146 I Assembly 



swells or cracks. The best way to char posts is to wet them with 

 cheap resin oil and burn it off. Copperas about posts in the 

 ground preserves them. Wire fence has not yet answered the ex- 

 pectation. I commenced early, and do not like to give up. I 

 still hope that some plan will succeed yet. The difficulty is to 

 provide against the contraction and expansion of the iron. The 

 best way to paint wire fence is to take eutta percha which has 

 been treated with white lead, and heat the wire with a lamp and 

 rub on the gutta percha, which will adhere to the hot wire, and 

 the white lead will give it the right color. Cattle on the road 

 are a public nuisance, and no decent farmer in this age will be 

 guilty of so great an outrage upon his neighbors as to turn out his 

 stock to steal their living. It is actually a system of robbery, and 

 there is a sort of mawkishness about people hesitating to abate 

 the nuisance by legal means. 



The subsoil plow exhibited by Prof. Mapes, and tested before a 

 committee of the Farmers' Club on the farm of the Professor in 

 New Jersey, proved entirely satisfactory. It is, indeed, the only 

 subsoil plow I have ever seen that would do its work effectually, 

 and at so small a cost of power. A small horse hoe or cultivator 

 was also tested, and proved very successful. 



The Rev. Mr. Carter, of Brooklyn, observed, that some years 

 ago he thought it well to try hedges here instead of our post and rail 

 and stone wall, and sent to England for twenty thousand of the 

 hawthorns — made proper furrows to plant them in, in double 

 rows, each plant being opposite to the interspace of the plants in 

 the other row. The rows were two feet apart and the plants six 

 inches from each other in the rows. Some years after, these 

 hedges were much admired. I have made a fence in this way: 

 two rails, with holes bored through them four inches apart, and 

 large enough to admit round pickets of about the size of our com- 

 mon broom handles ; three such pickets to the running foot of 

 rail, eight posts to every hundred running feet of the fence. The 

 pickets cost me but one dollar a hundred, and the boring of the 

 holes twenty-five cents a hundred. All the cost, when complete 

 was five dollars and thirty-six cents a hundred. I placed the 



