1903 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



1057 



and answer praj'er it will be well with them in his own 

 I good time; and my faith reaches up to that blessed 

 [ time when there will not onl^ be joy in heaven but in 

 f my heart. 



I i thank you heartily. Bro, Root, for \ our nice and 



I consoling letter. There are often times in our lives 

 I when a gooit Chri.stian word fiilv spoken fairly un- 

 , corks the vessel which admits rich blessings to our 

 [ souls, and this seems to have been one of them. 



Yours for God. H. Whitcomu. 

 Friend. Neb., Nov. 2?, 1903. 



I took the letter over to the house, and 

 read it to Mrs. Root. Before I g-ot through 

 she asked how old he was. I said I could 

 not tell; but from the fact that the dear 

 brother tells us he used tobacco " faithftil- 

 Ij' " for over fiftj' ^-ears, I imagine he must 

 be about my own age. When one reads 

 what he says about the two lines of that 

 hymn that he kept repeating' over and over 

 when going- home, and the two lines that 

 were all night ringing in his ears, it re- 

 minds us of what father Langstroth said 

 about his watch that kept saj'ing' " Quin- 

 by, Ouinb3%" all night. 



I suppose our readers would like to know 

 more about the " Olivers " and their work. 

 Perhaps Bro. Whitcomb or somebody else 

 will tell us more about them. 



By the waj', since this thing- has started 

 is it not possible that the ,year 1904 may 

 usher in a great wave of souls turning to 

 God? Is it too mtich to ask God that, in- 

 stead of reading- in our dailies about "graft- 

 ing- " in our great cities, and briber}' and 

 corruption, strikes, etc., we ma}' give the 

 papers some news in the line of Bro. Whit- 

 comb's new birth? May the H0I3' Spirit 

 bless the message as it comes to the knowl- 

 edge of the bee-keepers of our land. 



And now just a word to our good friend 

 Whitcomb. If j'ou go on in the spirit in 

 wh'ch the above letter is written, sooner or 

 later j-ou are going- to get some hard knocks. 

 Satan will protest; and discouragements 

 and vexations will come in upon yotx in 

 most unexpected ways. May the Lord be 

 praised for the fact that you are a big 

 broad-shouldered man, and, if I am correct, 

 not easily put out, especially when you 

 know you are right. Hold on to that Bible 

 promise in that longest psalm of David, 

 "Great peace have they that love thy law; 

 and nothing shall oflend them." 



On page 60 of our issue for Jan. 15 ap- 

 pears an excellent picture of friend Whit- 

 comb, and it may be worth while for the 

 friends to turn back and look at his picture 

 while the}' read his letter to the readers of 

 Gleanings. 



REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY TO KEEP IT 

 HOI-Y. 



Dear Bro .^00/.— To-day was the first time I had the 

 oppirtunily to read your Dec. 1st Home Paper on the 

 question of^the ob er\-ance of ihe Lord's day. I think 

 it is without exception, the best paper of any that I 

 have read in over four years. If the same common- 

 sense interpretation of the Scripture, and its applica- 

 tion to the problems of life, were only followed by the 

 followers of Christ, a great deal of energy 'hat is now 

 wasted could be better utilized in the kingdom: and if 

 the spirit of charity with which it is saturated were 

 only copied by all those who seek a solution of this 

 perplexing question it would be more in accord with 



the profession which we make. I think your view is 

 biblical, reasonable, and Christlike. 



Fraternally yours, Jesse Hill. 

 Medina, Ohio, Dec. 8. 



When I read the above letter, and found 

 it was from the pastor of our own church, I 

 shall have to confess it was one of my 

 " happy surprises." In fact, after the pa- 

 per was written I felt so much troubled 

 about it I meditated carrying it to him, 

 asking his opinion about it. For want of 

 time I did not get around to it. Perhaps I 

 maj' saj' to our readers that the writer of 

 the above is about as able a man, from 

 every point of view, to discuss and give an 

 opinion on this "perplexing question," as 

 he terms it, as any doctor of divinity or 

 anybody else I know of. 



HAIRY OR SAND VETCH. 



My trip to California during the past sea- 

 son prevented me from making experiments 

 with sandy vetch, as I proposed, but I still 

 have the matter in mind. We extract the 

 following from the Country Gentleman for 

 Oct. 22: 



Manj' cover crops do not actually cover the surface 

 of the soil. Soy beans and cow peas, for instance, es- 

 pecially when grown in drills, leave a laige part of the 

 ground uncovered. The vetch lies prostrate, and by 

 its rapid growth very soon puts the entire surface soil 

 out of sight. This is true even when seed is grown in 

 drills. 



This prostrate habit of the vetch, along with its abili- 

 ty to hold fa'it wherever it gets a start, makes it one of 

 the best possible crops to prevent erosion of soil that 

 is liable to wash. One of the strongest legitimate ob- 

 jections to the cultivation of orchard soils lies in the 

 fact that they sometimes do wash away badly during 

 the spring rain<. The proper way to prevent this of 

 cour.>-e, is by growing a go d cover crop, and for this 

 purpose we know of absolutely nothing so good as the 

 winter vetch. 



It has often been said that the fruit-grower should 

 choose one of the leguminous crops for an orchard 

 cover, the reason given being that, when such a crop 

 is turned under, it furnishes a considerable amount of 

 nitrogen for the trees 



This nitrogen, moreover, is in a very readily availa- 

 ble form, and can be made use of bv the trees with 

 certainty and rapidity. Among all the niirogengath- 

 ering cr ps, the vetch stands possibly at the head. At 

 any rate, it seems to gt-t the most nitrogen. Hlthough 

 the question where it gets it remains an open one. In 

 the experiments of Craig and Cavanaugh at Cornell, 

 some very remarkable figures wi re f'eveloped. It was 

 shown, for instance, that where cow peas contain an 

 average of 52 pounds of nitrogen to the acre, the hairy 

 vetch has .'eeured 2o6 pounds 



The price of $7 a bushel, however, is not so bad as it 

 seems. If one sows a bushel to the acre, then it is in- 

 deed expensive, and a bushel to the acre is what has 

 been frequently recommended According to our ex- 

 perience, however, the seed can be sown in drills at the 

 rate of one to one and a half pecks to the acre, and 

 still give a perlect cover under ordinary conditions. 

 This method of handling cover crops is one concerning 

 which we will have more to say at some futur e date. I 



Accompanying the article in the Country 

 Gentleman is a beautiful picture of a field 

 of sand vetch grown for seed. 



The above figures, calling hairy vetch 

 worth five times as much to plow under as 

 cow peas, are pretty strong; but from what 



