NOT SLOW IN CURING MEAT. 227 



Now, if the Professor had any malice in bringing me up here 

 ill connection with this sheep, I feel a little inclined to pay him 

 off. The Professor tells you that it takes from five to twenty 

 days, according to the thickness of the meat, to cure it. Well, 

 he is authority upon this subject. This is an English discovery, 

 and an Englishman is fully entitled to the credit of it ; but of 

 course Yankees will improve upon it. Now, none of you who 

 have seen the Professor will say, I think, that he is at all slow, 

 and those who are l:)etter acquainted with him than you are have 

 still less reason to think there is anything slow about him ; but, 

 as an American, I say it takes from twenty-four hours to five days 

 to cure. I speak from six months' observation of the Professor's 

 operations, and six months of very practical operations under 

 his instructions at Chicago. I am certain that in twenty-four 

 hours I can cure poultry perfectly. I have some chickens in 

 Chicago that were cured there last June. I have had beef that 

 was cured in thirty-six hours that was as perfect six weeks after- 

 wards, when we ate it up, as the day it was killed. How much 

 longer it would have kept I don't know ; but I assure you it did 

 not keep after it was cooked. As I said before, there is nothing 

 slow in the arrangement, except in the Professor's idea that it 

 takes a longer time than is necessary. 



While up, I would like to make a single remark in illustra- 

 tion of the lecture that was delivered here upon the value of 

 education to the farmer, as a means of making farming pay. 

 Most of you have heard of Mr. Kendall, the editor of the "New 

 Orleans Picayune." He went to raising sheep in Texas on an 

 extensive scale. He was successful at first, and he published 

 the results of his husbandry in that line. Before he died, how- 

 ever, disease got among his sheep ; he did not know how to 

 remedy the difficulty, and the result was an almost total loss. 

 There was a friend of mine near Corpus Christ!, in Texas, — 

 not as favorable a location for sheep-husbandry as the neighbor- 

 hood where Mr. Kendall was raising so many, — who commenced 

 with fourteen hundred dollars' worth of sheep. He lived off the 

 product of his flock, improved it as well as he was able, and in 

 four years, counting his flock at its cash value in Texas, and 

 what he had received from the sale of sheep and wool during 

 the four years, the amount was fourteen thousand dollars. 

 The difference between knowledge of how to raise sheep and 



