52 SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 



Bay to Naraguagus river, and we have a region of less snow than 

 any other part of the State. It is something more than mere prox- 

 imity to the sea that causes this phenomenon. I will not stop to 

 speculate upon the causes. It happens that our snow season com- 

 mences some days later and closes some days earlier than in the 

 region of Bangor, Augusta, or even than in the country back of 

 Portland, while the January thaw, which farther West and North is 

 a mere wetting and crusting of the snow, gives us bare hills and 

 wheeling ; and an open winter like this, which occurs about once 

 in seven years, brings no permanent snow at all.* I know how 

 justly and feelingly you farmers have complained of this very con- 

 dition, as fatal to all your cultivated grasses. But there is no 

 philosophy in complaining of anything so beyond our control as 

 the weather. We must adapt our husbandry to it. The keeping 

 of sheep is, in my judgment, greatly cheapened by this breaking 

 up of our winters. What sheep dread is not cold but storms, and 

 snow storms or rain may drive them to cover in the forests, and 

 snow compel them to seek the shelter of the barn and shed ; but 

 if the ground be bare they will range out upon the hills in defiance 

 of cold, cropping browse and stubble and the dried grasses until, 

 as I know from my own experience, it will require the attraction 

 of provender, rattled in a tin dish to bring them back to their fod- 

 dered racks. Some fifteen years ago a flock of twelve sheep kept 

 by my father subsisted through a whole winter like this, with not 

 more than twenty days foddering, getting their living in the fields, 

 not always, I fear, those of their rightful owner, and their condition 

 and profit may be guesed at, when it is added that they raised ten 

 lambs and sheared four and a half pounds of wool each, which was 

 sold for $26, a return, if the lambs be valued at $2 each, of nearly 

 $4 per head. 



I have seen during the year a report of a wool growers' conven- 

 tion in Vermont, at which it was stated that the cost of wintering 

 a sheep in that State, was $1.25, while in Maine it was only $l.f 

 Both these estimates are too low, but if Maine can keep 

 flocks through the winter for twenty per cent, less than Ver- 

 mont,, the great wool growing State of the Union, it cannot be 



* In this region, with the exception of about two weeks sleighing in December 

 there was no sleighing the present winter, until the first day of March and for 

 twenty-four days that followed it. # 



t Reported in the New York Daily Tribune. 



