104 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. IJan., 



make any dent upon the armor of this poHtician. It looked as 

 though it was one of those things where you could not do any- 

 thing. I stood ready almost to hold up my hands and say 

 there was no use, friends, the farmers will not rise up and do 

 their duty. The task ahead seemed so large that I was about 

 discouraged. In that condition I went out on my farm one 

 day along in September and there discovered an old Wyandotte 

 hen sitting in the dooryard. She was sitting upon three or 

 four old stones. I stood and looked at her, and then I turned 

 to one of the men who was with me, and I said, " How lonf 

 has this hen been sitting here?" "Two or three weeks." 

 " We have tried to break her up and can't." " Why," I said, 

 " can't you get her away? '' " Xo," he said, " we have done 

 everything that we can. We have bribed her with corn and 

 she will starve before she will leave her job. We have tried 

 everything we could think of to drive her away and keep her 

 away from that nest but still she comes right back." As I 

 listened to that story I thought, there is my lesson. If a hen 

 will sit there in the cold, and in the wet, and be right up prompt 

 and fair to her duty all the time, where you cannot whip her 

 or dislodge her, why should a grown man lose his faith ? The 

 more I thought of it the more that idea took possession of me, 

 and I went back and I attacked that man harder than ever. If 

 I want a lesson of devotion to duty today I will go and look at 

 a sitting hen. That was the greatest lesson I ever had in my 

 life, — from that sitting hen. Another thing that the hen 

 teaches us, and that is in the matter of advertising our goods. 

 There is many a man up on your hill farms that will stand still, 

 and who is really ashamed to come out, as it is his duty to do, 

 and let the public know that he has something to sell. I 

 know of lots of people who have lost many a dollar simply be- 

 cause they had not the courage to come out and tell other people 

 that they had something to sell, and what it was worth. Such 

 people as that can very readily learn a lesson from the hen. 

 There is another class which can also learn a lesson from the 

 rooster. The hen and the rooster are both advertisers. You 

 sometimes hear people talk about hen men. People come and 

 tell me about such men. I know of hen men myself. But you 

 take men who are successful in business, and you analyze the 

 situation right down, and the probability is that you will find 

 that about ninety-five per cent of those people are what I call 



