LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 157 



are turned to pasture in the spring. Wethers are wintered by themselves, 

 feeding them twice per day hay and straw, with sufficient grain, if necessary, 

 to keep in fair condition. All are given water convenient of access. By 

 feeding at regular hours, giving plenty of good water, by looking after each 

 individual sheep, by trimming their feet, tagging off filthy wool, giving salt 

 once a week, and an occasional dose of sulphur witli the salt, and many other 

 little attentions, I manage to keep my sheep in fair condition without an 

 expensive grain feed during the winter. I prefer to have my ewes commence 

 dropping their lambs about the 20th of April, and if they are through in 

 thirty days I am well satisfied. I believe I can take lambs, dropped anywhere 

 before the middle of May, provided they have ordinary good mothers, and 

 grow them to good-sized, well developed yearlings, with less loss and trouble 

 than I can March lambs, and make them to every appearance as good at the 

 end of the first year. 



The question of washing sheep I would like to have appear to me different 

 from what it does. This last year I made one experimental test of its value by 

 wool sales, and found that those sheep that I washed brought me just 

 thirty cents' worth more wool than did those that I did not wash. Now if 

 this difference would hold good in all flocks, then we had better go back to 

 old times and all wash sheep again. I have tested this matter in a small way 

 for several years, but never so satisfactorily to me as last year when I took out 

 a part of one flock, thirty-three in number, and kept them housed from all 

 storms till after shearing them, which I did just previous to shearing the 

 washed ones, and my experience was that I got just thirty cents more per head 

 for the washed fleeces than the unwashed ones. Either I should have lost 

 thirty cents per head if my sheep had all been unwashed or I should have gained 

 thirty cents per head by washing them if the rigid rule of dockage by weight 

 or price was a just one. With me it made a difference of nearly three hun- 

 dred pounds. Others might fare differently ; your sheep may have more oil, 

 gum and dirt in their fleeces than mine did, and in that case this rule of 

 dockage would not harm you as it did me. I dislike the job of washing sheep 

 for the sheep's sake as well as for my own. 



It is a well established fact that if sheep are shorn early in the spring 

 it is productive of an increased growth of wool for that year than if shorn 

 later in the season. Hosv much this difference is has not as I am aware been 

 accurately determined, but fine wool sheep men who have been shearing their 

 sheep year after year very early in the spring claim that they will not get any 

 increase in the growth of wool. "You may get grease, however," after about 

 the 1st of May upon unshorn sheep, but that you actually get nearly six weeks 

 more growth for the year's clip upon sheep shorn the first of May than upon 

 those sheared the loth of June, about the usual shearing time here. This 

 plan of early shearing for all our flocks, if found as it is represented, ought to 

 be adopted. I certainly could show you nice looking fleeces, those freer from 

 grease and dirt taken off the 1st of May than at any later time, fleeces that 

 ought not to be docked very much if any to bring them on an equality with 

 those washed and shorn the middle of June. 



I fear I have already tired you with the length of this rather uninteresting 

 paper, but permit me to say in brief that though it is said that there is no 

 form of labor that has so little profit in it as that of farming, that the farmer 

 works early and late, and often late into the night, that he is a hard task 

 master to his family, that he often lives on wheat he can not sell, that he 

 wears the cheapest and shoddiest of clothing, that his buildings and stock are 



