds.” So when he steps out las’ night—that
brother er your’n—I was right thar watchin’, an’ I flung up my old
Deckerd an’ I drawed a bead on him—it was all so plain, him outlined in
the starlight. But he looked so han’sum a-settin a hoss so lak Ajax thet
I sed: ”No, I’ll not shoot him—he’s somebody’s brother. An’ sho’ nuff he
was your’n!”

The girl turned white, then pink. Tears came to her eyes, the sight of
which made Solomon’s jaws set in stern decision. He pitied her, thinking
of Dinah Mariah—his sister. He swelled savagely: “Say, but don’t you cry.
I’ll lick arry man that ’ud hurt yo’ brother!”

“That is so sweet of you,” she said softly.

“Then I fetched my piece down an’ axed him fur the countersign an’—wal,”
he nodded his head up and down meaningly—“I got it!” He rolled up his
sleeve and showed the red furrow of another across his arm.

“Oh, I am so sorry—do—do come in and let mamma and me dress it.”

Solomon laughed: “Now, don’t bother ’bout it, Miss—yo’ bein’ sorry has
already cured it. I’d have it dressed but Gen’l ’ud find out an’ say I
was a fool fur not shootin’.”

But she dressed it—she and a stately White-haired one, bringing the salve
and bandages out to his beat; and when they had finished and the smarting
pain had ceased, Solomon belonged to them.

Then came the strange change in Solomon. He did not know what it meant.
Why he put on the uniform, the cavalry boots and the big spurs. Why he
wanted to strut and swell in the pride of his six feet three, when the
old General blurted out:

“Solomon, damned if you ain’t real handsome—what’s come over you?”

“Gen’l—Gen’l, I dunno—but I finds myse’f struttin’ jes like a wood-cock
in the spring.”

“Oho,” laughed the General, “look out, Solomon.”

That was all open—seen of all men. But secretly, silently, painfully—in
the depths of his great soul something stirred within him that he told to
no man, for he knew not what it was. What it did he knew: “God, it lifts
me out o’ the clay o’ myse’f!”

Never had he been so happy. Ride? He could ride Ajax over a whole
regiment. He could lick Johnston’s whole army. “An’ the cu’is part,
Solomon—yer fool—you are wantin’ to fight outwardly, but in’ardly you are
cryin’ all the time.”

It hurt him when he saw her. He was sorry when she brought him his meals;
he got behind a tree and wept when she left, and in this state he stopped
one day and turned white: “God, mebbe it’s that thar blin’ staggers I’ve
got—that I heur’n so o’ fo’ks havin’ in the rich valleys.” The dreadful
blind staggers he had heard of all his life—that never came to those high
up in the pure air of the mountain! He was sure they had him.

It was the third day and twilight, and when she came out, bringing his
supper, the red ribbon in the white of her gown, her dark eyes above,
made him think of the tiger lilies that grew by Telulah. He pretended not
to see her and when she blocked his path with a pretty smile and salute,
he feigned astonishment:

“Law, but I thort the moon had riz!”

“Oh, you are a poet, Solomon, and a dreadful flatterer,” but she laughed
in so pleased a way that Solomon swelled up in his great chest and blew
deep and long, snorting it out, to loosen the great hurting feeling that
was there. Then, too, he had seen Ajax do it with the thunder of battle
in his nostrils.

She sat on the stump before him, kicking her slippered heels against the
rough bark and watching him so keenly with measuring, wistful eyes.

“Solomon, I have been thinking, and mother and I want you to come in the
house and hear my music. You have been so good to us and we are so fond
of you.” She jumped down, took his hand and led him. It burned him—it
made him gasp for breath, yet all he could do was to follow.

And the house—never before had he seen splendor. They had trouble
persuading him to step on the rugs and to walk on the carpets. But the
sweet-faced, white-haired lady came graciously forward and shook his hand
which made him feel better. Then the Angel sat down before something
Solomon had never seen and—

They both stood over him ten minutes afterwards, for he was sitting on a
sofa weeping:

“’Scuse me—no—no, ’taint my wounded arm—it’s that’r thing over thar
that’s waked up the cat birds in the roderdendrums at home, an’ I heurd
the water failin’ over Telulah an’ the wind at midnight in Devil’s Gorge,
an’ I nurver knowed befo’ whut little Dinah Mariah had missed bein’ a
deef-mute an’—so—it sot me ter bellerin’ this away.”

They were very gentle with him after that, and more gracious, and when
the Angel played another piece full of dash and jig and rosened-bow and
thunder, he stood it until the blood began to boil under his hair and
they found him again in the middle of the floor shouting:

“Hurrah, boys! Lord, but can’t he run? Come home, Ajax!” “’Scuse
me—’scuse me—Mrs.—Mrs.—Angul—” after he came to himself—“but—but—she
plays that thing ’zactly like Ajax runs.”

It was the greatest day that had ever come into his life, and when he
left to go back to his beat he proclaimed exultingly to the White-haired
one that it was “Christmas, an’ hog-killin’ an’ heav’n all rolled into
one.”

It was twilight when she came out on the lawn, dressed in white with
ribbons in her hair. When he turned she had perched herself on her
favorite stump and was beckoning him to sit by her. Trembling, weak he
obeyed, his great arm touching hers, which thrilled him so that pains
shot into his wounds. She was silent, looking at him with the same
wistful, doubting eyes of the morning. He had seen them before, in camp,
when the boys gambled and their month’s pay was at stake, holding a card
aloft uncertain whether to cast or not. And how they held him—those eyes
of hers with the tragedy in them!

“Solomon, you know how we love you, mamma and I.” He sat mute with bowed
head. “And Solomon, if I trust you—if I tell you—will you never betray?”

“Whut—like that’r Judas I onct heurn of the time I went to meetin’?” She
nodded. It hurt him. “I can’t betray—It ain’t in me,” he said simply.

“Forgive me, Solomon. I knew it,” and she put her hand in his just as
Dinah Mariah had so often done, except that this made his heart beat so
it bothered his breathing and unlike Dinah Mariah’s he could not—she
being an angel—clasp it in turn. “Now, Solomon, my brother is coming
to-night—he will slip in yonder,” and she pointed to a by road leading
through shrubbery to a side gate. “You are not to see him, Solomon,
and you are to let him out the same way after we have fed him. For he
is hungry, Solomon, and in great danger—been surrounded and hiding
for days—they are on his trail. Your men, you know, have killed his
horse”—(Solomon winced—it hurt him to hear of a horse being killed)—“and,
Solomon, this is the only way he can get out—can save his life—for—for,
Solomon, they are to take him dead or alive.” She had ceased to smile.
Tears were in her eyes and Solomon’s great hand closed over her little
one.

“So he’p me God, I’ll nurver pester him!”

“And when he is ready to go—to try to escape, oh, Solomon, you will stand
by us—with Ajax ready?”

He started—he jumped from his seat. “Not Ajax—any critter we got but
Ajax.”

“Oh, Solomon, they cannot run—it’s—it’s—Ajax or death for him.”

She was weeping, her head on his great shoulder, clinging to his arm,
the perfume of her hair going into the soul of him like the odor of wild
grape blossoms after the spring rains in Dingley Dell. “Will you—will
you, Solomon; oh, save him for me!”

“So he’p me God, I will—he bein’ yo’ brother—my brother.”

“You are my brother, Solomon—the Brother of Nobility.”

Silence. He sat holding her hand as he would Dinah Mariah’s. “Will
you—er—kiss yo’ brother—when he gits here?”

She blushed. “Don’t we always kiss our brothers, Solomon?”

He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Awhile ago you made a remark
cal’k’lated ter sorter sot me to ’sposin’ thet mebbe I mou’t also be yo’
brother—”

There was a ripple from Telulah Falls, the pressure of lips on his cheek,
a whiff of wild grape blossoms in the Dell, a rustle of skirts up the
path, and Solomon sat breathing hard in silence.

“Wal, ef lightnin’ ’ud only give us notice when an’ whur it’s goin’ ter
strike!”

In camp he heard news—strange news. The whole army would strike next day,
for they had Johnston with his flank wide open; would bag him if that
scout didn’t get back through the lines—Captain Coleman, the daring rebel
scout. They had him surrounded now in a thicket by the creek, the man
they would give a brigade for—he was theirs if the pickets were careful.

Then it all came over Solomon and with it a blow that brought the great
strange man to dumbness. “I swore not to betray her—not to be her
Judas—oh, God, enny body but thet white-livered, snivelin’—” He heard
the flag rustling in the night air. He walked over, crept under the
folds, pressing it to his hot cheeks, kissing and fondling it. “Judas!
Judas!—oh, my country’s colors.” He looked across the night to the
hills where a thousand camp-fires twinkled in unbroken lines of starry
sentinels.

“Ye’ve got so menny to defen’ ye,” he said to the flag, “so menny twixt
you an’ death. An’ she—jes’ me—jes’ me!” He sang low the song that had
taken the camp.

    “I’ve seed him in the camp fires of a hunder’d circlin’ camps,
    They have builded him an altar in the evenin’ dews an’ damps—”

He stopped and looks at the living scene before him—it was all so true.
Then lower still:

    “He has sounded forth the trumpet thet shall nurver know retreat,
    He is siftin’ out the souls o’ men—”

He sprang up with a pain in his heart. “Siftin’ out the Judases, an’, oh
God, I’m a Judas arry way you fix it! Why did you fling me in this heah
pit among the wolves o’ war—away from my mount’in home—from little Dinah
Mariah?”

When Solomon went back to his beat he had slipped out Ajax, saddled, and
held him in the clump of orchard trees, near the sweet window where the
faint light came out, that he knew shone also over her and her brother.
He held his Deckerd proudly, for was he not all that stood between
her and death? He swelled with the pride of it and that queer sullen
feeling that came over him at times—that savage feeling he could not
understand—that made him willing to kill—kill if—

“They’d better not pester her,” he growled as he heard the pickets go out
for their night’s duty.

He heard them moving in the room. Her brother was preparing to go. He
peeped and turned away his head. “Somehow it riles me to see her brother
kiss her that away.” He tapped on the blind saying softly: “Ready—ready.”

“O, Solomon,” joyfully in a whisper, “bless you; bless you!”

“No Judas in mine, Angul.”

He turned, for Ajax had thrust his head over his keeper’s shoulder and
the man laid his cheek against it and his lips had parted for the pet
words which he never uttered; for there was a noise in the dark behind
him and two soldiers tried to rush by to the door of the room.

Solomon stopped them with his great Deckerd at port. “Halt fus’ an’
give the countersign,” he said, and he heard the scream of a woman, the
hurrying of feet within.

“Stand back, you fool, we are men of the Tenth and we’ve got Coleman in
there.”

“Stan’ back yerse’f—he’s her brother—my brother.”

There was a rush at him, into arms which made them think of a mountain
bear, for he gathered them to his heart, and the breath of them went out.
In the glare of the wide open door a girl stood white-faced with tragedy.
A man leaped to the back of a horse and the swaying, struggling group
were baptized in a shower of flying gravel. Shots and shouts behind and
the scud of a flying horse into the night.

“You damned traitor!” Solomon dropped the two men in the paralysis of the
bayonet thrust that sank into his back.

He quivered to the death stroke and turned beseechingly to the man:
“Shoot me, quick, brother—in the heart—in the breast—I’m no traitor, no
Judas—she’ll say I ain’t.” The man cocked his rifle but the great head
with the shock of long hair had gone down and the girl stood between them.

“No—no—not Judas—she’ll swear I ain’t.”

She did not seem to notice them—her beautiful head was turned side-wise
listening to the vanishing rhythm of flying hoof beats. “O, Solomon,
Solomon; will they catch him?”

“Whut—an’ him on Ajax? Ho-ho-oh,” and the great chest, schooled to the
mountain halloo, echoed it for the last time, like the sound of thunder
among the hollow gorges of the hills.

Then joy, great, radiant joy in her face, and with the returning glory of
it all—tenderness—tenderness and sorrow for him. “Can I—O, Solomon—can I
do anything for you?” She sat by him, her hand on the sweat-damp brow.

“You mou’t—kiss—me ag’in—an’ ef—you—happen to see—little Dinah Mariah—”

       *       *       *       *       *

    What doth it mean and whither tendeth,
      This life—this death—this world—the whirling stars?
    Why do we live to-day—to-morrow endeth
      Our half dreampt dream behind the twilight bars?

[Illustration]




The Phosphates of Tennessee

By H. D. RUHM

    Mr. Ruhm is one of the pioneers in the phosphate field and his
    paper on this subject is the work of an expert.—Ed.


The phosphates of Tennessee occur chiefly, in fact, almost entirely, in
the strata representing the Silurian and Devonian geological ages, or,
more properly, in the former, and in a transition period between the two.

The Silurian age was essentially the age of shell fish, animals with
their skeletons entirely on the outside of their bodies. The deposits of
countless millions of these shell fish and their remains form the immense
beds of limestone representing the Silurian age. The composition of these
shell fish was carbonate of calcium, or “lime,” and hence our common
limestones are calcium carbonate.

[Illustration: _Fig. A._ _Fig. B._]

The Devonian age was the age of fishes or vertebrates, and owing to the
need of greater elasticity of their bones and smaller weight, they are
composed of phosphate of calcium, or “lime.” Far back in the Silurian
age the “Hand that fashioned all things well” began to change some of
these shell fish to provide for the future order of things, so that
their outside skeletons, or shells, were composed of phosphate of lime
instead of carbonate. These two commingling, the resultant beds of rock
became somewhat phosphatic and formed the “phosphatic limestones”
of the Silurian age. In some places the phosphate shells were in
considerable proportion, and subsequent erosion, proper underground
drainage and leaching, dissolved out the carbonate of lime to greater or
less extent and left the “brown phosphate” of the middle basin, varying
in grade according to the preponderance of phosphate shells in the
original deposit and the extent of the subsequent leaching. Meantime the
transition stage between the two ages had been reached and the resulting
deposit spread over the central basin and the highland rim in the form
of a thin blanket of varying thickness and quality of the so-called blue
rock, which is blue, brown, gray and black, according to the coloring
matter present or absent, composed of a preponderance of microscopic
shell fish with skeleton composed of phosphate of lime, but mixed with
enough carbonate to make the resulting mass vary from sixty-five per cent
to as high as eighty per cent calcium phosphate.

The subsequent depression and deposit of Devonian shales and
subcarboniferous beds and subsequent great pressure hardened all these
into rock, and about the middle of the subcarboniferous age all these
were elevated above the surrounding country, and while the rest of the
land was taking its turn in being formed under the seas, this old central
basin was undergoing the wear and tear of erosion that finally produced
the “Dimple of the Universe,” surrounded by its chain of hills and ridges
and flatwoods of the highland rim.

In the central basin where conditions were favorable the intervening
strata between the blue rock and the phosphatic limestones that were
being converted into “brown rock” were sometimes partly and sometimes
entirely washed away, and the blanket of the blue rock, cracked and
broken into plates of the hardest and most durable parts, settled down
on the brown rock, sometimes resting directly on it and sometimes with a
clay seam left to represent the former intervening strata.

A glance at the illustrations will show the process. Let Figure A
represent the deposit as it originally was before the erosion and
leaching started in.

No. 1 represents the layer of blue rock in its original position; 2
the layers of limestone underneath; 3 the layers of highly phosphatic
limestone in suitable condition for leaching; 4 the hard, insoluble
portions of the limestone, and 5 the soluble portions of the limestone,
nonphosphatic.

In Figure B, No. 5 has dissolved out and disappeared. In No. 3, the
carbonate has leached out and it has separated into laminations and
falling into the places left by No. 5, has assumed the jumbled condition
found in the dips between lime boulders; No. 2 has dissolved down to
the clay seam so generally found, varying in thickness from one or two
inches to two or three feet, and No. 1 has settled down conforming to the
general bottom of 3 or top of 4, forming the top rock generally prevalent
in the brown rock field.

If the analysis of the original phosphatic limestone was, say, 50 per
cent phosphate of lime, 38 per cent carbonate and 12 per cent insoluble,
and other matters, and the leaching took out all the soluble carbonate,
the resulting mass would be 80 per cent phosphate, which is generally
the analysis of the bottom rock at Mt. Pleasant, or the “export,” as it
is termed. The top rock varies in analysis from 65 to 80, just as the
original blue rock did.

In the highland rim this process took place only on the slopes of the
narrow creek valleys and occasionally in projecting points, instead of
over large areas of country as in the central basin.

In the portion of the highland rim left intact the blue rock remains
in place as a general thing with its varying quality and thickness,
retaining its original compact form and density.

Occasionally, however, is found the layer of blue rock resting
immediately on the layer of phosphatic limestone, and where this is the
case numerous faults and dips occur, showing a similar structure to the
Mt. Pleasant formation typified.

Again, in the central basin or brown rock region, the top erosion first
disintegrated and then partially took off the upper layers of shale or
flint, sometimes entirely, sometimes leaving it from one to forty feet
thick, which accounts for the varying overburden.

In some places the limestone layers were entirely soluble or reduced to
clay and some acid condition of soil water dissolved the upper layers
of phosphate and redeposited it in the boulder and stalagmite forms of
the “white rock” found in Perry and Decatur counties and near Godwin, in
Maury County, and the “boulder rock” found everywhere to greater or less
extent but in especially heavy deposits near Nashville on the McGavock
Place. These latter redeposit varieties vary in analysis from 50 per cent
to as high as 90 per cent phosphate, and are uncertain as far as the
general variety goes, though individual deposits varying in extent from
one to twenty or thirty acres, are found of very uniform quality.

The first phosphate rock discovered in Tennessee was the kidney formation
that almost always attends the blue rock and black shale deposit. The
eminent physician, naturalist, botanist and geologist, Dr. Gattinger, of
Nashville, of revered and beloved memory, was first to recognize these as
phosphate rock, but being much more interested in determining the family
and pedigree of some new beetle or plant than in the commercial aspect
of any mineral proposition, he never gave his discovery to the world,
and only by his casual mention of the fact one day to Will Shirley and
Maj. W. J. Whitthorne, of Columbia, are we able to give him credit for
the knowledge. Dr. Safford, in his “Geology of Tennessee,” describes in
detail both the blue and brown rocks geologically, referring to the blue
rock as a blue fossiliferous limestone nearly always occurring under the
Devonian shale; but no chemical investigations being provided for, he
did not find out that it was a phosphate rock. Major Whitthorne and Mr.
Shirley kept up a systematic hunt for a deposit of commercial value and
finally the former located one on upper Swan Creek simultaneously with
the discovery made lower down the same creek by Messrs. Bates and Childs.
These latter gentlemen were insistent that the black shale, commonly
called slate rock, so abundant in the highland rim country, was a form
of, or indicative of the proximity of, coal, and at regularly recurring
intervals they would send in particularly promising looking samples to
Professor Wharton, of Nashville, for analysis. One day they dropped into
their bag of samples a piece of blue rock which they informed Professor
Wharton was nearly always present under the “slate,” and seemed to be a
“bloom.” What was their astonishment to receive from Professor Wharton
the report that their coal was still worthless, but that their bloom was
phosphate rock, analyzing over 70 per cent. This was in December, 1893,
and like the news of William Tell in Switzerland, of old, “From hill to
hill the summons flew,” and the whole country went phosphate and option
mad.

Lack of transportation and timidity of capital, coupled with the
large amount of territory occupied by the deposit and the numerous
parties holding properties caused the development to be spasmodic and
comparatively small and scattered, and in consequence the price soon fell
from $4.25 per ton f. o. b. Aetna, which was the first sale, made by the
old Southwestern Phosphate Co., to $2.25 per ton, which was the price at
which blue rock guaranteed 65 per cent was sold in 1896, being just a
small margin over the cost of production and hauling to the railroad.

