66 



GLEANINGS IN BRE CULTURE. 



Jan. 15. 



came lo hand from our good friend Geo. M. 

 Kellogg: 



The reason I wrote my "wanl" ad. (p. 33) 

 so sarcastic was. I am so bored by men wi o 

 claim to be garden- r?, etc., when they know but 

 OTict/ii/iry— that is, to laze around and kill time. I 

 just turned otf a man to-day. after ',"._, davs' 

 of work, who i-ame and recommended himself so 

 highly that 1 really thought he might be a good 

 help. 1 would not give such a man his board. 

 I would rather take a green boy, and t<-ach 

 him how to work. I am down on fossils in 

 lull nan form. 



Pleasant Hill, Mo., Dec. 29. 



(JN THE WHEEL — LACLEDE CO., MO. 



There are a good many peculiar things about 

 Missouri; that is, they have different crops, 

 and different ways of doing things, from what 

 we have here in Ohio. The great staple seems 

 to be corn; and the rich black soil, full of hu- 

 mus, for the most part, seems to be especially 

 adapted to corn. Now, with such immense 

 crops of corn, the price gets very low; and in a 

 good many places the crops are a good way 

 from railroads; therefore, to use up as much as 

 possible of It, a great deal of pork is raised. 

 The wire fence that troubled me so much to get 

 over was one of the pig- proof sort. As there 

 are immense tracts of forest, or, rather, scrub- 

 oaks (for the greater part of the trees are a 

 peculiar kind of oak of small growth), and 

 these oaks furnish most seasons immense quan- 

 tities of acorns, to use up this great quantity of 

 •'shack" the pigs— especially those belonging 

 to poor people — are allowed to run at large. 

 The consequence is, the farmer who raises crops 

 must fence the pigs out; and so they have 

 fences with barbed wire very close together 

 down near the ground — so close, indeed, that 

 many of them are chicken-proof as well as pig- 

 proof, unless thechickens jump and get through 

 the wide spaces a little higher up. In running 

 my wheel over the dry leaves through these 

 trails in the woods I often ran into droves of 

 pigs. Hy the time I conclude, however, that 

 they are not going to be frightened at the 

 wheel, as the horses, cattle, and mules are. the 

 leader of the drove gives a peculiar srruntof as- 

 toni-^hmcnt and fright, which is the signal for a 

 general stampede^; and if I do not slow up. I 

 am sometimes in danger of getting rolled into 

 the leaves among the pigs. Well, where pig- 

 growing is such an immense industry there are 

 great quantities of pork thrown on the market; 

 and in order to furni-h a Ixilanaed ration (ham 

 and eggs) great quantities of poultry and eggs 

 are produced. In fact. Missouri ought to he 

 able to furnish hatri and eggs enough for at 

 least a part of the great wide world. The wo- 

 men-folks have a great deal to do with poultry- 

 raising: and friend .Abbott's bright spicy poul- 

 try-talks at the; farmers' institutes have made 

 him quite a general favorite with the sex. It 

 won't hurl him any. for he is a good man, and 

 always remembers the faithful little wife who 

 so well looks after the comfortsof his neat little 

 home in St. .Foseph. 



These great cornlields are a splendid adjunct 

 lo the poultry business — especially the turkey 

 line. Turkeys, you know, ramble over miles of 

 territory. One of my brother-in-law's neigh- 

 bors has a flock of slate-colored turkeys num- 



bering over a hundred. He said they started 

 out in the morning like a regiment of soldiers, 

 taking the fields and woods, and every thing 

 that came before them, each turkey marching 

 perhaps twenty feet from its neighbor. He said 

 they went away every morning, and generally 

 came in about an hour before sundown, keep- 

 ing up the same line of march in all their raids. 

 I told him I should c(M-tainly have to go over to 

 his place to see them, and I happened along 

 just at the time specilied — about an hour before 

 sundown. They were just emerging from the 

 woods, in a long line, all abreast. As they went 

 over the pasture-lot, every cricket, grass- 

 hopper, bug, and worm, was pretty sure to be 

 detected by their keen sharp eyes, and you 

 could see them do their work as they moved 

 forward. Of course, they get into the cornfields 

 some; but I believe it is generally considered 

 that they do enough good in their march to 

 atone for the corn they take, for corn is cheap 

 down in Missouri. 



But even with the great numbers of turkeys 

 domesticated, there seems to be still a field for 

 more, for wild turkeys are even yet quite abun- 

 dant. They live. I believe, mosily on corn and 

 acorns. In fact, so plentiful are they that they 

 often mix, and the eggs of wild turkeys are 

 sometimes set and hatched under the tame 

 ones. They grow up with the rest very much 

 as if that were the way they had always done; 

 but when the wild turkeys fly over them on 

 their way south they are very apt to catch the 

 fever, and burst the bonds of domestication, 

 and soar aloft with their wild untamed breth- 

 ren. 



The man who owned the turkeys, finding I 

 was greatly interested in sinkholes, such as the 

 country aboundt-d in, told me there was quite a 

 tract, sevral miles away, where the ground had 

 suddenly dropped down forty or fifty feet, leav- 

 ing steep or even perpendicular sides all around 

 the inclosure. The road used to run through 

 this piece of forest, and a man rode over on 

 horseback only an hour before the sink occur- 

 red. As the rest did not seem to be particularly 

 curious about such phenomena, 1 decided to 

 hunt it up on my wheel. After various tnean- 

 derings through the woods and across the 

 clearings I discovered that I had got beyond 

 the spot. Many people seemed to know but 

 little about it, even though it was in ti.eir im- 

 mediate neighborhood: and they speculated as 

 to what "that fellow on the wheel" wanted of 

 that large sinkhole, anyway. Some thought I 

 was prospecting for minerals. At length I 

 found a little log house in the wilderness, be- 

 longing to the man who owned the property 

 where the ground had dropped down. Nobody 

 was at home but the woman of the house. It 

 was getting toward night: and darkness in a lo- 

 cality where it kept one busy to get through by 

 daylight was not the thing to be most desired. 

 She said I was to follow the road down to a 

 wheatfield. Then 1 was to go straight through 

 the wheatliekl. and I would find the road again 

 on the other side. When 1 got there, "straight 

 through ■' seemed to be a pretty difficult matter 

 to manage. In searching for the road I got off 

 into the thick and tangled forest, and lost my 

 bearings; and as the sun did not shine I could 

 not even tell which way I came from. I was lost 

 in the woods, and obliged to drag my wheel, and 

 pull it through the underbrush. No matter 

 which way I went, the bushes and vines grew 

 thicker. I pushed for the top of a little hill, 

 thinking I might see some signs of human hab- 

 itation in some direction; but it was all un- 

 broken forest. I could not discover in any di- 

 rection any thing that looked a bit like the path 

 or the wheatfield I had left. It may seem a 

 trifling thing for a full-grown man to acknowl- 



