BUYING OF WOOL. 217 



almost invariably makes the price for all the wool in that 

 neighborhood; and consequently the difficulty has been 

 in going around, and buying every man's wool fairly and 

 squarely on its own merits. Now, if the individual farmers 

 in a place would come together and settle upon some reliable 

 person who should fix the value of their wool, there would 

 be less difficulty, and less fooling, and less cheating, about 

 buying wool ; but, as long as the matter stands as it does, 

 there will always be this difficulty. The attempt will always 

 be made to put you all on a horizontal line. 



There are three fleeces lying there on that table, of three 

 distinct qualities ; and one man, perhaps, will have twenty 

 or thirty sheep, out of a flock of a hundred, of one kind, 

 and another number of another kind, and another number of 

 still another kind. When the wool-buyer comes to buy that 

 wool, it is all mixed up, and he has the greatest difficulty in 

 getting at its value, because there are so many different 

 kinds, and each one has a different value. We have to buy 

 your wool as it is, and we have to estimate it. You don't 

 want to say that you have got ten or fifteen oily sheep in 

 your flock, whose wool is not worth so much by certainly ten 

 cents a pound as the wool of some of the others. There 

 comes the difficulty. When you are breeding full-blood 

 Merinos, or full-blood Saxony sheep, you have pretty near 

 an even thing ; but, when you are breeding cross-bred sheep, 

 it is a very different thing. I have seen a Merino crossed 

 with a Leicester that produced as short a staple as the 

 Merino, with as coarse fibre as the Leicester : there you have 

 a wool that is almost worthless. Another one has the length 

 of the Leicester and the fineness of the Merino : there you 

 have a wool that is worth more than double what the other 

 is worth. 



In this matter of raising sheep for wool, you have a most 

 difficult thing to manage, from the fact that you are dealing 

 with the coat of the animal, and not with the animal itself. 

 All the value of the animal depends upon its coat. The 

 second fleece from a Saxony is worth more than the first : 

 every other kind of fleece is worth the most the first year. 



Now, there is one peculiarity in regard to the value of 

 wool, and it has existed almost ever since the war : it is 

 this, that a medium fleece is worth more than the fleece of a 



