BARB WIRE FENCES. 221 



would jump or break through. I have put up nearly two 

 hundred rods of this wire fence during the last four years, 

 and I have never had the least trouble with it. I have always 

 found that it keeps the cattle where they belong. 



Question. What is the expense per rod ? 



Mr. Stoddard. I think it is ten or eleven cents a pound, 

 fourteen and one-half feet long. If you, put up three 

 strands, it will cost you about thirty-three cents a rod for the 

 wire. 



Mr. Choate of South Hadley. I put a barbed wire fence 

 around a cornfield next to my pasture, a year ago this last 

 summer, and not long after the fence had been built I turned 

 out a horse that had been worked for two months every day. 

 The horse came up to the fence and got cut up in the way 

 Mr. Ware has described, only it was cut in the chest. You 

 could put your fist in the wound ; the horse died in a month. 

 That is my experience with barbed wire so far as horses are 

 concerned. But for cattle, there is nothing in the world 

 equal to it. As one gentleman said, a single wire on an old, 

 .dilapidated fence will turn any cow, even if the cow has got 

 into a cornfield ; and every farmer knows how difficult it is to 

 keep cows in a dried-up pasture after they have once broken 

 into a fresh cornfield. But one wire, if not more than three 

 feet high, will be a sure protection against them. Three wires 

 will make a fence, if you set the poles sufficiently thick, say 

 one rod apart, that will turn any stock in the world, except 

 horses ; and I think the remedy for any difficulty in regard 

 to horses would be to put a board either on the top wire or 

 the middle one. I was to blame, as the gentleman (Mr. 

 Ware) was, for turning my horse into the pasture without 

 taking him up to the fence, that he might see what there was 

 there. The horse, feeling well, would run against the fence 

 before he was aware that there was any fence there ; that was 

 the trouble. 



Mr. Russell. I have kept a good many horses for years, 

 and I have had the same difficulties that Mr. Ware has 

 described, from horses being injured against stone walls. I 

 will give my experience of one summer with a stone wall. I 

 had four acres in which I kept some breeding mares, and a 

 number of mares t'^gether are sometimes quarrelsome. One 