In January, 1896, at a time when negotiations were on foot for the sale
of a large tract of blue rock land on Swan Creek, Mr. S. Q. Weatherly,
former county judge, and prior to that county surveyor of Lewis County,
while on a trip to Mt. Pleasant, noticed the peculiar brown rock in the
ditch at the roadside on the W. S. Jennings’ farm west of Mt. Pleasant,
and being interested in minerals, picked up a piece of it. Noticing the
analagous appearance to the weathered blue rock, which is generally
brown on the surface, he dropped it in his buggy. On his return to Swan
Creek, he showed it to Mr. Harry Arnold and Col. D. B. Cooper, who were
interested in the negotiations above mentioned. These gentlemen had it
analyzed and finding it to be 75 per cent phosphate rock, induced Mr.
Weatherly to say nothing about it until after their deal was consummated.
Associated with these gentlemen was also Mr. W. J. Webster, and during
the time from January to July, 1896, when the negotiations for the
sale of the blue rock properties were finally closed, they ascertained
partially the extent of the Mt. Pleasant brown rock field.

When their “big trade” was made they formed the firm of H. I. Arnold
& Co., bought two and one-half acres of land from Mr. Mumford Smith,
ostensibly for a calf lot for Mt. Pleasant’s present genial mayor, Mr. W.
D. Cooper, leased at a royalty of ten cents per ton a few acres from Mr.
Cooper and a few from a darky named Tom Smith, got an option from Mrs. M.
G. Frierson on the present Columbian & Blue Grass Hills, and commenced
mining rock and putting it on the cars at a cost of about eighty-five
cents per ton. This rock, without preparation, ran 75 per cent instead of
65 per cent, but whereas the blue rock had never run higher than 3 per
cent I. & A., this rock ran, in the state they shipped it, from 4½ to 6
per cent I. & A.

Of course the manufacturers had bought blue rock for $2.25, and knew they
were getting it at very nearly the cost of production, and when they saw
the “snap” the miner had, they took the stick this excess of I. & A.
gave them and proceeded to beat the price down with it until $1.25 and
eventually $1.00 per ton were common prices.

Capitalists were rendered more timid than ever before, and even astute
phosphate man that he was Col. D. B. Cooper threw up both hands and quit.
He said, “Boys, if that is phosphate, the whole basin of Middle Tennessee
is full of it, and it will never be worth mining, as every farmer will
pick it up off the ground and haul it to the railroad.”

Mr. John S. O’Neal, in a paper presented to the Engineering Association
of the South, as late as 1897, said, “the owner of a bed of phosphate
rock, is not as well off as the owner of a sand bank, given the same
proximity to market.”

The poor fellows in the phosphate business, however, couldn’t get out,
and kept digging away, until gradually capital decided it was worth
buying the lands after all, and as a result nearly $2,000,000 has been
paid for property in the Mt. Pleasant field, about $500,000 in other
portions of Maury County, and over $1,000,000 for property in the
counties of Decatur, Perry, Lewis, Hickman, Giles, Williamson, Davidson
and Sumner. Rock has gradually advanced in price until now 65 per cent
blue rock sells at from $2.60 to $2.80 per ton, 75 per cent brown rock
at from $3.10 to $3.60 per ton and 78 per cent domestic (4½ I. & A.) at
$3.75 to $4.00, while 78 per cent export rock with 3 to 4 per cent I. &
A. sells for from $4.00 to $4.25 per ton.

As the prices have increased the cost of production has increased for one
reason and another, until now each ton of phosphate rock put on board
the cars represents an average cost in labor and salaries of $2.00 per
ton. The production for 1904 having been 540,000 tons, the wage earners
of Tennessee have profited by this industry to the extent of $1,080,000
during last year alone. On the other hand, fertilizer factories have
sprung up all through the interior of the country like magic, and as
they now get 75 per cent rock at their factory for less than the freight
they used to pay on 62 per cent rock from South Carolina, acid phosphate
is cheaper than ever before, and consequently the farmer gets cheaper
fertilizer or else better fertilizer for the same money.

The first thing which impresses itself on the mind of almost any visitor
to the phosphate fields is the almost universal dependence on hand labor
of the simplest pick and shovel kind. This is partially due to the fact
that they “just started that way,” and hence the most “experienced
laborers” have always done that way; and partially to the fact that after
sufficient capital was at hand for the purpose, the varying conditions
met with in the deposit made it very difficult to devise appliances
suitable for one portion of a mine that would answer the requirements in
the closely adjacent portions.

For instance, it is possible in the same open face of a mine to find the
overburden varying from two feet to twenty and the rock from a few inches
thick, sticking tight to the top of a lime boulder, to fifteen feet in
the “dip between two boulders,” while the rock itself will vary from the
shaly, partially disintegrated top rock through various sizes to heavy
blocks six to eight inches thick and often ten or twelve feet long.

It will therefore be seen how difficult it is to design a machine that
will accommodate itself to the handling of this material. The removal of
the overburden has been generally accomplished with wheel scrapers. Two
companies have used the New Era or Western machine plow with elevator
belt loading the dirt into dump bottom wagons alongside. Two steam
shovels are now in use, being of the traction type, and occasionally
these have been used in digging the rock, though apparently with not
sufficient success to justify its continuance. Cableways have never been
used to transport the material and this is done largely by wagon and
team, though many tram roads with cars propelled either by mules or dinky
engines are in use.

The bulk of the rock, however, is dug by the miner with pick and fork,
loaded into wagons, hauled out and dumped in windrows on the ground,
stirred with a potato plow and harrows, allowed to dry in the sun, taken
up again into wagons and hauled either direct to cars for shipping
or put under sheds for storage. When an extra good quality of rock is
wanted, as for export, a few layers of cordwood are put down and the
sun-dried rock put on that. Then, when ready to ship, the wood is fired,
and after the rock is cool, it is broken and loaded with forks, when most
of the dirt sloughs off, leaving the rock almost perfectly clean.

Some rock can be put from the mines immediately on the wood and burned
for export, but generally this will only be a safe domestic rock. Some
companies who have water accessible, pick out the large pieces and send
them direct to the dry kilns and then the small pieces with the dirt,
known as “muck,” are passed through washers, the rock coming out clean,
and being deposited on cordwood and burned as above described.

The resulting rock, after being crushed, is passed through screens which
separate it in three sizes, from one and one-half inch up going for
export, between that and one-fourth inch for domestic, and the dust and
one-fourth inch pieces being ground up and sold for direct use or to
small factories.

The Century Phosphate Co. has installed a system of dryers and do not
wash the rock, but dry it thoroughly in mechanical dryers and then screen
and separate it as above.

The reason the larger pieces are as a rule of higher grade than the
smaller, is that the dirt and impurity is mostly on the surface of the
rock and the greater the proportion of surface to volume the lower the
grade in B. P. L. and the higher in iron and alumina.

Owners and operators of mines are gradually turning their attention
to labor-saving devices for primary operations, and for systems of
reclaiming the immense amount of waste that has heretofore gone on, both
in the mining and the preparation of the rock.

One marked step forward in the business is the establishment of a
small mixing plant for making complete fertilizers, and the commencing
of operations on a large acid phosphate factory, with prospects for
additional ones later on.

At least ten per cent of the present output is thrown away to prepare
the high grade rock necessary, and this waste will make good 13 per cent
acid phosphate, so that every year 50,000 tons of valuable material is
absolutely thrown away. This is more phosphate rock than is annually
used by any one fertilizer factory in the world, so far as known to the
writer. This waste product could easily be transported to a local factory
for an average cost of less than 50 cents per ton. Sulphuric acid can be
bought laid down at Mt. Pleasant for $7 per ton. The mixing and other
preparation will not exceed $2 per ton, so that using half acid and half
rock the cost of the acid phosphate will not be more than $4.75 per ton,
while it will probably sell for at least $8 per ton. From these figures
we appear to be throwing into the waste pile at present material that
should represent a profit of not less than $162,500 per annum. That
this will be allowed to continue does not appear likely. The question
might arise, however, “What will you do with the acid phosphate thus
manufactured to keep from overcrowding or at least injuring the market?”
I should answer this by calling attention to the immense area of land
in Maury, Lawrence, Lewis and Hickman counties, known as “The Barrens,”
which are gradually being denuded of their timber for cordwood that is
shipped to Mt. Pleasant for use in drying the phosphate rock. There are
at least 250,000 acres of this land, which is now readily purchasable
at $3 per acre, with the cord wood on it. The wood alone will yield in
value more than this price, thus leaving the land clear. Now, it has been
demonstrated at Lawrenceburg, Summertown, Loretto, St. Joseph, Hohenwald
and numerous other places that systematic and intelligent farming, even
with the meager supply of fertilizer (almost entirely in the shape of
bone meal) that has been used, will bring these lands up to a point
where they will bring from fifteen to twenty bushels of wheat or from
twenty-five to thirty bushels of corn per acre. Such lands that have been
so brought up readily sell for from $10 to $40 per acre, according to
location.

From experiments it has been ascertained that the principal element of
plant food lacking in these soils is phosphoric acid. The application
of 275 pounds of acid phosphate per acre each year on these lands would
consume right at our doors the entire output of the proposed acid
factory, even if none were sold elsewhere. This appears chimerical to
the casual observer, I must confess, but a careful investigation will
demonstrate the soundness of the position taken.

A feature throwing some light on the development of the business at Mt.
Pleasant is shown by the following table:

The lengths of track built in each year are as follows:

                  L. & N. R. R.    Private Parties.

    Year.         Feet.   Miles.    Feet.   Miles.

    1896          200      .04
    1897        1,106      .21     10,343   1.96
    1898        4,403      .83      2,386    .45
    1899        4,857      .92     30,965   5.86
    1900       23,835     4.51     33,152   6.28
    1901          250      .05      1,364    .26
    1903                           29,040   5.50
               ------     ----    -------  -----
      Totals   34,651     6.56    107,250  20.31

In addition to these tracks, there are about six miles of narrow gauge
tracks and about eight or nine sidings and spurs have been built in
Lawrence County for loading cordwood for shipment to Mt. Pleasant.

In Hickman County, the N. C. & St. L. Ry. has built and acquired by
purchase from private owners about seven miles of track, which it is now
engaged in extending three miles farther up Swan and Blue Buck creeks,
and some five or six miles of private tracks have been built.

The following table shows the production of phosphate rock in Tennessee,
1894-1904:

                Quantity
    Year.     (Long tons).    Value.

    1894          19,188   $   67,158
    1895          38,515       82,160
    1896          26,157       57,370
    1897         128,723      193,115
    1898         308,107      498,392
    1899         462,561    1,272,022
    1900         450,856    1,352,568
    1901         394,139    1,186,033
    1902         454,078    1,341,161
    1903         445,510    1,434,660
    1904         540,000    1,944,000
                 -------    ---------
      Total    3,267,834   $9,428,639

With more or less frequency, according to whether the news supply
is sufficiently good to enable them to get “their per column,”
correspondents fire into the several papers of the State some sensational
head-liny article about the new “discovery of phosphate rock at
Crossroadsville, 5 to 40 feet thick, analyzing from 60 to 90 per cent
bone phosphate of lime.” For fear of being behindhand with the news all
the papers copy it, and before the report can be corrected to its proper
reality of from 6 to 9 per cent, it has been heralded to the four corners
of the earth and its effect on future and pending sales can better be
imagined than estimated.

If one will take the reports of the geological survey he will find that
every possible deposit of phosphate rock in the State is absolutely and
positively located. There will be no new discoveries. Of course there
will be much new development, but the location of such development will
have been discovered long before.

The principal localities in the State where operations are now in
progress, are: Mt. Pleasant, Kleburn, Jameson and Century, in Maury
County; Lower Swan Creek, Twomey and Totty’s Bend, in Hickman County;
near Gallatin, in Sumner County; Wales Station, in Giles County, and near
Nashville, in Davidson County.

The principal localities where developments will gradually take place
as the demands of the business require are: Southport, Estes Bend, Bear
Creek, Neeley’s Valley, Little Bigby, West Fork, *Baptist Branch and
*Leiper’s Creek, in Maury County; Richland Creek, in Giles County;
Station Camp Creek, in Sumner County; north and west of Franklin, in
Williamson County; Brentwood and Bellevue, in Davidson County; Beech
River, in Decatur County; Tom’s Creek, Buffalo River, *Hurricane Creek
and Cane Creek, in Perry County; *Forty-eight Mile Creek, in Wayne
County; *Upper Swan and *Indian Creek, in Lewis County; *Lower Swan,
*Indian Creek, Ship’s Bend, Gray’s Bend, Persimmon, Haleys and
*Leatherwood creeks, in Hickman County.

    * Blue rock.

Anything exploited outside of these known and designated deposits is
very apt to prove either a flash in the pan or will be found to be only
worked by the newspaper correspondents at so much per column.

Of the present working localities the principal one is Mt. Pleasant, and
while the property owners there are beginning to figure a little on how
much they have left, still the prevailing impression that Mt. Pleasant
is about through mining is an exceedingly mistaken one. With the present
rate of output, the visible supply of the Mt. Pleasant field proper
will last for seven years longer, without taking into consideration the
Southport field, which is practically part of the Mt. Pleasant field.
With the Southport field mining will last here at the present rate of
output for eleven years. It is very easy to understand that as work
progresses at Mt. Pleasant and the end comes more nearly in sight, some
miners drop out by selling, some by working out their small deposits and
these naturally go to the other fields above referred to. In none of the
other fields is found the persistently uniform high grade brown rock of
Mt. Pleasant except Southport, Century and Kleburn, in the two latter of
which operations are now in progress, and in the former the extension of
the Mt. Pleasant Southern Railway will soon cause development work there.

As these deposits afford practically the same grade of rock as Mt.
Pleasant proper, they will be worked out simultaneously with it and will
cater to the same market.

With their knowledge that the visible supply of this character of rock is
comparatively limited, producers are gradually increasing their prices,
and by reason of such increase they are slowly reducing their output and
giving opportunity for the marketing of the lower grades in the other
fields, notably the Swan Creek and Indian Creek deposits in Hickman
County.

This, of course, means that the producers at Mt. Pleasant will make more
money from their product, and that it will last a considerably longer
time, so that it is safe to say that mining in force will be carried on
at Mt. Pleasant and kindred localities for at least twenty years.

During the next decade, to supply the diminution of Mt. Pleasant’s
output, will come the gradual development of the vast blue rock field
of Maury, Hickman and Lewis counties, and the white rock of Perry and
Decatur counties, which form the backbone of the phosphate industry in
Tennessee, and whose millions of tons will cause these counties to be
considered the phosphate reservoir of the world for the next seventy-five
or one hundred years.

The change of base will be gradual and easy, and the trade will have
ample opportunity and time to adjust its operations so as to utilize the
lower grade blue rock as it becomes advisable and necessary to do so. Its
many points of superiority for acidulation and for direct use without
acidulation will largely make up for its lower grade, and as a mining
proposition it more nearly approaches a technical field of operation.

The blue rock field proper covers a territory bounded approximately by
a trapezoid having as its four corners Centreville, in Hickman County;
Kinderhook and Mt. Joy, in Maury County, and Lewis Monument, in Lewis
County. Traversing this territory are Duck River, Indian, Swan, Blue Buck
and Cathey’s creeks, and their tributaries, and outcropping along these
valleys and underlying the ridges between them are deposits of blue rock
running in bone phosphate from 60 per cent to 78 per cent, with less than
3 per cent iron and alumina, that will aggregate in the neighborhood of
40,000,000 tons.

This field will soon be developed by the extension of the Nashville,
Chattanooga & St. Louis branch up Swan Creek and the Louisville &
Nashville branch down Swan Creek, with side lines and spurs leading off
each, surveys for which have been made, and work on construction will
soon be under way.

If, however, the Florence Northern Railroad should ever be built from
Florence to Nashville it will run through the heart of this territory as
well as the magnificent iron deposits of Wayne and Lewis.

With the above road and a road from Huntsville on the southeast to Milan
on the northwest all of the phosphate territory would be fully developed,
and this section of Maury, Hickman, Lewis, Perry, Giles, Davidson and
Williamson counties would be the site of more fertilizer factories than
will be found elsewhere in the world in the same space.

Contributary to such prospective development is the present opening up of
pyrites deposits at Pyriton, near Talladega, Ala., with ore running two
to four units higher than the Virginia ores, and while from four to six
units lower than the best Spanish ores, it is much more free burning than
the latter, and with its advantage in freight rates, will likely give
manufacturers equally as good a product at a lower price.

The vein of pyrites is about one and one-half miles long and from four
to fifteen feet thick and has been exploited to a depth of 430 feet, the
ore improving in quality with the depth. It is reported by manufacturers
who have used it to be the freest burning pyrites ore known, leaving
only about ½ of 1 per cent of the sulphur in the cinder and containing
no deleterious ingredients. The deposits are controlled by the Alabama
Pyrites Company and the Southern Sulphur Ore Company, the latter owned by
Messrs. Carpenter & Howard, of Columbia, their vein running from eight to
fifteen feet thick. The railroad into this deposit has been built from
the Louisville & Nashville, at Talladega, a distance of twenty miles, at
a cost of nearly $400,000.

The consumption of fertilizers has increased 200 per cent in the United
States in the past twelve years, and while the visible supply of
phosphate rock is rapidly decreasing, the consumption of fertilizers
is almost as rapidly increasing, and with this fact in view, the large
fertilizer companies are and have been for several years gradually
buying up phosphate lands to provide themselves for the future. This
tendency has put a large amount of phosphate property in such strong
hands that little or no danger is possible of the old scramble to sell,
with its attendant low prices. At the same time, a considerable amount
of land valuable for its phosphate deposits is still uncontrolled by
manufacturers, so that a healthy competition in the business is still
open.

The amount of fertilizer used in Middle Tennessee is almost a minus
quantity, but this state of things cannot long exist. The horse worked
continuously without feeding soon dies, and so it will be, nay already
is, with much of our land in the “dimple of the universe.”

Farmers know that the crops of ten years ago cannot be raised to-day
and are all waking up to the fact that something is needed. The large
stock-raiser, who husbands his stable manure, can partially take care of
the thin spots on his land. But the small farmer, the backbone of the
country, whose acres do not afford him land sufficient to till and still
have the rich pastures necessary to raise much stock, contents himself
with simply wearing out his farm, selling it at a low price, generally
with the mediation of the sheriff, and moving elsewhere for better or
more probably for worse. To this class the use of fertilizer in Tennessee
is practically unknown, but their successors of the next few decades
will form, as is the case in other States, the bulk of the fertilizer
consumers, and when this comes to pass Tennessee will indeed have come
into her own.

The use of fertilizer in the cotton States has enabled the planters to
continue year after year to raise the enormous crops of cotton and has
also enabled them to diversify their crops by being able to produce the
same yield of cotton on a less number of acres.

So fertilizers will enable the Middle Tennessee farmers to raise the
same amount of feed on fewer acres, leaving more land to grow up to blue
grass, and our present greatly depreciated live stock interests will come
up by leaps and bounds until we will rival the famous blue grass section
of Kentucky, if we do not far outstrip it.

When one stops to consider (1) that the wheat crop alone annually
removes from the soil of the United States more phosphoric acid than
is the equivalent of twice the amount of phosphate rock produced in
the country; and (2) that over half of the amount mined is exported so
that the fertilizers used in the United States return to the soil only
one-fourth of the phosphoric acid that is taken away by the wheat crop
alone, without considering the other crops, we can readily see that the
consumption of fertilizer and phosphate rock not only will, but of right
ought to, enormously increase, and that the industry is a permanent
one that will last without cessation or danger of serious interruption
as long as the world eats bread. That it has been and still is being
developed almost entirely by outside capital is one of the features that
seems to attend the development of practically all the industries of the
State.

