1908 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



585 



HOMLS 



iyA.I.ROOT 



Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shall thou dwell 

 in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. —Psalm 37:3. 



Quite a few periodicals are sent me on 

 socialism; and, to tell the truth, I am flooded 

 with periodicals devoted to almost every isvi 

 under the sun, it would seem, and therefore 

 it is impossible for me to do more than to 

 g'ance over them. Perhaps 1 should say 

 that, as I grow older, I find it beyond my 

 strength to read books and papers as 1 used 

 to do. For some years I have felt it a sort 

 of duty to look over at least one daily paper. 



I do not want to miss the good things that 

 are coming so constantly in regard to the 

 victories of the Lord Jesus Christ over the 

 sin of intemperance; but I have just been 

 thinking that I shall have to give up reading 

 i^ven the daily — at least as much as 1 have 

 been doing. Not only my health, but my 

 very life depends on being out in the open 

 air many hours of the day. I make this sug- 

 gestion to you, dear friends, because 1 want 

 you to know that 1 can not read books and 

 periodicals as I used to do. Now, with all 

 this prelude I want to say that, in glancing 

 over the periodical called The Study of So- 

 cialism, my eye caught the following sen- 

 tence: 



" Whenever one man gets a dollar that he 

 has not earned, it is a sure thing that some 

 other man has earned a dollar that he did 

 not get." 



1 want to say amen to that statement, and 

 make an application of it in regard to this 

 matter of selling secrets, or, if you choose, 

 selling a much advertised book for five or 

 ten times what it is actually worth. Perhaps 

 I might say a hundred times. And this whole 

 business of taking a dollar, more or less, for 

 some information that can be printed on a 

 small piece of paper, is robbing somebody, 

 probably, of a hard-earned dollar. Our text 

 tells us to trust in the Lord, and do good; 

 but a man is not trusting the Lord nor doing 

 good when he takes money for "secrets," es- 

 pecially the sort of secrets where one signs a 

 contract not to let his neighbor have the secret 

 nor let him see the book. 



There is another way of getting money 

 that realllyrfoes do your neighbor good; and 

 that other way is what I am going to talk 

 about to day. Yes, I am going to have anoth- 

 er chicken story. While in Elmira, N . Y. , last 

 week I called on a bee-keeper of years gone 

 by. He was very glad to see me, and before 

 I left he introduced me to his wife, who is a 

 bright and interesting woman. Her eyes 

 twinkled when she heard my name, and 

 it was a pleasure to see me. Then she add- 

 ed that she wanted to find a little fault with 

 my last Home paper. 1 began to be trou- 



bled right away; but when she explained 

 that her only objecition was that it had not/i- 

 ing in it about chickens, I felt better. How- 

 ever, her good husband (Mr. P. F. CouKlin, 

 who is a railroad engineer), so strongly in- 

 dorsed my temperance talk that I felt as if 1 

 had not gone very far amiss, take it all to- 

 gether, after all. And, by the way, there 

 are so many of the women-folks who have 

 been asking for more "chicken stories" that 

 I do not know but I am warranted in tak- 

 ing a little space for that subject — a subject 

 dear to my heart, even if this is a bee journal. 



I want to say something more about my 

 visit to friend Philo's in Elmira. His only 

 son is named Ernest — E. R. Philo; and al- 

 though the father has been a "chicken 

 crank" all the days of his life, as well as a 

 bee-keeper, his son did not seem to take much 

 of a shine to either bees or chickens. HIm 

 great craze from boyhood up was printing. 

 In fact, while quite a boy he got a little print- 

 ing-press, like the one I started with, per- 

 haps, before we published Gleanings. Well, 

 this boy could think of nothing, day or night, 

 but nice clean printing; so after his father 

 got to doing so much with chickens that he 

 needed some sort of communication with the 

 great outside world, his boy started a poultry- 

 paper. But for some years, owing, probably, 

 to the great number of other poultry journals 

 (somebody has told me there are close on to 

 one hundred of them in the United States), 

 they did not succeed in working up a very 

 large subscription li■^t. 1 think that, about a 

 year ago, 1500 subscribers was pretty nearly 

 the sum total The hoy is now just about 21, 

 bright and wideawake, with a pretty good 

 physical frame for hard work. Well, that 

 list of 1500 names has. during the last year, 

 run up to over 12,000. I do not know how 

 it came about — probably largely on account 

 of the father's development of new things for 

 poultrymen during the past year. 



While talking with friend Philo about his 

 "fireless" brooder I asked him several ques- 

 tions about the traflic in baby chickens one 

 day old. Later I noticed an advertisement 

 in the poultry journals of several establish- 

 ments near my own home that do nothing 

 but ship chickens as soon as they are hatch- 

 ed. I sent for their circulars, and yesterday, 

 April 14, paid a visit to three of them. The 

 first one I called on was owned by Jos. A 

 Bloom & Co., Chatfield, O , and I was de- 

 lighted to find the whole establishment under 

 the care of a young man not much older in 

 appearance than Ernest Philo — may be 25 

 years old. A new building has been put up 

 since January, and this building contains 48 

 incubators of 200-egg capacity each, all in 

 full blast, and he and his younger brother 

 were very busy in making m,ore incubators. 

 Instead of paying a big price to the incuba- 

 tor factories they just make their own, and 

 they claim that these home-made ones will 

 do as good or better work than any they can 

 buy. Just think of it! A couple of boys 

 practically making incubators that actually 

 give splendid results! As a matter of course, 

 they have sent for samples of almost every 



