552 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



enhanced price of the clip, for extra wages to a careful 

 hand. 



If, as is often the case in newly settled places, you 

 have no barn or other convenient building to work in, 

 be sure and not commence your shearing until you have 

 procured some large sheets of canvass — or coarse cot- 

 ton drilling will answer — to lay down upon the ground 

 to lay your wool upon to keep it out of the dirt. 



Before sending to market, put up the wool in sacks, 

 made of five yards each of stout tow linen, yard wide. 

 Sort the fleeces, and fill each sack with those of equal 

 quality as near as possible. If you sell the sacks with 

 the wool, the buyer will always pay for them, and if he 

 can ascertain the quality aright, without unpacking, will 

 prefer to do so, and will be likely to pay about a cent a 

 pound extra for your neatness and honesty. 



A word more about filling the sacks, and I have done. 

 Sew up in each bottom corner a bunch of wool as big as 

 a goose's egg. Get a stout wooden hoop, made like a coop- 

 er's truss hoop, the size of your sacks, slip it over the top 

 of the sack, and wind the cloth over round the hoop, and 

 then have three ropes that will suspend the sack just clear 

 of the ground, and at the end of these ropes iron hooks 

 that will just clasp the hoop, which will keep the cloth 

 from slipping off, and still be easy to cast loose. Let the 

 packer get into the sack, and as the fleeces are handed to 

 him, tread each one into its place, and you will be sur- 

 prised to see what a quantity you can get in. When full 

 sew up the mouth, and make two just such corners as at 

 the bottom. These are the handles of the sack, and are 

 very convenient. 



Perhaps at some other time you may hear again from 

 your "Old friend of the Prairies." 



Solon Robinson. 

 Dec. 10, 1845. 