A complete analysis of a dry sample of average “brown rock,” which the
writer had made several years ago, may be of interest, and is as follows:

    Moisture                                .87
    Combined water and organic matter      1.53
    Sand and insoluble matter              2.76
    Peroxide of iron                       2.40
    Alumina                                1.99
    Lime                                  49.07
    Magnesia                                .24
    Carbonic acid                          1.08
    Equals carbonate of lime, 2.41.
    Fluorine                               2.98
    Sulphuric acid                         1.03
    Phosphoric acid                       35.62
    Equals bone phosphate of lime, 77.78.
                                          -----
        Total                             99.57

The rock which is exported from Tennessee goes to England, Scotland,
Ireland, Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Japan. The
domestic rock is consumed by the various fertilizer factories all over
that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, some of the
principal points being Philadelphia, Pa.; Buffalo, N. Y.; Cleveland and
Columbus, Ohio; Chicago, Ill.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Lynchburg, Staunton,
Norfolk and Richmond, Va.; Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn.;
Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, S. C.; Charlotte and Winston, N.
C.; Macon and Atlanta, Ga.; Meridian, Miss.; Birmingham, Montgomery and
Mobile, Ala.

In conclusion, a word might be appropriate on the subject of the direct
use of raw ground phosphate rock as a fertilizer, without acidulation.

The experiment stations of the great States of Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey have made exhaustive experiments
with this material, and their bulletins may be had by any farmer desiring
them, showing that this material has given results that prove it to be
more valuable for many soils than the acidulated phosphate. The great
State of Tennessee, on the other hand, without any practical experiments
to back it up, in the face of the opinions of some of its most eminent
chemists and experts, continues on its statute book an absolute
prohibition against the sale of this material within its borders.

Mr. Cyril Hopkins, of the Illinois Experiment Station, says that the
discovery of the Tennessee phosphate deposits is the greatest thing that
ever happened for the farmers of Illinois.

Each year many carloads of this material are shipped into other States
and wherever it has been used its use is spreading, yet these people have
to pay more in freight alone than it would cost the average Tennessee
farmer at his farm.

Immense deposits of this rock exist in Tennessee high enough in grade
to meet the requirements for direct use, and if this prohibition were
removed, almost every county seat in the sixth and seventh congressional
districts would have phosphate mills to supply the local trade, just as
they have flour mills.

The next Legislature should certainly correct the errors of the past by
allowing the Tennessee farmer to exercise the same amount of free agency,
common sense judgment as his fellows of the other States.

The principal mines in Tennessee are shown in the table on the following
page:

    --------+---------------------------------------------------------+
            |                          Operators.                     |
    County. +---------------------------------------+-----------------+
            |                                       |                 |
            |          Name                         |   Post Office   |
    --------+---------------------------------------+-----------------+
    Davidson|Charleston, S. C., Mining and Mfg. Co. |Charleston, S. C.| 1
    Hickman |American Cotton Oil Co.                |New York         | 2
    Hickman |Jarecki Chemical Co.                   |Cincinnati, O.   | 3
    Hickman |Meridian Fertilizer Fac.               |Meridian, Miss.  | 4
    Hickman |Rich & Hays Phos. Co.                  |Twomey           | 5
    Hickman |Rich & Hays Phos. Co.                  |Twomey           | 6
    Hickman |Swift & Co.                            |Chicago          | 7
    Hickman |Tenn. Blue Rock Phos. Co.              |Mt. Pleasant     | 8
    Hickman |S. M. Ward Mining Co.                  |Centerville      | 9
    Maury   |H. F. Alexander                        |Columbia         |10
    Maury   |H. F. Alexander & Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |11
    Maury   |Blue Grass Phos. Co.                   |Mt. Pleasant     |12
    Maury   |Central Phosphate Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |13
    Maury   |Central Phosphate Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |14
    Maury   |Central Phosphate Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |15
    Maury   |Central Phosphate Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |16
    Maury   |Charleston, S. C., Mining and Mfg. Co. |Charleston, S. C.|17
    Maury   |     ”         ”           ”           |Charleston, S. C.|18
    Maury   |     ”         ”           ”           |Charleston, S. C.|19
    Maury   |     ”         ”           ”           |Charleston, S. C.|20
    Maury   |Columbian Phos. Co.                    |Mt. Pleasant     |21
    Maury   |H. B. Battle                           |Winston, N. C.   |22
    Maury   |Federal Chemical Co.                   |Louisville, Ky.  |23
    Maury   |International Phos. Co.                |Columbia         |24
    Maury   |International Phos. Co.                |Columbia         |25
    Maury   |Maury Phos. Co.                        |Mt. Pleasant     |26
    Maury   |Petrified Bone Min. Co                 |Mt. Pleasant     |27
    Maury   |Swift & Co.                            |Chicago, Ill.    |28
    Maury   |Tenn. Chemical Co.                     |Nashville        |29
    Sumner  |Buffalo Fertilizer Co.                 |Buffalo, N. Y.   |30
    Sumner  |Smith Agr. Chem. Co.                   |Columbus, O.     |31
    Sumner  |Swift & Co.                            |Chicago, Ill.    |32
    Maury   |France & Co.                           |Mt. Pleasant     |33
    Maury   |Ruhm & Barrow                          |Mt. Pleasant     |34
    Hickman |N. Y. & St. L. Min. & Mfg. Co.         |Aetna, Tenn      |35
    Maury   |Globe Phos. Co.                        |Mt. Pleasant     |36
    Maury   |Century Phos. Co.                      |Mt. Pleasant     |37
    Maury   |Southport Phos. Co.                    |Mt. Pleasant     |38
    Hickman |Amer. Cot. Oil Co.                     |New York         |39
    Lewis   |Big Swan Phos. Co.                     |Mt. Pleasant     |40
    Hickman |Ruhm & Wheeler                         |Mt. Pleasant     |41
    Hickman |Killebrew, Ruhm & Co.                  |Mt. Pleasant     |42
    Perry   |Perry Phos. Co.                        |Columbia         |43
    Decatur |Beech River Phos. Co.                  |Nashville        |44
    Lewis   |Charleston M. & Mfg. Co.               |Mt. Pleasant     |45
    --------+---------------------------------------+-----------------+
    +-----------------+-------------------+-------------
    |                 |     Holdings.     | Character of
    |  Name of Tract  +-----------+-------+   mining:
    |    or Mine      |    How    |No. of | Underground
    |                 |    Held   | Acres | or surface.
    +-----------------+-----------+-------+-------------
   1| Caldwell        |    Fee    |    65 | Surface.
   2| Gregory         |    Fee    |   125 | Both.
   3| Ratliff         |    Fee    |   300 | Both.
   4| Laverick        |    Fee    | 2,280 | Under’gr’d.
   5| Brown           |    Fee    |    50 | Surface.
   6| Wiss            |   Lease   |    40 | Both.
   7| Eason           |    Fee    |    60 | Both.
   8| Fogg            |   Lease   |   200 | Under’gr’d.
   9| McGill          |   Lease   |   500 | Both.
  10| Jameson         |           |       | Surface.
  11| Mt. Pleasant    |           |       | Surface.
  12| Blue Grass      |   Lease   | 1,000 | Surface.
  13| Dawson          |           |       | Surface.
  14| Kittrell        |   Lease   |   125 | Surface.
  15| Harris          |           |       | Surface.
  16| Long            |    Fee    |   140 | Surface.
  17| Arrow           |    Fee    |   690 | Surface.
  18| Howard          |    Fee    |   182 | Surface.
  19| McMeen          |    Fee    |   540 | Surface.
  20| Ridley          |    Fee    |   319 | Surface.
  21| Columbian       |    Fee    |    60 | Surface.
  22| Battle          |    Fee    |    84 | Surface.
  23| Tenn. Phos. Co. |    Fee    | 1,200 | Surface.
  24| Solita          |    Fee    |   110 | Surface.
  25| Satterfield     |    Fee    |   275 | Surface.
  26| Moore           |    Fee    |   264 | Surface.
  27| Petrified       |    Fee    |   220 | Surface.
  28| Bailey          |   Lease   |   361 | Surface.
  29| Douglass        |    Fee    |   250 | Surface.
  30| Watkins         |    Fee    |   250 | Surface.
  31| Sumner Phos. Co.|    Fee    | 1,500 | Surface.
  32| Guthrie         |    Fee    |   321 | Surface.
  33| Goodloe         |    Fee    |    40 | Surface.
  34| Sedberry        |    Fee    |   130 | Surface.
  35| Peery           |    Fee    | 7,000 | Under’gr’d.
  36| American        |    Fee    | 2,500 | Surface.
  37| Harlan          |Lease & Fee| 1,000 | Surface.
  38| Southport       |    Fee    |   943 | Surface.
  39| Gilmer          |    Fee    |   200 | Both.
  40| Walker          |    Fee    |   600 | Under’gr’d.
  41| Harvill         |    Fee    |   736 | Under’gr’d.
  42| Rochell         |    Fee    |   541 | Both.
  43| Tom’s Creek     |    Fee    |   500 | Under’gr’d.
  44| Parsons         |    Fee    | 1,000 | Surface.
  45| Mayfield        |    Fee    |   500 | Under’gr’d.
  --+-----------------+-----------+-------+-------------




A History of the Hals

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE


CHAPTER II.

THE PACER’S FAST DEVELOPMENT.

    De Record’s Gwine Down.

    De pat’idge is in de cohn-field, his courtin’ days am pas’,
    He am waitin’ fur de hunter wid his gun and whiky flas’,
    De squirl’s in de hickernut, de shell am droppin’ ’roun’,
    But de pacer’s still de racer, and
                                de
                                  record’s
                                    gwine
                                      down!

    De coon am up de white-oak, an’ de price er powder’s riz,
    He am layin’ up de coon-grease dat am good fur rheumatiz.
    De ’possum’s way up yonder whar de wild grape’s turnin’ brown,
    But de pacer holds de market, and
                              he
                                keeps
                                  dat
                                    record
                                      down!

    Oh, ebery thing am risin’, and’ hog-meat’s in de sky,
    E’en de chickens got de panic an’ hev gone to roostin’ high!
    De onliest thing dat’s fallin’—an it makes de trotter frown—
    Am de pacin’ race-horse record, and
                              dat
                                keeps
                                  on
                                    gwine
                                      down!

    OLD WASH.

The achievements and development of the pacer in the past ten or fifteen
years, since the advent of the Hals, and the swift tribe of trotting-bred
pacers, has been so marked and so great that a special chapter is needed
for its explanation. The old “side-wheeler” has gone—the new, beautifully
gaited, true striding pacing race horse has taken his place. No other
feature of a race meeting brings out the crowd and the enthusiasm equal
to the free-for-all pace. Never before had such races been witnessed
as those first seen in the days of the Big Four—the queen of which was
Mattie Hunter 2:12½, the first great Hal mare to attract the attention
of the world. She was the star of the Big Four, the others being Blind
Tom, Lucy and Rowdy Boy. Later, some of the great free-for-allers were
Little Brown Jug, Brown Hal, Hal Pointer, Robert J, Direct, Joe Patchen,
John R Gentry and many others whose names will be readily remembered by
every horseman. The very mention of these names brings a thrill to the
heart as, toward the last of the century, Robert J, John R. Gentry and
Joe Patchen and Star Pointer began to bring the pacing record to the
two-minute mark. This was first done by Star Pointer, an inbred Hal,
crossed again and again in the thoroughbred blood which, undoubtedly,
gave to the Hals the staying power so characteristic of the family. And
so, looking back, the following article, written by Trotwood December 29,
1892, seems prophetic—that is, if there were such a thing as prophecy.
But, alas, there is not, for prophecy is merely another name for the
cause of the future as foreseen in the present’s effect. And though this
was written thirteen years ago, it is embodied into this history, as
fitting so well the present:

“There can no longer be any doubt that the pacer, as a future product on
the light harness race course, will be a still stronger factor than he
is to-day. Even if desired, it is now not possible to eliminate him from
the light harness breeding world. He has come to stay. It matters not
to us whether the honest, but sturdy, rascal can trace his ancestors to
Marsh’s five-toed orohippos, weighing about forty pounds, and which had
all he could do to keep out of the way of Darwin’s “missing link,” and
thus save himself from drudgery, even before the days of the Silurian
serpents, or whether he was developed in Trojan wars as carved on the
frieze of Grecian temples; the fact remains the same, that to-day he is
here by a large majority, and though snubbed by his more aristocratic
brother, he persistently refuses to stay behind in the procession, and
is never happier than when he can get up a good, rattling fight in a
five-heat race, or stick his common, but inquisitive, nose a few seconds
beyond the trotting record securely placarded on the front of old Father
Time. Flung into the world without prestige, friends or influence; his
coming regarded as the epitome of a breeder’s ill luck; condemned before
he was born, and damned before he could walk; a little too good to kill,
yet hardly good enough to be allowed a square meal once a week that he
might grow up like any other horse; toe-weighted and hobbled and banged
about, and forced to trot in spite of the laws of nature herself, yet the
game and honest little fellow, when relieved of his owner’s prejudices
and hobbles, has flown to the front with the ease of a swallow through
the air and the grace of a game fish in the lake, and now holds the first
record for speed and the chief place on the program in the eye of a grand
stand that paid its way to see an honest horse race.

“It is the old story of the rejected stone, and he now holds up with
surprising popularity his corner of the race horse structure. And yet
twenty years ago a pacer was scarcely allowed on a fashionable race
course; his pedigree, they said, took to the woods on the first cross;
he was regarded by the trotting world as a camel-backed, cat-hammed,
narrow-chested, curby-legged beast who paced because he couldn’t trot,
and was alive because nobody cared to buy powder enough to kill all of
them in the woods of Tennessee and Kentucky. He was allowed to exist on
the race course very much on the same idea that a slave is allowed to
breathe the same air and view the same heaven his master does. He began
his career because he was a good kind of an animal to have around to do
the race act at the pumpkin show and come in along with the fat woman and
the five-legged calf. His coming to the front was his own work; and to
use a classical phrase, he was purely the architect of his own fortune.
The American people are a long time finding out merit, but nothing helps
them to see it as quickly as the image of the American eagle stamped on
the back of a silver dollar—and this the pacer has shown them.

“Despite the oft-repeated theory of ‘the Canadian pacer,’ there is no
doubt that the pacer as now found in Kentucky, Tennessee and the West
came originally from the older Atlantic States, such as Virginia and
the Carolinas, and that he was brought there by our forefathers from
England. The fact that there are pacers in Canada merely proves that in
that Dominion also they have been brought from the mother country. To
trace their origin in England is both a tedious task and a most uncertain
one. Yet, from the best information obtainable, there appears to be but
little doubt that the pacer was originally a product of Spain, where
many years ago he was bred in the purple as a pleasure animal for the
nobility of Andalusia and other Spanish states. In fact, it is more
than probable that he was bred with more care than was bestowed by the
Spanish upon their now favorite animal—the ass. We know that the pacer
was safely domiciled in England as far back as the Norman Conquest, for
in ‘Ivanhoe,’ written by that most painstaking scholar and novelist, Sir
Walter Scott—a man who wrote truer to nature and with as much historic
accuracy as any novelist who has ever lived in England—we find many
allusions to the pacer under the style of the palfrey and the ambler.

“The following is an extract from Ivanhoe, Chapter II., the scene being
in the time of Richard I. In reading it we must remember that the name
jennet did not mean then as now the female of an ass, but it meant the
palfrey which the lay brother was riding. Says Sir Walter: ‘This worthy
churchman rode upon a well-fed, ambling mule, whose furniture was highly
decorated and whose bridle, according to the fashion of the day, was
ornamented with silver bells.... A lay brother, one of those who followed
in the train, had for his use on other occasions one of the most handsome
Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time
to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth
and distinction. The saddle and housings of this superb palfrey were
covered by a long boat cloth which reached nearly to the ground, and on
which were richly embroidered mitres, crosses and other ecclesiastical
emblems.’

“From other writings of Sir Walter Scott we find that the knight usually,
when not in battle, rode upon an ambler, and a page, riding also upon the
same kind of a horse, led the knight’s large war horse, with his armorial
trappings. The fact that in the above extract the mule also paced, goes
to show how strong must have been the pacing instinct in his dam, being
able to overcome entirely the gait of the ass. But to go further into
the history of the pacer in England would be foreign to the ends of this
brief article.

“We will only add that in spite of the fact that many English breeders
assert that not a pacer has been kept in that country for many years,
yet we believe that this is not true and that there are many of them
there to-day. But to return to our own pacer. It is quite easy to trace
his career as he came from the mother colonies, spreading out through
Kentucky, Tennessee and the States of the Northwest, under the name of
the ‘saddle horse,’ by which name he was held in the highest esteem and
filled an humble but most important position in the pioneer work of State
making. Before the roads were cut out through the forests, and when only
blazed Indian paths were the highways of the country, he was an absolute
necessity, and to-day there belongs to him the proud honor of having been
the first common carrier of American civilization. He was with Marion
and Sumter in their partisan warfare in the Carolinas; he saw, no doubt,
with patriotic emotion, the ignoble surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown;
he followed the intrepid Boone across the Alleghanies into Kentucky,
and came along with the immortal Jackson—the man of destiny—into the
‘basin of middle Tennessee.’ Pulling the plow for an honest living
in the rich cornfields during the week, he carried the women and the
children on his back to the primitive church on Sunday. As civilization
advanced he improved with it, being crossed with thoroughbred blood
in rich profusion, until to-day his lines of breeding are thoroughly
established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from
the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed
king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing,
and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the
grand stand.

“A scrub, indeed! He was here fighting for independence and an honest
living when the forefathers of the Wilkes and Almonts—since old imp.
Messenger is regarded as the fountain head—were courting the favor
of royalty in England ‘that thrift may follow fawning,’ or carrying
soup-drinking Britons on their jolting backs to the wharves of Liverpool,
to be shipped over here as food for Tennessee rifles at New Orleans.
Plebian, did you say? Why, he ought to be pensioned. He is older and more
respectable than the Dutch governors of New York and has a greater claim
to patriotism than half of the pensioners who never smelled the smoke of
battle.

“In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since
the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is
destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace
his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native
stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of
the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there
is no doubt in the world. And that this thorough blood has been as good,
if not better, than that in old Messenger himself, is also true. But the
astonishing thing about this amalgamation is the very small per cent of
pacing blood it required to leaven the thoroughbred loaf. A pacing sire
bred to a running mare and that offspring to another running mare, and so
on for several generations, will end with the last, as with the first, in
getting a ‘saddler.’

“We have always regarded this fact as the strongest evidence of the
intensity of the pacing instinct—an instinct that has such a pure and
strong fountain-head somewhere that it is able to overcome the running
instinct, though crossed and recrossed upon the pure running blood, is
abundant evidence of its own purity and prepotency. And the fact that
so many fast pacers are continually thrown from the trotting ranks, now
commonly called ‘trotting-bred pacers,’ is but another illustration
of the same fact. Verily, back somewhere in the past the pacer was a
thoroughbred at his way of going. His remote ancestor, whether in the
myths of fables, or in the woods of northern Germany, or the vine-clad
hills of Spain, or around the frozen lakes of Canada, was an Alexander, a
Julius Caesar and a Napoleon Bonaparte, all in one, in the greatness and
gameness of his gait. How else could the fact that every great family of
trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory?
The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to
mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact
remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters
does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on
the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity
of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait; and
we are also led to believe that it often requires but a small portion of
pacing fluid to overcome several generations of the diagonal gait in the
veins of the trotting-bred horse.

“Take from the trotting ranks those out of mares or descendants of mares
by old Pilot, Jr., and other pacers, and the truth of this assertion
will be most plainly seen. In fact, every noted family of trotters, such
as the Wilkses and the Almonts—wherever there is any pacing blood, even
away back in the fourth and fifth generation—have to the credit of that
family some pacer who is faster at his way of going than the star trotter
of that family is at his. No Hambletonian trotter has ever attained the
speed that has been shown by Direct, unless it be Nancy Hanks, who has
some pacing blood in her own royal veins and is inclined to pace a bit
herself; nor has any Almont trotter ever equalled Flying Jib and hosts
of others we might mention. Among the Wilkses they are thicker than the
leaves of Valambrosa, until one is forced to believe that the Clay
blood, if such it was, in the pedigree of George Wilkes was about as good
as any the great horse had in his veins.

“These facts being true, it is evident that the pacer is not a scrub.
If he is a scrub, then we are forced to the conclusion that nothing
in all the breeding world may be likened to the intensity of his
cold-bloodedness. This scrub blood overcomes the hot running blood,
though continually diluted for successive generations; and it needs only
a little of it to knock out the hopes of the bluest blooded trotter
descended from Hambletonian lines. If he is a scrub, then he is the
veritable ‘original sire’ of the scrub horse business, which, like that
in man, is ever on top. But as this sin of the pacer helps him to the
wire first, and has given him the harness records of the world, we trust
no trotting moralist will attempt to entirely obliterate it. We don’t
need any crucifixions there! To our mind, we believe that if the curtain
of the past could ever be unrolled upon the pacers of old we would find
that centuries ago he was bred for no other way of going, and bred so
long and so purely and so consistently that in him has been planted an
instinct that will never be obliterated. To argue that a cold-blooded
horse can be thus preponent is to argue against the well-known laws of
heredity!

“In the second place, the pacer has undoubtedly come to stay. The
American people are nothing if not quick in realizing real merit and
honoring it when clearly proven. As they make no pretensions to the shams
of royalty, so are they not bound by the iron rules of court custom from
‘hustling’ to horse-racing. They do not care for so much trappy action;
nor does the matter of a banged tail cut as much of a figure in their
calculations as does the intense patriotism which lies within them for
their own almighty dollar. Passing over the generally admitted fact that
the pacer is naturally faster than the trotter, comes to his speed more
quickly, may be more evenly matched in a race, and is preserved longer by
reason of the smoothness of his gait, there is yet another cause why the
pacer is destined to become more popular.

“A great English commoner, whose ire had been aroused on one occasion by
a member of the House of Lords, in reply, in a speech of burning oratory,
spoke of the aforesaid gentleman as being in his titled position merely
by reason of the fact that he was ‘the accident of an accident.’ There is
no doubt that Hambletonian 10, the present head of the trotting family,
was even more of an accident than the English lord was. Bellfounder
mares of trotting propensities were rarer than imported Messengers, and
if the mating of Abdallah with this mare was not an accident, but the
plan of a thoughtful intellect looking to the future, the descendants of
the man who thought it out should have risen up and told it last month,
that their forefathers might have been honored along with Columbus at
the opening of the World’s Fair. Now the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ is quite
an accident himself. He is here by reason of the fact that many trotting
breeders in their wild vagaries and theories regarding the best way to
breed a trotter, ranging all the way, in the theory of breeding, from
thoroughblood to jackass, have accidentally honored a few thousand
pacing mares with a service to some of their Hambletonians. As a result
the ‘trotting-bred’ pacer is with us. As it is quite impossible for the
trotting turf to get rid of this rascal if they wished to, and as he has
managed to be quite a game and fast money-making machine himself, he has
clinched the popularity of the pacer as a pacer and has stuck a peg in
the map of popular favor that would be hard to be removed.

“And it is safe to say that by reason of the blood of Pilot, Jr., Clay,
Blue Bull, Tom Hal, Pocahontas and many others being so generally
distributed in the pedigrees of trotters, the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ will
continue to come from such trotting sources in the future in geometrical
proportion and to pace in the same ratio. What will be done with them?
Each one, with speed, is simply a money-making machine, and his owner
will not be long in putting him at the work which nature cut out for
him. To destroy him merely because he paces belongs to the dark ages when
the pacing gait was one which made no money, but now, since the pacing
purses have gotten to be so liberal and getting more so each year, it
is only common sense to suppose that owners of pacing horses will begin
to take more pains in their development and their breeding. This will
improve their speed. As it is now, we do not suppose there is a betting
horseman alive who would not give large odds that the pacer will be the
first two-minute horse.

“And in this connection another thing must be taken into consideration.
The pacer’s gait has itself been greatly improved in the last ten
years. He is no longer the rotary-motioned mud-flinger of old, whose
forefeet pawed the air in circles parallel with and above his ears, while
his hind feet described semicircles over the ground, but he is now a
smooth-gaited, straightforward, quick-actioned fellow, with plenty of
knee action in front and the stride of a bullfrog behind, and at his
highest speed it requires more than a glance for one to say whether
he is trotting or pacing. In other words, the pacer has come to be a
well-rounded, symmetrical and well-bred horse. His gait is the poetry of
harness motion, his courage is unquestioned and his staying qualities,
especially with the pacing-bred ones, of whom we are more familiar, are
equal to those of any horse that ever stretched his neck in the home
stretch. In view of these facts it doesn’t require even the grandson of a
prophet to predict he is destined to a still greater career on the light
harness race course.

“We can only judge the future by the past and the present, and with that
in view from a study of the 2:20 list, which a most exclusive list in the
light harness race course, we are startled with the enviable position the
despised side-wheeler holds in that charmed circle this season. There can
be no sham in the 2:20 list. A horse must be able to trot or pace that
enters it. Up to November 15 there were, according to the statistics at
my command, 189 new 2:20 performers; and by new performers we mean horses
that had no record as good as 2:30 trotting or 2:25 pacing before the
opening of this season. Of these 189 new 2:20 performers we find that
the pacers constitute 128 of the number, while the trotters are credited
with sixty-one. This table includes but seven pacers that have lowered
their records from the 2:30 list last year to the 2:20 list this year,
and we use it to get at the number of green horses to enter this list,
and _from_ it we are able _to form_ a more correct idea of the material
coming fresh from both ranks. It cuts off such stars as Kremlin, Stamboul
and Nancy Hanks among trotters, as well as Hal Pointer, Mascot, Guy,
Direct and Storm among pacers.

“But a still more exclusive list is the 2:15 class, and in order to
show your readers what has been accomplished by the new material from
the pacing ranks this year as compared with the same material from the
trotters, we publish that list in full, and in a spirit of generosity we
place the despised pacer on the left in the goat’s place. The fact that
it looks something like the last electoral college, with Cleveland on the
pacer’s side, need not lead any one to think we are at all partisan in
this matter.

“New pacers with records of 2:15 or better:

    Flying Gib      2:05¾
    Jay-Eye-See     2:06¼
    W. Wood         2:07
    Robert J.       2:09¾
    San Pedro       2:10¾
    Wisconsin King  2:11
    Online 2        2:11
    Walnut Boy      2:11½
    Ella Brown      2:11¼
    Cleveland S     2:11¾
    Prima Donna     2:11¾
    Colbert         2:12¼
    Dandy O         2:12½
    Charley Ford    2:12½
    La Belle        2:12½
    John R. Gentry  2:12¾
    Gilileo Rex     2:12¾
    Expert Prince   2:13¼
    Fleetfoot       2:14
    Henry O         2:14
    Eclectic        2:14
    To Order, 2     2:14
    Rebus           2:14¼
    Clint Cliff     2:14½
    Joe Jett        2:14½
    Chris Smith     2:14½
    Lydia Wilkes    2:14½
    Diabolo         2:14¾
    Merry Chimes    2:14¾
    Nuthurst        2:14¾
    Bob             2:15
    Alhambra        2:15
    Blondine        2:15
    Wardell         2:15

“New trotters with records of 2:15 or better:

    Directum        2:11¼
    Muta Wilkes     2:14¼
    Azote           2:14½
    Hulda           2:14¾

“Total number of pacers not having a record of 2:30 or better in 1891,
but now having a record of 2:15 or better, thirty-four; total number
of trotters, four. Finally, when we consider the fact that a very much
larger number of trotters are trained, or attempted to be trained, than
pacers, these figures become still more expressive of the great future
possibilities lying within the pacer’s reach at a light harness race
horse.”

What wonderful progress has been the pacer’s since the above was written!
If we were to attempt to publish the 2:15 list to-day, it would take the
next issue of the Monthly, there being now about five thousand, while the
2:10 list surpasses belief. Three of them have paced miles better than
two minutes, and such names as Star Pointer, Joe Patchen, John R. Gentry,
Direct, Robert J. and others have made the turf bright with glorious
deeds. Truly the pacer’s development surpasses even prophecy!

(To be continued.)

       *       *       *       *       *

The Past is Yesterday’s present. Remember it as you build to-day.




Do Farmers Think?

By S. W. WARFIELD.


This pertinent question was suggested by a conversation between a young
farmer—a college graduate—and a young man who had just received his
diploma from one of the leading agricultural colleges of the country.
When questioned by the former as to what vocation he expected to follow,
the latter said: “I guess I’ll be a farmer, because farmers don’t have
to think.” Was the young man correct? After a day’s journey through the
country a very observant and thoughtful man will be forced to acknowledge
that a great many farmers do not seem to think. The amount of high-priced
machinery allowed to rust and ruin in the fields, the haphazard way in
which grain and hay is stacked, the utter indifference displayed in
plowing land and laying off rows, the disregard that is paid to the
washing away of the soil, soil that was thousands of years in forming,
the fertility of which depends upon the actions of the elements for
generations; a soil that, when once gone, is gone forever. We are forced
to admit that all farmers do not think. When we see farmers burning straw
stacks or filling gullies with manure, which will soon rot, float off and
carry all accumulated soil with it, we know in that particular they do
not think. For when a gully is stopped with manure, it is only a question
of time before it will have to be stopped again, and the next time the
task will be greater, for there will not be much adjoining soil with
which to stop it.

When we see a farmer delving with his whole household from daybreak till
dark, denying his children the privilege of a common school education,
trusting to luck and brawn to carry them through life, we have another
illustration of a farmer who does not think. For if he would but think,
he would realize that his sons, after he was dead and gone, would prove
easy victims to the oily tongued sharper and his hard-earned dollars
would go soon to swell the coffers of another man’s son.

A great many farmers do not think, and to them rightly belongs the
disrespectful epithets of “Reuben” and “Hay-seed.”

Admitting the foregoing, we are glad to know that there are a great many
farmers who keep abreast the times, are thoughtful and studious men.

With the vast area of fertile soil capable of producing vastly more of
any crop than is needed, which fact is almost every year proven, with
a herd of middlemen manipulating the crop reports and combining to put
and keep prices down; with this country a network of railroads, one
and all of them clamoring for freight to haul; with shrewd managers
to concoct the “rebate scheme” to counteract the “Interstate Commerce
Law” and “Railroad Commission,” put the farmer of any section in direct
competition with the whole country. When the above facts are considered,
it certainly behooves every farmer to “think” and study so that the
thinking will be on sure footing.

No matter what the past has been, the day of haphazard farming for
success and competency is gone. Farming to-day is a scientific problem,
and a problem that requires all the thought that can be bestowed upon
it. Not a thought for to-day or to-morrow, but long-headed thought that
studies the supply and demand of the year ahead before planting largely
of any one crop or launching into any new enterprise. He must study the
supply and price before he can tell whether to hold wheat or longer feed
his cattle; must know the needs and study the rotation to get the best
results from each crop; must think to be able to properly harvest and
care for each crop as it matures; must think how best to become his own
financier, and not be controlled by any bank or supply merchant. He must
think to live on what he makes and make all that he needs.

The life of a shrewd, thoughtful farmer is the most independent in the
world—a life that the followers of all trades and professions yearn
for, a life acquired only by thought. So, in answering the question, Do
farmers think? we’ll say, If they succeed, they do.




Nature Nuggets

By H. ALISON WEBSTER.


The sexuality of plants has been known from the time of Camerarius, 1691;
and yet, what farmer looks to the strains of the seeds he plants? How
many farmers buy their seed corn in the ear? The fact that like begets
like should never be overlooked.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nature’s secrets, to a great extent, have been revealed, but if the
practical man be not acquainted with the things revealed, to what avail
their revelations? Until teacher and practical farmer are congenial in
the full sense of the word, the power of the soil will remain unknown.

       *       *       *       *       *

Plants drink and do not eat: therefore, Nature, although robbed by man
of many methods, and now needing man’s assistance, still provides means
of converting insoluble elements into drinkable or water-soluble foods.
All insoluble foods brought to the surface by plowing are decomposed by
freezes, frosts and snows, and are acted upon by carbonic acid, other
acids, oxygen and carbonate of lime. Again, if the soil be properly
conditioned rains will carry the acids, oxygen and lime down below the
surface to accomplish the same end. After the end is accomplished, the
soluble foods are brought back to the plants by capillary attraction.
Humus should be in the soil to hold the moisture or foods coming from
above and below.

       *       *       *       *       *

System breeds success, neglected details, failure.

       *       *       *       *       *

Farming needs brains as well as brawn; furthermore, it offers far greater
opportunities for brains than do the overcrowded professions of the
cities.

       *       *       *       *       *

Buy for cash, and you will get more and need less.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are known by our faults and judged by the errors we make.

[Illustration]




Wouldst Thou Succeed?


    Wouldst thou succeed? Then master each detail,
      Hold them in hand as reinsmen hold their steeds,
      Firmly, yet urge them on. Let no false needs
    Slip up on right or left and make bewail.
    Onward—drive them yet onward, and prevail
      Ere Doubt shall sow her hesitating seeds
      To flower in Failure rank or other breeds
    Of Mishap, Chance and Ill-luck that assails.

    Wouldst thou succeed? Finish the work in hand
      Nor dabble here and there while Time goes on
    And naught is done—and one by one the sand
      Of moment, turns to heaps of hours gone.
    Finish—Finish—at the dawn of light
    ’Twas stamped in stars across the perfect night.

                                JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

[Illustration]




Stories of the Soil

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


War Babies.

The most gigantic struggle of modern times was the American Civil War.
In no other country but this, with its breadth of conservativeness and
its dearth of caste, could the bitterness of such a war have been so
quickly forgotten. As it is in a few more decades, if the same spirit of
good feeling continues to prevail, and the fanatics be allowed to die a
natural death, it will be a question as to which side will have the most
respect for the brave men of the other. A striking feature of the great
war, to me, has always been the unanimity with which the entire country,
with the probable exception of the military leaders themselves, expected
the war to speedily terminate. In the South the enlisted men all feared
it would end before they had time to get into a rousing good battle, and
the same feeling appears to have existed among the Northern volunteers.

As an illustration of this feeling in the South, in talking to an old
farmer the other day, and he a gallant cavalryman, who belonged to
Forrest’s immortal command, he laughingly remarked, that the greatest
number of colts he ever saw at one time was a certain Tennessee cavalry
regiment the first year after the war. “You see,” he said, “none of us
expected the war to last over three or six months, and never dreamed it
would go over a year. Nearly every man in our regiment went in on his pet
saddle mare or half thoroughbred, and fully two-thirds of us were horse
breeders, on a greater or less scale, while at home. But the war went on,
we were ordered here and there, hundreds of miles from home with plenty
of fighting and little else to think of. We were kept so busy that many
of us, in fact, had forgotten all about the spring breeding, and would
have been glad if it had forgotten about itself. But not so; the next
spring there came the colts—war babies, to be sure—dropped into a hard
world at a cruel and unmotherly time, and before we knew it our regiment
had more colts than we knew what to do with. I had to send my mare home
and get a fresh mount, and the others traded around, or left dam and
colt to shift for themselves in strange and foreign lands. I have often
wondered what became of that crop of colts, the first breeding venture of
our regiment.”


A Contest in the King’s English.

There is a young darky downtown, at a livery stable, who has been priding
himself on his ability, as he expressed it, “ter fling English.” But he
takes no pride in it any more. Old Wash cured him, and it happened this
way:

“Wheneber I goes down dar arter yo’ mare,” the old darky said, “dis heah
young niggah gins ter fling his English ’roun’ scan’lus. I tell you,
boss, I’m gittin’ tired ob dat, an’ I’m gwi’ teach ’im how ter talk
English sho’ nuff some day. I sw’ar to you, sah,” said the old man, as he
mopped his face with his red handkerchief, “It’s so hot I’ve mighty nigh
multerplied, an’ I’ve got de commissary rumertism, ter boot; but jes you
watch out fur me de naixt time dat nigger ’gins ter fling his jaw-bone
’roun’ whar I’m standin’—jes you watch me riddle ’im wid sintax an’
orfrography an’ sich! Jes you watch!”

For several days after that I noticed the old man studying an old Davies
Geometry and an obsolete work on synonyms, which I had sent to the attic
long ago—looking, as he expressed it, for “some good cuss-words to fit de
’casion.” But I had forgotten all about it until one evening I drove into
the stable with him. A sprightly young darky ran out, took the mare by
the bit, and patronizingly remarked:

“Gentermen, condescen’ to disintergrate frum de vehicle, an’ de quadruped
shall hab my unqualified solicertashun, wid abundance ob nutrititious
ellerments.” And he smirked at the old man as much as to say: “Don’t dat
parlyze you, old man?”

“Hold on dar,” exclaimed Old Wash, and his eyes flashed as he rose
quickly to the occasion: “Sonny,” he began witheringly, “it is
transparent to de interlactual apprehension ob eny disinterested
individual dat de gravertashun of special conceits described on de
hypotonuse of your simeon-headed eclipse, am entirely too cumbershum fur
de horizontal vinculum dat circumscribes de radius ob yo’ cocoanut-shaped
trapezium, sah!”

“Wha—wha—what dat you say, Unker Wash?” gasped the young darky as his jaw
began to drop.

“I merely riz ter interjec’ de mental reservashun,” remarked the old man
indifferently, “dat de interlectual hemmerage of verbosity procedin’ from
de vacuum produced by de metermorphosis ob de origonal superstructure
of de san’-stones ob yo’ cranium, am entirely incumpatabul wid de
consterpastion of ideas generated by de paralysis ob yo’ interlectual
acumen, sah!”

“Gord, what is he sayin’?” remarked the young negro sheepishly to the
crowd that had gathered to enjoy his discomfiture.

“In udder words,” shot out the old man again, “ter make hit entirely
incomprehensibul to de conglommerated hypothesis ob yo’ trapezoidal
interlec’, I simply remarked dat de corporeal superfluerty ob yo’
physical insigniferkance am entirely too cumbersome fur de belly-band ob
yo’ mental confermashun, sah!”

Here the crowd shouted, the young darky’s eyes looked like moons, his
legs shook, and he gasped out: “Wha—wha—what dat old man talkin’ ’bout,
man?”

“How long since this nigger wus cotch in the jungles of Africa,”
asked Old Wash quietly of the proprietor of the stable, “dat he can’t
understan’ de simples’ remark in de plaines’ of English?”

And then the old man tried again. He rolled up his sleeves, and with the
air of one who was trying to make himself exceedingly plain he began
laying it off on his fingers and palm:

“Sonny, de equilateral altertude of de comprehenserbility ob my former
observations wus to de effect dat, if in de course of a cummercial
transacshun, I shu’d onexpectedly negotiate fur yo’ habeas-corporosity
at its intrinsic invalidity an’ quickly dispose of it at de exaggerated
hifolutiness of yo’ own colossal conceitability an’ hipnartic expectashun
I’d have sufficient commercial collateral to transpose my present
habitation to de perennial localization of de avenue called Easy.”

By this time the young darky was fairly groveling in the dust.

“Do yo’ comprehen’ dat,” yelled the old man, “yo’ po’ benighted
parallelergram, distended from de apex of a truncated coon (cone), yo’
bow-legged son of a parallelopipedon—”

But the old man got no further with his geometrical swearing, for
amid the shouts of the spectators his opponent had vanished, and
as he went up the street to have the old man arrested for swearing
in public, he remarked to the policeman as he told his tale: “I
didn’t keer, Cap’n, ’bout ’im outgineralin’ me er flingin’ English,
an’ outcussin’ me in mo’ kinder newfangled cuss words den eber cum
out ob Turkey, but when he ’flected on my mother by callin’ me de
bow-legged-son-ob-a-parrot-an-er-pigeon-roost, de nigger don’t lib dat I
gwi’ take dat frum!”

It was a week later before Old Wash and I had occasion to drive into the
stable again. We were met by the same darky, who took the mare by the bit
and meekly remarked: “Light, gentlemen; I’ll take de mair.”

And the old man said: “I am so excruciatinly rejoiced, sonny, to
recognize de rejuvernated resurrection ob de exhileratin’ perception
dat an infinertesermal ray ob common sense has penertrated de comatose
condition ob yo’ fibrous misunderstanding’. In other words,” he winked,
“I’se saved an ebononic interlec frum er new-bohn grave.”


“The Little Girl.”

Pioneer days in Texas, and the prairies unbroken by the smoke of a single
cabin. To the south the Brazos, and to the west the buffalo lands, the
herds crawling in the distance, like huge mud-waves on land, toward their
fall feeding grounds.

There had been raids by the Comanches, then hot fighting with the troops
and every settler west of the Brazos had run into the fort, each with his
family, his man-servant and maid-servant, each with his cattle and his
asses. For the Comanches are wily devils and born horsemen. One day they
are here, and the next they are not. And they go on ponies that are as
tough as their riders, and as fast and as fearless, and no man knows when
and where they will strike.

Three full companies of troops had gone north on the track of the
desperate band who, but a few days before, had surprised the settlers
on the upper Brazos and, after killing and scalping and plundering, had
fled, as the troops thought, northward. The stricken settlers had been
coming in for two days, all plundered, tired, many wounded and some still
sobbing with the grief that would never die.

There were little children—motherless, fatherless. There were mothers and
fathers who but a day before held loving ones in their arms.

Troop H, 7th Regiment, was holding the fort while the other companies
went north to avenge.

The First Lieutenant of Troop H was a beardless youth just from West
Point. He had been shot out of West Point into the saddle and to the
front. Two months of it had bronzed him and added two years to his looks;
but sentiment was still in him and Romance claimed his for her own. He
had had enough fighting for any ordinary trooper, but to-day he felt sad
that three companies had gone north after the marauders and he—he held
the peaceful fort.

The sun was setting across the great plains and shadows had lengthened to
their uttermost when a man on a cow-pony galloped in, not from the north,
but from the west.

His pony was reeling at the first gate. It was dead in the fort ten
minutes later. The man himself carried two Comanche arrows sticking
through a shoulder and an arm. A gash was in his head from a glancing
arrow and blood ran from another that had cut across his forehead.

He was unconscious before the surgeon could extract the arrows from his
body, but he said enough. The Comanches were not north, but west—they
had attacked him in his little squatter cabin forty miles west—they had
killed all his stock but one pony—he had no family but a little girl—he
had escaped on the pony. “An’ the little gal—God knows—I seed her cut
for a dug-out in the side of a hill—a kind of a cellar—where I kept
pertatoes an’ sich—then—wal—”

He went to sleep.

“Let him sleep,” said the surgeon, “he is nearly gone as it is—forty
miles and blood leakin’ out of him every jump of the pony.”

Ten minutes later the bugler called “boots and saddles,” and when Company
H wheeled in the fort’s square, the Captain said:

“Well, men, the boys are on a cold trail. You have heard where the devils
are; we can’t all go. Half of us must stay behind to hold the fort. I’ll
be fair to all, for I know you all want to go, so count by twos.”

“One,”

“Two.”

“One,”

“Two.”

It went down the line, one hundred strong.

“Numbers Two, ten paces forward, march!”

There was a happy smile on Numbers Two as they spurred forward—they knew
what it meant. They were lucky.

“Now, boys, you know I want to lead you,” went on the Captain, “but it
isn’t fair. I must take my chances, too, and tote fair with the First
Lieutenant. Lieutenant Troup will toss up with me,” he said with a laugh
as he tossed a coin from his saddle into the air. It flashed high up in
the sunlight.

“Heads for me, Lieutenant, and here’s wishing you—”

“Tails!” said the soldier who picked it up.

The Lieutenant flushed as he spurred forward saluting. Then men cheered
again and the Captain wheeled, saying:

“Take them out, Lieutenant Troup—it’s your luck, and maybe—ah, well, you
can’t tell how many there are, you know, and half a company is mighty few
after sending out three troops. Leave your trinkets, men, and any message
you may wish to send home. Yes, it’s a nasty bit of a fight you’ll be
having, likely, and I wish it had been my luck to be in it. I have been
in service a little longer, you know, perhaps the Lieutenant might—”

But the Lieutenant only smiled and saluted again.

“I’ll do my best, Captain—war is on and it’s my time, you know.”

The Captain pressed his hand as the Company filed out of the fort.

And all the time the Lieutenant kept thinking of the half-dead man who
kept saying even in his delirium: “An’ my little gal—God knows—I seed her
cut for a dug-out—”

The Lieutenant was young—very young—and he was romantic. He could see the
little girl—of course she was about sixteen—all settlers called their
grown girls little. Perhaps—well—if she hadn’t been killed—

The troup wanted to gallop, but the Lieutenant brought them to a steady
trot:

“It’s all right, men, and ten miles an hour is fast enough. We may need
our horses for all that’s in them. We’ll be there by midnight as it is.”

The moon arose and drifted higher and higher and still the troopers
struck grimly across the plain. The wind brought the howl of wolves—big
greys—and the yelp of coyotes, but the troopers turned neither to the
right nor left, and the Lieutenant rode at their head, and all the time
he was wondering what had become of the pretty girl—helpless—alone. “An’
my little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out!”

It was the first streak of day. The men and horses had been resting for
four hours—those not on picket, and some had even slept and were fresh.
But the young officer could think of nothing but the little girl, and
wonder at her fate.

They had lined in behind a few willows that skirted a small stream and
were concealed from the view of the Indians. Then they looked well to
rifles and Colts. The light came slowly and as they peered through the
mist where the cabin stood only a burnt place blurred the dry grass of
the prairie. There were no Indians in sight.

“Thar—look!”

It was an old Indian fighter whose keen eyes saw it first—a thing which
looked like a potato-house butting out of a clay bank.

“Thar’s life in thar—see—it’s the little gal, an’ she’s alive yit—see!”

From the protection of small rises on the right three Comanches galloped
out encircling the dug-out in a very generous circle. They had slipped on
the off-side of their ponies and clung to mane and neck, with one leg and
heel thrust over the flank.

The old fighter snarled: “The cowardly coyotes! They seem ter be mighty
skeered of a little gal. Say, but they’ve got a whole lot o’ respect for
her; she must have a weep’n o’ some sort in thar an’ tort ’em a crackin’
less’n with it, or them dogs ’ud et her up befo’ now; why—thar, by gad—”

He gripped the Lieutenant’s shoulder as a puff of smoke leaped out of the
clay bank and the foremost pony stopped so quickly that it went down,
Comanche under.

“She’s killed that Indian sho’,” cried the old hunter in a whisper. “No
live Comanche was ever cocht under a fallin’ pony. See.”

The pony sprang quickly up—the bullet had creased him; but marvelous the
shot!—it had gone to the exact spot where it would bring down a pony
creased and a rider with a hole through his head.

“That’s shootin’ some,” cried the old hunter as the young officer gave
the quick commands:

“Ready!”

“Mount!”

“Charge!”

“An’ remember the little gal!” they shouted as they broke across the
plains.

It was a running fight and the Indians taken by surprise, for they were
after the thing in the dug-out. And they paid for it—sixteen dead ones
in the first half mile. The others—they had enough to get away from the
forty troopers who shot as they rode and shot to kill.

Then the Lieutenant and ten men rode back to the dug-out. They approached
it slowly—reverently, and all the time the young officer was thinking of
dark eyes and auburn curls and the beauty and bravery of the little girl.

“Hello!” he shouted, his voice trembled in spite of himself.
“Hello!—we’re your friends.”

“Hello, yo’self—mighty glad to see you.”

“It’s the little girl, men,” shouted the Lieutenant, boyishly, as he
rushed up. “She’s safe! hurrah!” and they gave it with a ring.

At the door he stopped short and looked into the hole under the
potato-house.

Then his romance went out as the tide to the sea.

A woman at least thirty-five stood there. Her hair was red, her features
hard, her face burned by the sun. Grim, square jaws set off her face.
There was a line only to show where her lips met in deadly determination.
She wore moccasins and leggins, a short skirt of deer skin and she held
in her hand a rifle that had sent a dozen Indians to death in the twelve
long hours she had held the little fort. Stuck in her belt were two good
pistols. A thousand Comanches with arrows and antiquated guns could not
have taken her.

“Oh!” she said, “but I’m glad to see you. Say, but I stood ’em off all
right, didn’t I? It was awful—’specially last night, but the moon riz
an’ saved me, for a Comanche with an arrow or a old gun is kinder techus
’bout a rifle. Is Pap safe?”

They told her he was.

“I tried to git the old fool to stay. I told him all hell couldn’t git us
out o’ this hole, armed as we wus, lessen they come with bilin’ water,”
she laughed, “but he got panicky an’ vamoosed on the only pony left. Dad
allers was a gal.”

“Good gad,” cried the old hunter bluntly at last, “an’ is you the little
gal he kip talkin’ ’bout?”

“Oh, he allers called me that,” she smiled.

“Well, you’re the gamest little gal I ever seed,” and he wrung her hand
while the others followed suit. “An’ you’re our little gal now,” went
on the old hunter, proudly, “an’ as I ain’t seed one like you since
mine died years ago, I’d—I’d—I’d lak to kiss you jes onct for her,” he
stammered.

“Oh, you shet up,” she said hotly. “D’ye think I stood off a lot o’
Comanches all night to be rewarded by kissin’ a old grizzly like you? But
say,” she added, hesitating, and with a laugh, “I wouldn’t mind kissin’
that pretty little boy thar!”

There was a wild shout from the men, but the young Lieutenant had turned
to mount his horse.

“Any way you belong to Company H,” said the old hunter.


A Preface.

At the request of the ladies of a church in Marion, Alabama, Trotwood
wrote the following Preface, a few weeks ago for a cook-book which the
ladies are publishing with a view of paying off a church debt:

The climate, the soil, the very air play their part in the art of good
recipes. The cooking of the North and West is very different from that
of the South, for Southern recipes are the products of sunshine and
Southlands, of culture, of rest, of the Old South.

And nowhere has the Old South flowered to sweeter perfume than in my
native town of Marion. Macaulay’s New Zealander, if placed in Delmonico’s
would straightway beckon for cold clam, and good King Edward, if stranded
in New Zealand, would soon fish an oyster cocktail out of some unruffled
kiss of the sea.

Recipes, indeed, are a test of one’s civilization—one’s religion—one’s
mentality. They are the products of the centuries beginning with the
primitive clam and ending with the thousand glories of the oyster. They
are the literature of the laughter which comes with good eating, the
bon mots of jolly stomachs, the sparkle of centuries of good cheer, the
morals of mucous membranes, the religion of healthy livers.

Charles Lamb tells us that roast pig, for instance, was accidentally
discovered by the primitive man in the burning of his crude stable in
which was a litter of pigs. After that, fires were frequent and log
stables few. And I doubt not if the history of every good recipe in this
splendid collection were traced to its birth, it would show an unbroken
line of progress as clearly defined as Magna Charta.

Think not lightly, then, of the book, for you have in your hand the
concentrated perfection of the culinary ages. The dash of Caesar into
Briton, the strength of the Dane, the brilliancy of the Norman, the
excellency of Angle and Saxon, the glory of the English and the old
Scotch. It is history, religion, progress. It is a novel more interesting
than all novels, a poem which made Tennyson possible.

I have not read these recipes. I speak from higher authority. I have
tasted them. From my infancy up I have known them. They are part of my
life and this article returned to them is a feeble result of their cause.
They are interwoven with the memory of my home, in the song of the pine
tree, in the opal gleam of the old red hills, in the sweetness, the
culture, the religion of Marion. And to-night, should Abou Ben Adhem’s
Angel come to me and ask for the name of one blessed beyond his dues, I
would answer: “It is I, O Angel, blessed beyond words in the mother I
had, in the father; blessed in my birthplace, in the people among whom I
grew up, in the moral sweetness of their schools and churches, blessed
that I was born in

                   MARION.

    An opal sky and a sea of green,
          Marion.
    And ruby-red the hills between,
          Marion.
    Twilight tints that blend and shine
    Through sinking clouds and sighing pine—
    Dear native land—sweet mother mine—
          Marion.

    Rest and peace and sweet release,
          Marion.
    Home and the loves that never cease,
          Marion.
    O, cradling stars from out the glen—
    O, sweet moon-mother, come again—
    O, Peace that passeth human ken—
          Marion.




The Tennessee Jersey

BY W. J. WEBSTER.

    NOTE.—Mr. W. J. Webster developed two of the three greatest
    cows of the world to championship honors, and has made more
    great churn tests than, perhaps, any other living man. His
    experience is of the practical kind.—Ed.


This has become a well-known name among Jersey cattle breeders of the
United States and frequently used in advertising strains of blood by the
various owners. This is easily accounted for by the high stand taken by
Jersey cows owned, developed and bred in Tennessee. Many years ago the
pioneer breeders of this favorite dairy breed of cattle, Major Campbell
Brown, Judge Thos. H. Malone, M. C. Campbell, M. M. Gardner, and the
writer of this article, W. J. Webster, built their herds on a very solid
foundation:

First—Constitution and ability to stand long continued high feed.

Second—Richness of milk as well as quantity, but with the goal always
centered on production of butter as ascertained by actual test, without
any instrument, calculation or guess work. The churn was adopted as a
test system.

Third—Beauty, symmetry and general conformity. We early in our course of
breeding determined that beauty of cattle should not be ignored, but was
an element certainly in the sale. Therefore, Tennessee Jerseys were bred
for all these qualities claimed and I do not think that anywhere in the
United States a more uniform or more beautiful set of animals could be
found.

The Middle Basin of Tennessee is especially adapted to the breeding,
rearing and developing of this cow. We have here the elements of the soil
entering into the blood of the animal which I think develops them more
highly than in any other portion of the United States. We have lime rock
and bone phosphate of lime entering into the water they drink, and the
bluegrass and other grasses that they eat, corn, oats and hay consumed
by them, and also mingled with enough iron so that the very highest
opportunities are available for their growth. This thought applies not
alone to the Jersey cow but to the whole animal kingdom as evidenced by
the fact that some of the finest race horses in the world, either running
or pacing horses, have been developed in this Middle Basin of Tennessee.
In point of climate we are exceptionally well located, all things
considered, about the same as the Isle of Jersey, the original home of
the Jersey cow. No wonder then that with the additional advantages of our
soil mentioned above the Jersey has developed wonderfully in Tennessee.

The question is sometimes asked why prices have declined the last twelve
or fifteen years. My reply is that prices have not declined all over the
United States, but that the old breeders have dropped out in Tennessee
and that there are now very few breeders in Tennessee paying any
attention to the development of the Jersey cow. Recently Messrs. Overton
and Gardner, of Nashville, have begun to pay more attention to it and I
predict that if this is continued the prices will again rise for they
have not fallen in New York and other centers, but the present year sales
are higher than they have ever been at auction, as shown by the general
average at the Cooper sale of over six hundred dollars per head, a single
animal bringing ten thousand dollars and that in a sale of over a hundred
animals. So it is not a declining in the prices of the breed cattle but
simply a lack of driving their interests in Tennessee.

The system of testing Jerseys and knowing exactly what they were capable
of doing did more to develop them than anything else. The American is
always an eminently practical man and wants to know what he is doing
instead of guessing. The Tennessee breeders inaugurated this test system,
Messrs. Campbell Brown, Thos. H. Malone, M. M. Gardner and W. J. Webster
having edited the first compilation of test in the United States as a
venture of their own and at their own risk and expense; then turned it
over to the Club of American Jersey Cattle Breeders, and the work has
been continued by the club since that time. Prior to this time tests were
reported to newspapers and frequently tests were claimed for ancestors
of cattle that subsequent research showed were either tests for one day
multiplied by seven, making it an estimate test, or in some instances
that they did not exist at all. It therefore required a large amount
of labor to run down by correspondence all this and procure from their
owners the actual tests, and these were published with the tabulated
pedigree of the cow. This work caused a boom in the Jersey family shown
to be prominent, and this has continued all along where they were pushed
and developed. Tennessee breeders were fortunate in having laid well
their foundation as it was based on such cows as Landseer’s Fancy, Oonan,
Duchess of Bloomfield, Beeswax, Kate Gordon and other prominent and
beautiful cows and it so happened that the cows named possessed all the
requisites, constitution, richness and beauty, and no money was spared
in heading the herd with such animals as Imported Tormentor, Signalda,
Ida’s Stoke Pogis, Gold Basis, Southern Prince and other noted animals
too numerous to mention. From these came what is known as the Tennessee
Jerseys, possessing constitution, richness and beauty. As proof of
the wonderful development of these cows any person who desires to be
informed has only to consult the test books in charge of the American
Jersey Cattle Club to find that the richest cattle ever bred, owned and
developed were in Tennessee: Bisson’s Belle with the yearly test of 1,028
pounds and fifteen ounces, that held the champion cup, was developed in
Tennessee; Landseer’s Fancy tested 936 pounds fourteen and three-quarter
ounces in one year, was developed in Tennessee and held the cup. She and
her descendants are known for their extreme richness: so marvelously rich
that they were compelled to demonstrate their ability to make this test
again and again, a number of times by official tests, by disinterested
committees and verified by chemical analysis.

I could not in this article undertake to give a list of Jersey cows from
Tennessee in the honor roll, but only mention a few of the prominent
ones: Ethleel the Second, 30 pounds 15 ounces at two and one-half years
old; Landseer’s Fancy, 29 pounds one-half ounce; Bisson’s Belle, 28
pounds 10 ounces; Toltec’s Fancy, 27 pounds 5½ ounces—this cow was
officially tested by the Alabama experiment station and Major Campbell
Brown, and her milk analyzed at Vanderbilt University confirms the test
showing butter fat 16.32 per cent, equivalent to one pound of butter
to 4.79 of milk; Oonan, 22 pounds 2½ ounces; Duchess of Bloomfield, 20
pounds one-half ounce; Cherokee Rose, 23 pounds 10 ounces. And I might
continue even from memory, as this article is dictated from memory (no
records being before me), and give a long list. But for the purposes of
this article it would be useless and simply a compilation that the people
would not read, so I only call attention to the fact that the champion
cup, a large silver urn costing five hundred dollars, was held only four
times in all; twice in Tennessee against the whole United States. But to
prove that the Tennessee Jersey has life in any other hands, scattered
far and wide over the United States we have only to look at the work of
the last great test at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis to
show what their descendants have done.

[Illustration: BISSON’S BELLE.]

The American Jersey Cattle Club has published a pamphlet giving the work
of the Jersey team of twenty-five selected from all over the United
States under a committee appointed by the American Jersey Cattle Club
which showed no favoritism, but the cows were judged for entrance into
this team by preliminary tests at St. Louis and then the team selected
by a committee. It ought to be very gratifying to the old breeders in
Tennessee to analyze this pamphlet and find that the cattle bred, owned
and developed in Tennessee have, through their descendants, put their
mark on thirteen of the twenty-five. It certainly is very pleasant to the
writer of this to find that Tormentor, owned by Major Campbell Brown,
placed his mark on twelve of the twenty-five; Landseer’s Fancy, owned by
the writer, on seven; Oonan, six; Toltec’s Fancy, four. Only one other
cow in the United States, of co-temporaneous age, competes with them with
six, this cow Erotas.

It is also to be noted that No. 1 of the team of twenty-five champion
over own team, the champion cow of all breeds at the World’s Fair, is
a descendant from cattle owned, bred and developed by old Tennessee
breeders. I do not mean, of course, that she is composed entirely of this
blood, but she takes her line directly back from Chemical Test bred in
Tennessee, son of Toltec’s Fancy, that in turn was daughter of Landseer’s
Fancy. So carrying the blood of Tormentor, Landseer’s Fancy and Oonan.

Then permit an old breeder to make the suggestion that what has been
done once could be done now even to greater advantage if taken up and
the proper amount of energy, zeal and intelligence bestowed upon it.
Prices would again revive and Jersey interests in Tennessee would again
develop. Why should young breeders of the country neglect the natural
advantages we have, backed by experience and the development of the
breed already accomplished? I think if there ever was a time that is
exceedingly favorable for this industry it is now.

Commencing with Landseer’s Fancy, then giving about thirty pounds of
milk per day, which made under test 14 pounds 6 ounces in one week, I
fed and developed her through a long series of years, using more and
more concentrated food and less bran, until in the end she was capable
of digesting two gallons at a feed, equal parts corn and oats, with
one-half gallon of bran (pure wheat bran), and when making her maximum
amount of butter—29 pounds one-half ounce—was giving only from twenty
to twenty-three pounds of milk per day, and subsequently went as low as
seventeen or eighteen pounds of milk per day, holding her own with regard
to the butter. So it will be seen that from the commencement she lost in
quantity of milk, but under such feed gained in butter. Her milk was so
remarkably rich as also her daughter, Toltec’s Fancy’s milk, that, for a
long time having the test questioned notwithstanding the fact that she
had always proven by repeated official tests all claims made for her,
finally resorted to glass jars made of heavy glassware wherein her whole
milk was placed after each milking and placed under seal as usual in
official tests so that when lifted from the water the line of cream and
milk would be seen, and it was demonstrated that it was almost entirely
cream, being about three-fourths to seven-eighths cream. This cow was
exceptional, or I might say, her whole family was exceptional in such
remarkable rich production. But she handed down to her descendants the
same tendency to richness in other hands long years afterwards. She has
two sons with over seventy daughters in the honor roll of the Jerseys,
and five daughters all in the fourteen-pound class and upwards, and it
would be hard to give a list of her descendants in the fourteen-pound
class. I should say something over two hundred. This cow, with others
handled by me, was fed according to the capacity of each cow to digest
the corn and oats ground together, with grass, hay and running water
at will. On this point I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that
Tennessee is better located and supplied with running water than any
place I have ever seen. With all the bluegrass and other facilities of
Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, they lack running water for the
cows to drink and the running water to set the milk in.

I have tried every known experiment in raising the cream on the milk
for the best results, but in all I have ever tried I have never found
anything equal to the stone spring-house with wire gauze over the windows
to keep out all insects, ceiled overhead with plank (not plastered),
and set the milk in jars, either stone or glass, when first drawn from
the cow warm, in the water about 56 to 59 degrees temperature. The
temperature of the milk soon becomes the same temperature as the water
and remains stationary until all the cream is raised in the milk. The
current of water keeps the air in the spring-house fresh and clean and
every facility is given for the production of butter.

In building the various spring-houses that I used on the different farms
at different times, I always used what is known as the test-room, about
six feet wide across the entire spring-house, a wall of brick or stone
cemented inside and out, with only one door and window in the same, both
of which could be placed under seal by any committee called to test the
cattle at any time, or used by myself and manager in making private
tests, so that the milk of the cow under test could be kept absolutely
untampered with by any person. And the tests made by me were made in this
way and verified by various committees and also by chemical analysis. So
that when I went out of breeding Jerseys I know that I had more official
tests than any Jersey breeder, and probably at one time as much as all
combined.

I believe in the theory that especial families of Jerseys are capable of
being fed so as to grow richer after long continued feed. Some will not.
There is a limit that will be found in nearly all of them.

In testing cattle it was always my purpose to ascertain the maximum of
food capable of being digested by any cow under test, and fall slightly
below this quantity of feed so as to keep her appetite always whetted.

Another point was that she be fed regularly and preferably, not over
twice a day with concentrated foods, and thus giving the stomach all the
time to do its work. I have seen many a test disturbed by feeding only a
small amount of grain at the dinner time out of order. It disturbs the
entire digesting of the animals and will probably throw them off a day or
two. When undisturbed, the same cow will come up at night and take her
regular feed and not be disturbed in her test at all. It may be thought
that this is going into detail too much, but small details sometimes have
wonderful influence in handling any animal. A horse may be just on edge
for a race and some small circumstance occur that disturbs it. So with
the wonderful mechanism of the cow making her four pounds of butter per
day, she must be handled very carefully.

But it may be said, what profit is there in all this? My reply is that if
Landseer’s Fancy had not been tested as she was and thoroughly developed
her descendants might have passed unnoticed and we would have been none
the wiser as to the capabilities of this family. I have taken her as an
instance because more familiar with her history than others, and because
she was the hub around which the herd revolved. I paid $175 for her,
and, on calculation of her descendants owned by me and sold to others,
she realized nearly $30,000 without any calculation as to her milk and
butter. She entered into and formed the web and woof of what was known
as The Columbia Jersey Cattle Company’s herd. She was sold subsequently
when that corporation was wound up to Messrs. Webster and Morrow and
entered the great herd at Nashville.

This Columbia Jersey Cattle Company organized with a capital stock of
$20,000, paid a dividend of 14 per cent or over per annum, and the stock
was retired at par with all debts paid; one of the most successful of
all Jersey cattle enterprises I was ever in. I think the last year, with
about thirty working cows and the dairy receipts of thirty-six hundred
dollars and over and the sales of calves and cattle from the herd, with
the herd products and heifers added, was something over ten thousand
dollars.

It was then located at Indian Camp Springs, about three miles from
Columbia and an ideal place for a spring-house, the spring being about
fifty nine feet above the spring-house and coming to the spring-house
through a four inch pipe, but the water had to be cut off so that it
would run slowly into the spring-house, and when we wanted to work the
butter in the churn it would be turned on into the hose and the butter
thoroughly washed.

Young breeders cannot adopt a better formula for feed than the one I have
suggested, which is cheap also in the long run, for it is a farm product
and it is not necessary to buy on the market, but it can be produced on
the farm. Besides this, no cow will stand commercial feed as she will
this corn and oats in equal parts. It is nearer suited to nature and
she can stand this feed longer without injury than any commercial food.
When I say corn and oats in equal parts I mean bushel for bushel mixed
and ground together. If any one will think a minute there is nothing
deleterious in this food. You can get it absolutely pure, whereas if you
go to market to buy bran to feed the cattle on you do not know what you
are getting, sometimes the sweeping of the mill floor and any old waste
the miller is pleased to throw off. The Jersey breeder ought essentially
to be a farmer and raise on his own farm what his herd consumes and thus
market the products of the farm.




In The Open

    (Note.—Under this head communications are invited from
    the open—of gun, dog and rod—stories of hunting, fishing,
    traveling, etc.—Ed.)


A PRAIRIE CHICKEN HUNT IN NORTH DAKOTA.

By Trotwood.

Every citizen of this great republic should travel over his own country.
He will be amazed at its greatness, and his prejudices and local
conceits, if he have any breadth at all, will grow fewer the further he
goes, and learns that the world cares nothing for the petty environments
and embroilments of his own bailiwick.

The most attractive country in the Northwest is the great prairies of
the Dakotas. I thought I had some idea of their immensity, of their
greatness, until for one solid day and night I raced across them by fast
express, and saw by day the pillar of their cloud of smokestacks—for it
was harvest time—on each side, as far as the boundless horizon, and each
cloud a thresher from whose funnel poured the wheat of the nation.

There is something in mere land to me—any kind of land—soil, you may call
it—dirt—I care not what. But I love it just as I hate brick walls and
city pavements. There is something about it, from the rocks and hills to
the level, plowed valleys, that is clean and good. It means independence
and honesty and clean living. It may not mean shrewdness and polish and
that smart education which comes from living by one’s wits in a great
walled-in home of wits, but it means independence and the rest that made
Shakespeare.

When I saw the Dakotas, I wondered how the white man had stayed away
from them as long as he had. Perhaps it were better for the staying,
starving, striving quality of our forefathers that this grand garden
spot of the Northwest lay hid between the mountains and the sea, instead
of stretching up and down the coast. It were better for their children
that fathers should toil in sand and flint. It puts flint into the
children—steel—gameness—the spirit to do.

One generation of striving poverty makes flint; two, steel; three, well,
you have heard of Andrew Jackson, of Lincoln, perhaps. Study the poverty
of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.

The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What
kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific
slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?

And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is
everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts
and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. They should
learn—they must learn—that, as the making of money is the lowest of all
human talents—the talent of self first, which is the lowest instinct of
all life—so is its talent for getting the lowest, meanest of all talents.
“All my life,” says Edison, “I have been trying to keep away from mean
people who make money.”

Fargo I found to be a beautiful and prosperous city, and the soil of the
country around it, as it had been for two hundred miles, truly a glory
and an inspiration. If this land had the climate of the South it could
feed the world. As it is, Nature, who adjusts herself to environments,
acts quickly here, and I was surprised at the stories of its
productiveness in the short season it had. Nay, mine own eye beheld it,
for never had I seen such wheat, barley and small grain, such cabbage,
beets, turnips, vegetables of all kinds.

There was a greatness and vastness everywhere. As far as the eye could
see, even beyond the rim of the horizon, it was vast—vast. And that
always affects me peculiarly. After I have seen as far as the eye will
reach, I become homesick. I have a sacred, sad longing to see and go
farther and uplift the veil.

I rejoiced in the fact that there were no trees, no high hills, nothing
to break the great canvas of vastness—a bivouac of eternity dotted with
millions of camps of wheat shocks, fringed with the splendor of a vast,
pure sky, and framed in the purpling splendor of a horizon of blue and
gold. The little ten acre lots of dwarf trees the Government has forced
the settlers to plant, I liked them not. They were warts, merely, on the
brow of Eternity. The great, rich, boundless, beautiful prairies were
there as God had Intended them to be—Nature’s handiwork, with splendid
harmony in its whole.

No picture ever painted has equalled it—for Nature never makes a mistake
in her pictures. She never sticks a bunch of dwarf trees where the great,
grand prairies should roll away.

There is but little difference between the Dakota prairies and the ocean.
The difference is that only between the imagination and the fact. And
looking over them, standing in them, seeing the ceaseless waves rippling
across the seas of wheat or the white caps come spinning from the
uplifted heads of them, again and again I caught myself repeating Byron’s
lines:

    “Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
      Glasses itself in tempests, in all time,
    Calm or convulsed, in breeze or gale or storm,
      Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
      Dark heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime—
    The image of Eternity—the throne
      Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
    The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
      Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread fathomless, alone.”

Lisbon is a beautiful little town, and one comes upon it so suddenly it
is a surprise. For hours nothing but the grand, great prairies, billowed
in wheat waves, smoke-plumed with thresher stacks. Then down you go into
a beautiful valley—the valley of the Cheyenne, and nestling on its banks
clean, church-spired, sits this up-to-date town.

I landed in good luck there, for I had anticipated the pleasure of
meeting old friends and relatives—a cousin whom my mother had reared and
who to me had always been a sister—but I had the additional good luck
to fall into the hands of Mr. Geo. W. Ferguson, the county treasurer,
and the owner of Raymond S. by Montevideo, the handsomest young trotting
sire it has been my good fortune to see in any State. And I found the
blooded stock interest alive and growing in all that section, and surely
no place under the skies has a better license to rear them. In the hands
of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. W. B. Stone, the county game-warden, I realized
one of the dreams of my life—a prairie chicken shoot. If you have never
indulged in one, go a thousand miles to Dakota—and every year will find
you wanting to go again. It was a bright, crisp morning in September, and
Mr. Stone’s beautiful setter bitch was good and fit. I had been out early
to see some threshers at work in the wheat, and a little shower coming up
I had gotten wet. This in the South would have meant two hours’ dampness,
and a cold, but imagine my surprise, in a short while, to find the ground
dry and myself with it, very dry! In the rarefied air of this great
country I do not believe one can get wet unless he is foolish enough to
drink water.

Mr. Ferguson met me later with his surrey and two spanking red-sorrel
trotting mares, as well bred as Raymond S, and away we went across the
prairie after the chickens. The ride itself was pleasure enough—forever
going through that beautiful black loam, as tempting to the eye of the
man who loves the soil as a cobwebbed bottle or a fat capon to the
stomach of a priest. For it was bespangled with red berries, ripe heads
of flax, golden stubbles of wheat and oats and barley, red grasses finer
than ever bluegrass grows to be and richer than all tame blades.

My first covey is pictured forever in my mind. The bitch came to a
staunch stand near a low, marshy place, where the grass was blue green
and studded with fall flowers. On all sides were shocks of wheat, and
away in the distance the interminable smokestacks of busy threshers. I
walked up and took it all in—I stamped the picture forever on my mind. I
wanted it there that I might always see it—the very clouds, the distant
horizon, the golden stubble-blades, the very silence that hangs like a
benediction over the land. And all over it and above everything that
beautiful Llewellyn bitch, frozen in living marble before me.

“Is it possible,” I thought, “that nothing is between these birds and
me but the air?” No pines of Alabama and Mississippi, no thickets on
the creeks of Louisiana, no wooded lots and big hills of Tennessee, no
barb-wire fence with hideous signs stuck up warning me that some hog
lived there on posted land? All my life I had shot quail under those
conditions. Now—now—nothing but me and the pure, clear air and the
boundless, rolling prairies and that dog of marble waiting for the word,
to flush a dozen prairie hens squatting in the stubble ready to rise
with a cyclone’s rush on wings of thunder. I stood frozen—like the dog.
I could not move. My heart beat like a race-horse in the back stretch,
making me take long breaths and swallow hard as I came to the hunter’s
attention. Then!—

Never arose before mortal man so thrilling a sight. They sucked me
forward like the gust of a passing express, like the roar of a wind
storm, like the burst of sun from a cloud, thunder-lined. The earth of
stubble quivered to their wings of thunder and the air pulsed like a
man-of-war when the big guns bellow to port.

But I did not forget to fire—oh, no! Man is a killing animal by instinct,
and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory
of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is
up and his stomach is at stake. Yes, I fired—once—twice—and I shot to
kill. Two beautiful ones I picked with lightning glance from the splendid
covey—two glorious ones that fairly split the air in the wild joy of
escape, only suddenly to—

Well, “the rest is silence,” as Shakespeare said, when Hamlet died, and
it is the same death that will come to you and me—the end will be just as
sudden, whether we fall in the mid-day of life or fall to the slow fever
of age. They fell but ten feet apart and I walked up and looked down on
them—the proud, beautiful creatures now limp and lifeless.

I took them up and fondled them—I wanted to kiss them, they were so quiet
now and warm, still splendid in death.

Mr. Stone had killed his brace also, but being more experienced, had shot
them farther off.

“You killed yours too close,” he said, as I stood fondling the limp and
beautiful birds. “You should have waited up to fifty yards or seventy.”

“Yes,” I said, “you see it is my quail hunting instinct. I had my first
lesson in shooting quail in the pine woods of Alabama, and let me tell
you, I laughed, it may be wrong, but it’s dead easy killing those big,
beautiful hens. Honestly, except for their lightning flight I thought I
was shooting at Tennessee guineas.”

Mr. Stone laughed: “You wait and see,” he said.

“Why, if you want to know what real shooting is,” I went on, “you just
get up a covey of piny wood quail, where every mother’s chick of them is
taught from his pipping moment to place a pine tree between him and a
load of shot, and do it in the first twenty feet. You have got to shoot
quick.”

We had walked away across the stubble to where they had gone down,
scattered. Suddenly—

“There they are,” said my companion. As we came on the bitch frozen again.

“Now, you first,” said Mr. Stone, kindly, “it’s a single bird.”

Up went the bird with his thunder of wings. I don’t know how it
happened—I can’t see how it happened to this day. I think I was thinking
of Alabama quail or Tennessee “patterges,” as Old Wash calls them, but
when I fired and the great game cock went on about his business, I got
busy seeing what ailed my gun, and wondering why we always fall down
about the time we think we are mounted on as many legs as a centipede.
Mr. Stone was too polite to refer to my previous remarks, and I watched
the big fellow sail away with more respect for the sport.

A little further on the Llewellyn again stood, and this time it was my
companion’s first shot. And here is where I did a shameless thing—but I
couldn’t help it, to save my life.

Up went the bird, and I saw the old hunter throw up his gun. I
listened for the report, but on sailed the bird, fairly eating
space—on—on—fifty—sixty—seventy yards.

My fingers itched, my arms jerked upward, my gun jumped to my shoulder.
“Great heavens,” I thought, “the bird is gone! His gun won’t fire”—

The report of my gun and the collapse of the bird came just a second
before his.

He looked around astonished. “Pray forgive me,” I said. “I have acted the
hog, but I was sure something was the matter with your gun.”

He laughed: “I was just waiting for it to get a little farther away.”

After that I shot them farther off, and by noon we had eleven beauties,
filling up the front of our surrey, upon which my eye feasted in delight.

We decided we had enough, and towards evening we drove across the
cooling, sweet grasses to a group of pretty little lakes or ponds in the
hollow depression of the land. These we found literally covered with
Spoonbills, Teal, Mallard and Red-heads, and then we had sport royal and
of another kind. They were wary, though, very; and we had to crawl on
our stomach for a quarter of a mile to get to them, Mr. Stone on the far
side, to fire first and send them over me. And when his gun sounded once,
twice, here they came toward me, I lying flat in the grass. I picked
two big ones leading the flock, knowing if I didn’t get the kings I’d
get the knights and pawns behind them. I didn’t get the king, but down
tumbled a Red-head, a Mallard—one—two—three—four! Good heaven! Did I kill
all of them? I saw smoke drifting across my left. Mr. Stone had turned
his old Winchester repeater on them, also, and so I gave him credit for
everything but the redhead, for I shot at him. This was our sport—from
one lake to another, until we had shot enough, and the ride home across
the starlit prairies and under the cool, bracing air of that boundless,
glorious country.

Can you not see how two days of that kind of sport is worth all drunken
yacht trips, and all the heart-breaking, dust-killing automobile rides in
the world? You feel it bodily and spiritually for years, and remember it
with pleasure all your life.

So here’s to the grand Dakotas and their hospitable people and their
splendid birds!

       *       *       *       *       *

The Philosopher reasons and says it cannot be done. The Doer tries and
does.




Modern Cotton Culture

By E. I. WOODFIN, OF ALABAMA


There is no subject which is of more vital interest to the South and to
the whole world than successful cotton culture. In spite of the repeated
claims to the contrary, in which every now and then it is predicted that
certain areas in Africa, India, China and South America will be devoted
to cotton, the fact remains that that strip of country lying on the map
of the Southern part of the United States is the finest cotton belt in
the world, and so far absolutely the only large body of land that has
ever produced year in and out any very great amount of the fleece. That
it will continue to be the world’s field for cotton for centuries remains
clearly proven, not only because of its adaptability but because upon it
live an intelligent and industrious branch of the great white race, to
guide and direct and work and this race of people have the best labor in
the world to assist—the negro.

In the early days this great cotton plantation, as the South might almost
be called, suffered greatly from careless and improvident cultivation in
which the rich soil lost much that might have been kept in it. The great
thing now is to reclaim and build up and at the same time produce cotton
for the steadily increasing demand, which is more as each year goes by.
With these preliminary remarks, and the further one that I cannot better
illustrate my subject than to quote my own personal experience and with
apology for the personal tenor of this paper, I shall give to others the
benefits of my limited success.

However, in every profession of life, each aspirant strives for golden
results, and as I feel that my harvests for the past few years have
increased several fold, perhaps the practical farmer may benefit some one.

In 1895 I purchased my farm containing about 200 acres. At that time
the natural resources of the soil were almost completely exhausted, the
produce from one acre being about one-third of a bale when planted to
cotton. I realized there was no money from so small a yield as that
so determined first to try to restore the impoverished soil—the soil
which for fifty years had been planted in cotton. The clean culture that
cotton requires had exhausted the humus from the soil, and it’s almost
impossible to make any money on cotton grown on such soil. I decided
that rotation of crops was the best and cheapest way of restoring this
soil. I divided my land into four fields, fencing each field with wire.
No. 1 I used for a permanent pasture. No. 2 I planted in cotton. No. 3
half in corn, the other half in oats, followed by peas. No. 4 I used as
a temporary pasture, thereby giving the soil a much needed rest. Don’t
be afraid to do this; the cattle and hogs sold from it will pay you some
rent, and in the improvement of your land lies the increase of your bank
account. Having started this rotation, I have kept it up, letting cotton
follow corn and oats, corn and oats follow temporary pasture, and pasture
following cotton. Could you see the result you would say with me that
rotation is the keynote to successful cotton culture. Occasionally a
farmer will have the seasons very favorable and make a good crop on land
deficient in humus, but what we are striving for is to make a paying crop
every year. This restoration of humus is a wonderful safeguard against
excessive wet or dry weather. Stable manure supplies this much-wanted
humus, but our supply is very limited; from the number of stock required
to work this amount of land we get only enough to cover three or four
acres. But we farmers have to acquire patience, anyway. Take your field
that has been planted in corn, oats and peas, as soon as the stock has
finished up what the mower left (we save all the pea vines we can for
feed). Now, turn under all stubble with a two-horse plow. If this is well
done, it will decompose before planting time, if you finished with the
plowing early enough, thereby adding much humus to the soil, as well as
nitrogen stored there by the pea crop. The custom is to break this land
flat, but I prefer to lay mine off in beds from the first. My land is
now bedded, and it is about time to commence planting. My fertilizer
distributor is started about two days ahead of my cotton planter. The
fertilizer is put in drill not over three or four inches deep, and is
to be followed by a harrow. Now, get the best cotton seed. I use what I
consider the best. I won’t tell you of its many good qualities for fear
you will think this an advertisement. After the cotton has come up to
a good stand, start the plows to barring it off. As soon as you have
finished barring put on little sweeps and run close to the plants. This
leaves them on a very narrow ridge and a good hand will chop from one to
one-half acres more per day than he would on a bar. Push the chopping,
and follow immediately, if possible, with plows, dirting the cotton up
with sweeps. In ten days’ time, or less, if it rains, go over again with
hoes, taking out every other hill and putting it to a stand. These two
workings with the hoe will cost very little more than to have put it to
a stand at first and the cotton will be in much better shape. Strive to
plow over every ten days until you see the first open boll. Guard against
plowing too wet. After rains wait until the soil crumbles. In cultivating
I use a double foot with two 14-inch sweeps, going twice to the row,
until the first of July. After that I use a 28 or 30-inch wing sweep. I
generally go over my crop with the hoes twice after it is put to a stand.
In dry seasons once is generally sufficient. By all means keep ahead of
the grass. It will injure your cotton and cost you more in the end to
clean it out. You see my advice is to rotate. Come, walk over my fields
with me and see my cotton, in places growing more than a bale per acre,
where a few years ago the yield was about one-fourth of a bale, and you
will say with me, “Help nature, give her back her natural elements, and
she will return you a harvest of gold.”




Poetry, True and False

By JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE


There have been many definitions of poetry ranging all the way from the
well-known Englishman’s definition, “A criticism of human life,” to that
given by one of the most original of all poets, Poe, “the rhythmical
creation of beauty.” That was merely as these two men saw it, or had the
poetic principle developed in them—the first, practically; the second in
all the rythmical beauty and sensuousness and indefinable mistiness of
the immortal “Raven.”

It is quite plain that no definition can be given of poetry that would
apply to all poetry or even to the poetic principle. No more than can be
given a definition of love, or the sweet character of the Christ, or of
God, or of eternity. Each true poem, like the keys of a piano, may awake
a different chord, and every one perfect. To attempt to define the poetic
principle would be like attempting to sound the depths of our immortal
souls, the very spirit of eternal life, a depth as varied as humanity—in
some, as deep as the valleys in the ocean’s bed, in other “ending in
shallows and in miseries.” I believe it was Mendelssohn who said there
were two things mortal man should not attempt to define—“God Almighty and
Thorough-Base-and-Harmony.”

Poetry is the music of the intellect and, therefore, like the musical
principle, is indefinable. But what are some of its attributes?

First of all, real poetry is true, and absolutely a part of our souls,
our experience, ourselves, our most positive beliefs. At first it may
not be readily understood by us—a fact in itself which should warn us
not to be too hasty in condemning it, because that very fact may show
it has touched on a higher, not a lower plane than the plane we are on,
and that we must climb to it, not drag it down to us. Such is the poetry
of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley and Browning. And you who say you cannot
read poetry, and who have had your taste destroyed for true poetry by
newspaper jingle, which lies at one extreme, and magazine poetry, which
lies at the other, and both of which are more often false than true, let
me ask you before you give up, to read some of the real poetry from each
of the authors above before saying again that you cannot love poetry.
Read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Tennyson’s “The Princess,” Shelley’s
“To a Skylark,” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” In these, as in all true
poetry, though all of it may not be fully grasped at first, there is an
indefinable something that touches us and makes us wish to read it again
and again until, having tuned our own souls to the key of its beauty we
stand elevated, instructed, sweetened, strengthened, blessed!

The true poem, like the true poet, has a mission to perform and should
go right to the heart of it—no beating around the bush, no mental
pyrotechnics, no flowery words to sweeten and weaken it, no “churning
about to get up a foam,” no intellectual mistiness, but the simple
laying of the hands on the eyes of the blind! For every poet is also a
preacher, and the greatest of all preachers. And if it fails to perform
its mission, if it does not sound its chord, and that clearly, but a
mere jingling of pretty bells, it is no more a poem than a dancing harem
girl, with silver bells, bracelets and anklets on her, is a woman. Every
poem that has ever lived lived because it filled a mission; and all those
that have died, died because they had none to fill. “The Psalm of Life,”
“Highland Mary,” “Evelyn Hope,” “Thanatopsis”—these and hundreds of
others, short as they are, came with a mission and, finding it, performed
it, and each of the above, with the lesson it teaches, is a statue in
the temple of fame and will stand there for all times as clearly and
distinctly as Washington, Bruce, Nelson or Jackson.

Let us not judge poetry, then, by the two false extremes in which we meet
it most often—newspapers and magazines—and the two which have caused so
many to form unfavorable opinions of poetry. Forgetting that rhyme is
not poetry, and that a poem is the product of life, the newspaper poet
tries to jingle one out every day. He might as well try to live his
year in a day! Clipped by some thoughtless editor, who uses his shears
as recklessly as he does his spleen, and who clips as he writes—to
fill space—the newspaper poet mistakes even this for ephemeral fame
and like a howling dervish continues to dance around the circle to the
monotonous music of his tom-tom; while the magazine fellow, after months
of laborious travail, brings forth an intellectual mouse. Posterity
will indict the first of these for false pretenses, and hang the other
for downright murder. But like the thief and the murderer of old, the
punishment of one will not bring back the good opinion of poetry to those
from whom he has filched it, nor will the lynching of the other give back
to the world the life of Art after the murderer has taken it.

Imagine Robert Burns, having made a reputation with his “Highland Mary,”
and filled with the newspaper’s idea of his art, grinding out another
poem every few days to the Scotch lassie his genius immortalized.
Posterity would hate him. Think of Shelley, for ten dollars a week,
“trying his hand again on the ‘Skylark.’” And yet this is what many
so-called modern newspaper poets try to do.

The truth is, the true poet, like the mocking bird, never sings twice
on the same note, but in that song he exhausts his soul. It is only the
jaybird who sings the same thing every day and imagines it is a new song.

I do not mean by the above criticism that real genius may not now and
then appear in newspapers. In fact, more of it—much more—appears there
than in magazines, being often the bursting of a wild rose in the meadow
into full bloom and giving its perfume to the world without pay and
without knowledge of its own sweetness. But as the wild rose cannot bloom
every day in the year, so have I never yet seen two newspaper gems in
one year by the same poet. And those that appear, written quickly, and
apparently thoughtlessly, yet are they the product of years of sweet
growth of unconscious development, of work, imperceptibly wrought out,
but, like the coral castle beneath the sea, as perfect and as beautiful.

But as between the newspaper and the magazine poet, give me the
former—for now and then he writes a poem, but the magazine poet—seldom!
The first-named is often a true poet, and my only objection to him
is that he lowers the standard of his art, he desecrates his high
calling by a too often, too feeble, and a too familiar attempt; but the
magazine poems, after years of reading them, I am constrained to believe
that, with few exceptions, they are utterly devoid of even the poetic
principle. Their authors not only would not know a poem if they met one
in the road, but they could not read one if an angel of light would write
it with a diamond-pointed star on the windows of heaven!

Poetry need not rhyme, it need not be written in verse, even; and the
simple test of it all is, does it awaken some chord in you that uplifts?




With Old Wash.

THE EXAMINATION.


“Boss,” said Old Wash the other night, “I have got ter hol’ a zamination
over in my deestrick for skule teecher, an’ I wisht you’d write out de
questions for me.”

I knew that the old man was the moving spirit in educational and
religious matters in his end of the county and that he holds an
examination now and then among the colored applicants, and none of them
may teach or preach unless the old man passes on their papers.

After much work I wrote a list of questions suitable, as I thought, for
such an occasion and read them to the examiner.

“Deys all right, boss, ’cept one thing. Jes write de answers dar, too.
It’s a po’ teecher dat ain’t got his ansers as well as his questuns. An’
I’d lak for you ter go along, too, jes ter see me squelch dem smart Ike
niggers dat think dey kno’s it all.”

On the day appointed there were three applicants. One was a pompous
looking darky with a knack of saying things grandly and using big words.
I named him Pompey. Number two was a sanctimonious looking fellow
who knew it all. He was a newly fledged preacher. Number three was a
knowing-looking, sly soon, with less book sense, but more mother wit than
the others. He looked like a slick one.

Nothing pleased the old man more than to show off his own learning and he
quickly caught on to Pompey’s gait—going him, in fact, one better. Slowly
and with great dignity he pulled out his roll of manuscript, adjusted his
big, iron-rimmed spectacles, and squelched them all in the beginning
with the flow of language:

“Now, I’m gwine ax you all a few supernumerous questions, calk’lated
to disembody de fundermentalerties of yore onderstandin’ an’ de
posserbilerties of yore interlects for impartin’ informashun. An’ I want
you all to chirp right out as peart as jay-birds on a Friday.”

There is a negro superstition to the effect that all jay-birds go to a
place unmentionable on Friday and carry sand to his Satanic majesty. I
wondered If it was a hint of what the old man had coming for them.

Adjusting his glasses again, the old man said to the preacher:

“Whut is jog’erfy?”

The answer came back glibly and without a flaw:

“Jog’erfy is de science of de earth an’ de art of navergashun.”

This was said in such a matter of fact, positive tone that I almost
caught my breath. But I soon learned that all their answers, right or
wrong, came with the same assurance and without a quiver. The old man
squinted one eye and said:

“Den I s’pose you’d say a coon-dog was de science ob coon-killin’ an’ de
art ob barkin’. I turns you down on dat. Nex’!”

“Jog’erfy,” said Pompey, “Jog’erfy! Brer Washington, ain’t dat got
sumpin’ to do sorter lak a narrer neck jinin’ two dem-johns of lan’,
sorter lak an’ so forth or sumpin lak it?”

“Wal, it may smell ob de jug a leetle,” said the old man, “but it don’t
gine de demi-john to de extent ob pullin’ out de cork. Nex’.”

“Jog’erfy,” said the Slick One, “is de art ob joggin’ and de science ob
gwine round circles.”

This set the old man to thinking. He scratched his head and inspected the
candidate closely. “Ain’t you de nigger dat use ter swipe old Hal P’inter
when he went to de races?”

“Yassir.”

“Wal, dat ain’t zactly right, but it’s got mo’ sense in it dan anything
dat’s been sed, an’ I’ll give you ten, as you seem to have sum hoss sense
in yore make-up.”

Fortunately I was where I could lean back behind the blackboard and save
the dignity of the examination. For all this had been said with a dignity
and earnestness that was appalling, and not the slightest trace of humor
appeared in their voices.

“How am Tennessee bounded?” he asked Pompey.

“She’s bounded by straight lines makin’ a parallellogram inclinin’ in a
right angle,” said Pompey, knowingly.

The old man scratched his jaw and passed it to the Preacher. The answer
came back glibly:

“Tennessee am bounded on de north by Kaintucky an’ de rory-bory Alice, on
de east by de Great Smoky mountains, on the west by Mt. Pelee an’ on de
south—”

The old man brought his fist down indignantly. “Ef we’re bounded on all
dem sides by de things you say dar ain’t but one thing dat can nachully
bind us on de south an’ dat am hell! You may know a whole lot about dat
place but you don’t kno’ a little bit about jog’erfy. Lemme see whut you
all kno’ ’bout hist’ry.”

He slowly studied out the next question:

“Relate de causes leadin’ to de Riverlushunary war.”

“De circumnavigatin’ cause ob de Riverlushunary war,” said Pompey glibly,
“was de extenshun ob de Equater too far into de Gulf stream, endangerin’
de tail ob de British Umpire.”

The old man sadly shook his head and passed it to the Swipe.

“I can’t jes zactly spress it kordin’ to book larnin’,” said the Swipe,
“but it was sorter lak dis: We drawed de pole an’ axed for a squar race,
but England fouled us on de fus’ turn an’ got us in a pocket on’ de half.
We run into her, cut her down an’ won as we pleased.”

“Go head,” said the old man proudly. “Hal P’inter sho’ done lamed you
sumpin’.”

This put the Swipe at the head. He scratched his chin, made eyes at the
others and licked out his tongue.

“Who was Maj. Andre?” slowly spelled out the old man.

The Preacher thought he was one of the Disciples and Pompey, after much
thought, said he was the man who went over Niagara in a barrel. The Swipe
wasn’t sure, but after a while his face lit up with a broad smile and he
said:

“Unc. Wash, wan’t he a British ringer dat got unkivered an’ ruled off at
de West P’int meetin’? ’Twas a close heat an’ he lost by a neck.”

“De very man,” said the old man enthusiastically. “I tell you, sonny, if
you keep up dis clip, you’ll break in all de colts in dis deestrick.”
The Swipe smiled and sat up higher in the sulky. The old man studied his
manuscript carefully and propounded:

“Describe de battle ob Shiloh.”

“Dat’s easy,” said the Preacher smiling. “It was a hard-fit fight in
which Shiloh got killed.”

“Oh, he did,” said the old man, wrathfully. “I guess de nex’ thing you’ll
be tryin’ to teach de ole man dat at de battle ob de Nelson, de Nile fell
offen his hoss. Nex’, whut you say?”

“Dat ar battle wus a dead heat ’twixt Gen. Grant an’ Johnsing, wan’t it,
Unc. Wash?”

“Sonny,” said the old man proudly, “I’m beginnin’ to think I orter resign
an’ let you ax dese questions. I didn’t kno’ dar was so much hoss sense
in hist’ry.”

“What am de princerpal organ ob circulation?” spelled out the old man.

Pompey thought a long time and thought it was the liver. The Preacher
threw up his hand and a knowing smile went over his face.

“What am it, den?” asked the teacher.

“De hat,” shouted the candidate.

“Es dat’s de fust time you’ve come nigh it I’ll give you ten on dat,”
said the old man, “but I think de P’inter boy can do better yet.”

“De princerpal organ ob circulashun,” said the Swipe, “am de little
silver cartwheel dat is stamped wid de eagle.”

“Sunny,” said the old man, “you have sho’ been in de hoss bisness for
some good. Now you Preacher man, whut was de greatest trade of England?”

“De trade-wind,” came back promptly.

“Trade yore grandmammy’s black cat,” said the old man, wrathfully. “What
wind got to do wid dis deestrick skule? You ’pear to be mighty windy
yo’se’f. Nex’.”

“Wan’t dat de Pennsylvania whisky resurrecshun’?” timidly asked Pompey.

The old man glared at him. The Swipe held up his hand, and when the old
man nodded, he said:

“De princerpal trade, Unc. Wash? ’Pears to me it was when ole Richard
tried to trade his kingdom for a good hoss.”

“Wal,” said the old man, “tain’t down zactly dat way in my book, but
I’m gwine give you de certificate, fur it ’pears lak you de only nigger
on dat bench dat’s got enny hoss sense an’ dat’s de main thing in skule
teachin.”

                                                                TROTWOOD.




“And Who Is My Neighbor?” Luke 10:29

By REV. T. A. WHARTON, D.D., First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, Tenn.


He was a Pharisee. He was also a scribe—a lawyer. And he stood up to
tempt the Master. He would show this throng gathered about the Lord that
their alleged prophet was only a cheap schemer—a designing Galilean
playing upon their ignorance and credulity.

“Rabbi (patronizingly), what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Let us
reason together and come to first principles: What do you make of the
primal law? Just the old question of the Pharisee—the classic question of
the legalist in every age of the world. There is a double blunder in this
age-worn question. They belong to that class of blunders which have just
enough truth in their midst to give them a species of eternal life, and
self perpetuative power.

The first blunder is an assumption—that in doing alone depends an
entrance into the kingdom of heaven. What shall I do—what shall I do?
Never what shall I be? It is so much easier to do than to be—that it is
not a thing for wonder that our poor warped human nature should prefer to
beat out a path of merit and morals to the kingdom rather than submit the
will. “Do this and live” is its password and shibboleth—never the “live
and do this” of the Master.

“Ye must be born again” is something alike repulsive to the pride of
reason and the pride of life. And yet there is nothing more certain
than this—no one of us shall ever see the kingdom of God without such a
radical birth change in our heart of hearts as shall give all our doing a
new meaning and color. Is it not a strange blunder for man to make when
it appears in the very question itself? We cannot do things to inherit—we
must be sons to inherit.

The second blunder is an assumption also. It appears in the tone of the
questioner. The tone implies, Rabbi, am I not doing enough already? Am
I not doing all that is necessary. I give alms of all that I possess. I
fast twice in the week. My life is clean in the sight of the law—“Thank
God, I am not as other men are”—as that disciple of yours there, for
instance. What further shall I do or can I do to inherit eternal life?
What lack I yet or the existing church of God? In so far as you are
teaching anything new it must be false, and anything old is it not
unnecessary? Why then all this stir you are making throughout the land?

The Master’s reply is very simple. He takes this self-sufficient sinner
on his own ground: “How readest thou the law?” Since this is your trust
and hope, what do you make of it? The lawyer replies glibly enough: “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul,
with all thy might and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thy
self.” The Saviour replies: “Thou hast answered right; do this and thou
shalt live.” But there is such an emphasis upon the “do” this that a
dead silence falls. The lawyer grows uncomfortable, and begins to hedge.
Had he this “done?” But it is evident that the less said upon the first
table of the law the better. There is more hope of the second. So says
the record: “And willing to justify himself, he asks,” “And who is my
neighbor?” Do you not see that this is a broken sentence? It is preceded
by a bit of very hurried thinking. I have been good to my family—to those
about me—my next of kin—my set. It all depends upon this “who is my
neighbor.” “And who is my neighbor?”

The answer is only a parable, but a parable whose meaning when once
caught and practiced shall change our world beyond the recognition of
even the angels of heaven. It will make this poor, weary, burdened earth
to blossom as the rose; shall make all our desert like the garden of the
Lord. It shall become the universal solvent for all problems arising from
man’s relation to man. It will stop every war before noon to-morrow.

Then shall the lion of capital and the lamb of labor lie down together,
and neither shall be afraid, neither shall there be any more strikes,
nor walking delegates; no more epidemics of hate; no more vipers to hiss
their slander or trail their slime. “Then shall every battle flag be
furled in the parliament of nations, the federation of the world.”

Wherever there lies the wounded and helpless by the wayside of life,
wheresoe’er in the world there shall spring to the rescue some strong son
of God armed to the teeth with wine and oil for the wound and the sword
of the Lord and of Gideon for the assassin, our right worshipful dollar
shall change its meaning and its face—its eagle shall have the olive
branch in its mouth. It shall become a health certificate for the sick, a
help certificate for the needy, even though they be not our next of kin.

This parable has wrapt up in it the one remedy for the race with which to
work out its salvation from man’s inhumanity to man.

Oh, this is a dream, the over statement of an enthusiast’s heated fancy.
If it be so, then farewell to our hope of civilization. Its permanence
will depend upon its obedience to this, its supreme law. It is no dream.
Everywhere before your very eyes is it unfolding—unfolding an asylum
for the helpless, hospitals for the sick, charitable institutions of
every type are reaching out their arms all over the world for earth’s
stricken ones—its motherless and helpless. You pessimists do not believe
in humanity, nor do I, but I believe in humanity’s Christ, and I know He
is breathing into His own utterance the law that is to redeem the whole
earth. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And who is my neighbor? We have been saying all the time with this narrow
Jewish lawyer, He is my fellow-Jew; he is akin to me—a man of my nation,
and my neighborliness, diminishing with the square of the distance,
vanishing altogether when he is out of sight.

Well, I tell you, this is not the Master’s, although very similar. His
definition has just two definite terms, and two only—a certain man, and,
to die unless someone helps him. A nameless man of a nameless land,
and wholly desperate. All else is indefinite—a certain man. Was he a
Jew? No answer. Was he stranger from the Perean hills beyond Jordan? No
answer. Was he a merchantman from the isles of the sea returning with his
Damascus purchases via Jerusalem and Joppa? No answer. Was he a good man?
No answer. A man of means, or poor, with a dependent family? No answer.
Was it not wrong of him to venture through so dangerous a region, and
alone? No answer. Was it not foolhardy of him not to yield his goods and
without a struggle? No answer.

All that enters into the Saviour’s definition is the fact that he was a
man, a helpless, wounded man, and to die unless someone comes to him and
ministers to his desperate need.

    “Once in the flight of ages past,
      There lived a man—and who was he?
    Mortal howe’er thy lot be cast,
      That man resembles thee.

    The bounding pulse, the languid limb,
      The changing spirit’s rise and fall,
    We know that these were felt by him,
      For these are felt by all.

    He suffered, but his pangs are o’er,
      Enjoyed, but his delights are fled;
    Had friends, but his friends are now no more,
      And foes—his foes are dead.

    He saw whate’er thou hast seen,
      Encountered all that troubles thee;
    He was whatever thou hast been,
      He is what thou shalt be.

    The annals of the human race;
      Their ruins since the world began,
    Of him afford no other trace than
      This—there lived a man.”

Now, here is the definition and the picture of our neighbor, a picture
whose lights and shadows shall never vary while the world shall last.
This is the man whom Jehovah solemnly committed to his people in every
age of His church. O land of Pharisees, O scribe and lawyer, ever since
the days of Abel this man has been your charge and ward. How sayest thou,
I have loved my neighbor as myself? How sayest thou, I have kept the
commandment of God, when thou has walled thyself off in national barriers
and hath built walls of caste and prejudice between thyself and him? How
sayest thou, I have loved my neighbor as myself, when thou hast stopped
thine ears and shut thine eyes and stalked on by all those who are lying
by the wayside of the Kingdom, dying through all these years of your
history and theirs?

This is our neighbor, where are his? We have found him, where shall he
find his neighbor? The story of the Good Samaritan is the eternal answer.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Who always would but nothing finds to try,
    Unstable shall he live, unhonored die.

       *       *       *       *       *

Prejudice is the ball and chain of Achievement.

[Illustration]




                           TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY
                    Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.
 TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn. Office 161 Fourth Ave. North.

                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., NOVEMBER, 1905.




With Trotwood


THE YELLOW EDITOR.

(After Rudyard Kipling, for Trotwood’s Monthly.)

(A yellow editor has complained to the governor of Minnesota that the
warden of the Stillwater penitentiary has refused to allow one of his
convicts to subscribe for a certain saffron journal.—News Item.)

    Now Tomlinson once robbed a man in Berkeley Square,
    And a copper caught him in the act and nabbed him then and there.
    The copper grabbed him by the neck and hurried him away.
    In a blue patrol that was right outside, he rode through shadows gray
    To a gloomy place in the darksome town where the blatant noises cease,
    And they came to a gate within a wall where the jailer has the keys.
    “Stand up, stand up, now Tomlinson, and answer loud and high.
    Your name and age, and all of that and ye need not ask me why.”
    The morning dawned and before the judge to trial came Tomlinson,
    He sentenced him to the gloomy “Pen,” and a year he got—just one,
    And the judge’s voice resounding loud to him seemed like a knell
    Or ever they took the man away to lock him in his cell.
    Then Tomlinson looked up and down and sought for things to read:
    “A yellow journal is my meat, yea, that is what I need,
    And I will crawl upon my knees and ask the jailer man
    If he will only bring to me a sheet of the hue of tan.”
    But the jailer held his hands aloft and swore by heaven high
    That no such evil thing should come that penitentiary nigh;
    “For by my troth,” the jailer cried, “ye are a devilish mess,
    But ye dare not steep your guilty soul in the filth of the saffron
      press.”
    Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in the penitentiary there,
    And a spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair—
    The spirit gripped him by the hair and sun by sun they fell
    Till they came to the belt of wicked stars that rim the mouth of hell.
    The devil sat behind the bars where the desperate legions drew,
    And spied the hasting Tomlinson and gladly let him through:
    “Sit down, sit down, upon the slag and yammer loud and high,
    And tell me what you did, my man, or ever ye came to die.”
    “I spent my time on earth, my lord, in reading the yellow press.”
    Thus Tomlinson let out his voice and shouted in distress.
    Then the devil gripped him by the hair, and redder grew his face:
    “If that be true, ye dare not spend one minute in this place;
    Wot ye the price of good pit coal that I must pay?” asked he,
    “That ye rank yourself so fit for hell and ask no leave of me?
    Go back to earth with lip unsealed—go back with an open eye,
    And carry my word to the sons of men, or ever ye come to die,
    That the readers of the yellow press on earth may bide and dwell.
    But we do not want them down below to corrupt the hordes of hell.”

                                                   —Will Reed Dunroy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here is a letter from a young man in Wisconsin, one whom I have never
met except in that way in which kindred spirits so often meet—by mail.
Stricken ere his manhood had scarcely begun, blind, he has never given
up, and is making a living and doing good to all around him—one of the
best and most useful citizens of his town.

Trotwood believes in this whole country, North and South. He does not
believe that either section has all the good or all the bad, but that
in both there is far more good than evil and that the only reason why
people do not like each other is because they do not know each other.
Transportation, the cable, the telegraph, wireless telegraphy and the
telephone have changed the face of the world and corralled mankind with
wires of steel. Japan is nearer Washington to-day than Boston was fifty
years ago. You have more neighbors in Europe than your grandfather had
in the county adjoining him. I am publishing this letter hoping my blind
friend may find the kind surgeon, and also to show the spirit of our
reunited country for which my pen has always and will ever work to cement:

                                      Merrill, Wis., June 30, 1905.

    Dear Trotwood: Rather tardy in thanking you for taking the
    trouble of sending me “Songs and Stories of Tennessee,” but my
    wife and daughter have been away on a visit and though it’s
    vacation, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to press my
    sister into service. We all enjoyed the stories very much, and
    are looking forward eagerly to the time when your new book will
    be out.

    I’ve been wanting to tell you of my father’s experience during
    the Civil War, to see what you think of it, and to see if you
    have any idea who the surgeon could have been and to show you
    another family in the North with the kindliest of feelings for
    the people of the South.

    July 1, ’63, at about 2 o’clock p.m., a Confederate bullet laid
    my father low at the Battle of Gettysburg. The ball passed
    through and killed the man directly in front of him, entering
    father below the heart, the wound being very similar to that
    of President Garfield. He still carries the lead. He lay the
    afternoon until along in the evening the Union line having
    retreated, and firing ceased. About this time Gen. Lee and his
    staff came on the field. The general, seeing father was alive,
    asked what troops he had fought and how boys happened to get
    commissions in the Northern Army. Father answered, “They fought
    and earned them.” As the party passed on, the surgeon returned,
    eased father’s position, gave him a drink of liquor and said he
    would see him later. He came again at about nine o’clock that
    night, twice the next day and late the afternoon of July 2 he
    had two Confederate soldiers prepare a litter and carry father
    to a farm house where, being the most dangerously wounded, he
    was given the only mattress in the house. Father calls him his
    “Good Samaritan.” During his time on the field his hat cord was
    stolen and he gave all the money he had, twenty dollars, ten
    each to two Union soldiers to get him off the field or get him
    something to drink. They never returned. During the night a
    Confederate soldier gave him a drink of milk for which he had
    spent his last cent. This is in brief, but explicit enough to
    show that though father was struck down by a Confederate bullet
    he nevertheless owes his life to men of that army. When the
    Confederate line retreated, father was taken to the hospital
    in the city and was never able to learn the name of his “Good
    Samaritan.” How his wound did not heal for two years, how Dr.
    Bliss treated him and how an abscess formed in his back which
    also took a long time to heal is probably but a repetition of
    many such incidents of which you’ve already heard.

    For fear you’ll grow weary, I’ll desist.

                         Yours very truly,

                                                       H. R. BRUCE.


       *       *       *       *       *

It is time that the flamboyant and flowery, the unreal, was cut out of
our oratory and literature. Kill it. Talk straight, think straight,
live straight. The flamboyant, the flowery is the product of slavery,
of idleness, of high living and no thinking. It is a relic of the past,
of feudalism, a mixture of chivalry and unclear thinking. The great
poet, the great writer, the great orator is he who talks the greatest
good sense. Anything else is the badge of mediocrity. The tendency of
everything these strenuous days, from literature to life insurance,
is expressed in the phrase: “Get there.” How amusing the efforts of a
Tennessee statesman in a recent great occasion, majestically sweeping
the heavens with his hands and solemnly proclaiming that “Tennessee had
set more stars in the galaxy of glory than all the other States.” Bosh!
Tennessee has as many fools to the acre as any other State, and what she
should do just now is to set more hens and fewer stars!

       *       *       *       *       *

People who live with nature soon learn a great deal. The best way to
study nature is to get in harmony with the laws of nature. The best
advice ever given on longevity was from the cheerful old gentleman who
said: “To live long, live naturally, eat what you want and walk on the
sunny side of the street.” Children think that some great man made up the
horrid rules of grammar, and then all the world learned them and went to
talking. They do not know that the world talked first and the rules of
grammar were deduced from the talking. From the facts of life we draw our
rules.

And Nature is the Great Fact.

I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many
thousands—but I noticed it is a fact that the man who works the soil is a
natural-born optimist. Let the farmer fail year after year and he still
plants, hoping. Let the merchant fail one year and he is badly shaken—one
more—another, maybe—and he is done. That is the Fact. Now for the rule:
God intended man to love, to cultivate, to cling to the soil. In other
words, is not farming man’s natural vocation, since neither drought nor
flood nor failure can shut out from his heart that instinct of hoping
which has come down to him through centuries of farming fathers?

       *       *       *       *       *

We—and that means England and America—have used the Jap to fight our
battles for us. The issue has been the stopping of the tide of Moscovites
across Asia, the killing of their influence in the East, the grasping
from covetous hands the yellow empire, richer than mints of yellow gold
to the nation that shall supply their wants. That means the open door
until Japan decides to close it for the world and that the Muscovite must
forever be bound between the Baltic and the North Sea and the ice zone
of the Pacific, all of which was necessary. Arrogant and ignorant Russia
needed this chastisement. But is it not time to stop? We are chuckling
now, but the greatest problem lies before us. Sixteenth century Russia
has met twentieth century Japan, and walked from the woods of barbarity
into the daylight of a Mauser-swept, mine-entangled, smokeless-plowed
field of death. The harvest has been as certain as when the Gauls came
out of the woods to meet the steel-sheathed legions of Caesar.

History does not stop at one page. One was made at Port Arthur and the
Straits of Japan, now—

“Let China alone,” said Napoleon, “she is a sleeping giant.” The
fight has been for China, and the wily Jap, playing on the unfailing
cupidity and conquering, grabbing instinct of the Anglo-Saxon, has won.
Hereafter China belongs to Japan. Give her just a century to vitalize
the nation which, if the world were stood in a line, would count every
fourth fighter as hers, and the white race will face the problem of its
existence. At Portsmouth recently, when the Sabbath came, the Russian
went to church. The Jap only laughed, and voted to work on. Shintoism
knows no Sunday, no soul, no to-morrow, no eternity. Shintoism is blind
chance pitched against the barb-wire of blind unbelief.

It is time to see clearly—to turn. We have conquered our own kin with a
soulless, smiling, ghost-born being who is far-sighted and will yet make
our children wonder why we gave him a Mauser for posterity. As for us, we
will always be for the white man and the Christian.

       *       *       *       *       *

Trotwood’s Monthly has installed a new feature in magazine management. We
call him Jonah. He is a bright boy who does things around the editorial
room. They are not always done right, but when he finishes with them we
are willing to aver that they are always done. One of his duties is to
read all of the poetry submitted—and it is coming in with a rush—condemn
the bad and pass the good up to Trotwood for final judgment. Here are his
comments on an execrable batch of it sent in under the title of “Piping
Lays” by a good, sweet, but sadly misguided being, whose name begins
with Tillie:

    Hear we hav a poet boald.
      Naught I’m frank to sa is worce,
    Than the “Flowery” tales she’s told,
      In her akrobatic verce.

    Tillie fane would pipe a lay
      That would markit fur a song,
    But her Piping duz not pa,
      Why? Bekaus her meter’s rong.

    Tillie mite reverse the phraze
      ’Til her muse is neerer ripe,
    And insted of piping lays
      Tri her hand at laying pipe.

                            JONAH.

But Jonah is equally as hard on Trotwood, as the following unique note
came to me in a batch of proof:

    dear mister trotwood:—

    I think your writing is plain, but the printer, says it is a
    cross between a chinese laundry ticket and the Lord’s prayer
    ritten in arabic. They sent one sheet back to-day and i red it
    and it reeds like this—“The Hal family is a very slow bunch,
    and unless they cross the blood with a Texas Mustang pretty
    soon, they will only be fit for water wagons and apple carts,
    and anny boddy would go to sleep waiting for them to go around
    a half mile track.”

    I draped it on the floor, and when I picked it up it was
    different, and red like this—(I had it up-side-down):

        Life’s ills, could man by knowing,
        Be spared from undergoing,
        There would be sense in knowing;
        But since with all our knowing,
        This coal dust keeps on blowing,
        Well—what’s the use in knowing?

    Mr. Sweetland the business manager said I was a fool, but when
    he tried to reed it, he could not tell whuther it was a horse
    story or poem or something about Uncle Wash. He said it was one
    of the three, and said you wrote like a lobster. it is plain
    enough to me, but i wish you would write and tell me just what
    it is, and I will tell the printer for he is too fresh anyhow.
    Hear is whut I mad of it last:

        When you give a sweet maid kisses
          She hands you back a sigh—
        When you give a printer copy
          He hands you back a pi—
        And he made it in the gloaming
          With his stomach full of rye!

    noto bene:—Pleas com up and let us no which one goes. And pleas
    pardon a suggestion but I saw to-day a thing that wurred me
    verry grately. it was that the buggs insex and varments eats
    up Three Billion Dollars worth of the farmers truck and stuff
    every year. Don’t you think we ought to let them no about it.

                                                             JONAH.

The following compliment from an old friend, Judge John L. Miller, of
Corsicana, Texas, is highly appreciated. When we say “old” friend it
carries a double meaning, for in addition to having been our friend for
many years, this grand old gentleman has nearly reached his ninetieth
milestone, and is still enjoying good health. He writes:

    When I learned that TROTWOOD was to edit TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY
    I folded my arms and shouted for joy, I knew the author of
    “Ole Mistis” and “Miss Kitty’s Funeral,” two of the brightest
    literary gems of modern times, could and would give us a
    monthly that would be read and appreciated by all reading
    people in both North and South. This is the character of
    reading matter the whole country needs, and judging from the
    first number of TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY I think we will get it. The
    visitor from Tennessee is gladly welcomed, bringing as it does
    into our home good cheer and sunshine—short gems of poetry,
    making “Tears from eyelids start,” then smiles and ringing
    laughter.

    With Little Sister, we grieve over the condemned long-legged
    colt. We help her to rescue the little deformed thing from the
    hands of the negro executioner. We shout and sing and dance
    and “’Rah for Little Sister” at the race course as she swings
    proudly into the ring and wins the race.

    Right gladly we renew our acquaintance with “Old Wash” and our
    sympathies are his as he attempts with his luscious watermelons
    to reach the hearts of his people through their stomachs, and
    also defeats his own purpose through their stomachs.

    A “History of the Hals” appeals strongly to lovers of fine
    horses. Many horses of the Hal family are owned by Texans and
    the articles on this especial subject will be read with avidity
    by subscribers over this state as well as elsewhere. A bright
    magazine enjoyed alike by every member of the household we find
    TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY to be, and “Barkis is more than willin’”
    that it should be the success it so well deserves.

       *       *       *       *       *

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.




                            1:59¼      2:00½

                               EWELL FARM

                           (ESTABLISHED 1870)

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

_Trotting and Pacing Horses. Jersey Cattle. Shetland Ponies. Southdown
Sheep._

       *       *       *       *       *

IN THE STUD

JOHN R. GENTRY 2:00½, 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.

McEWEN 2:18¼—Prize winner at St. Louis, 1904, when 19 years old.
Unquestionably the best sire of his age, bred and owned in Tennessee.
Sire of 26 with fast records. A great race horse, a splendid road horse,
a successful show horse and a remarkable sire.—Fee, $30.00.

HAL BROWN, one of the speediest of Brown Hal’s sons. Showed two-minute
speed as a yearling. Full brother to four with records from 2:07¼ to
2:13¼. Represents on both sides the best of Tennessee’s pacing strains. A
most precocious sire.

YOUNG STOCK of both sexes, stallions and brood mares, trotters and pacers
ready to race, for sale at all times.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Ewell Farm JERSEY HERD is headed by TOMMY TORMENTOR 67233, a double
greatgrandson of Imp. Tormentor 3533 (whose blood entered more largely
into the pedigrees of the winning herd in the World’s Fair test, at
St. Louis, 1904, than that of any other bull). A bull of exact dairy
conformation, beautiful color and great vigor. After January 1, 1906, a
few young bulls and heifers will be offered for sale.

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.

SOUTHDOWN SHEEP.—Our Southdowns are of pure blood, but unregistered.
Especially adapted for breeding spring lambs.

       For Particulars, Address EWELL FARM Spring Hill, Tennessee,
                              Maury County

               GEO. CAMPBELL BROWN, Mgr. Live Stock Dept.

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