248 Transactions of the American Institute. 



not make this pay. Each person must judge for himself. Circum- 

 stances alter cases. But where it does pay to cook, it is a saving of 

 from twenty-five to thirty per cent. This is proved beyond contro- 

 versy. 



PltOFITS OF FaEMLNG. 



O. M. Tinkum, said he was born of poor, but honest parents, and 

 commenced life for the first time on fifty acres of land somewhere 

 in New Enland. He didn't make it pay, though he worked hard. 

 He tried to make it an intellectual employment, as some of the city 

 editors advised; but somehow last spring he failed to convince 

 himself that there was anything intellectual or even poetical in 

 drawing out manure from a wet barnyard over fields full of " sink 

 holes." 



The chairman remarked, that he should have cast a long look 

 ahead, and seen, in his mind's eye, the golden harvests, which would 

 follow in the wake of liberal application of manure, and deep plough- 

 ing. 



Farm Fences. 

 Mr. D. Y. Eoger, Minburn, Iowa. — The west is to-day bankrupt 

 with fences, more especially those portions which are lately settled, 

 and whose people have not yet passed the tribulations of the new 

 comer ; and strange as it is, this class who suffer most, stick the most 

 tenaciously and insanely to the old folly ; they must be brayed in the 

 mortar awhile longer before the majority will see the need of change. 

 Here and there one finds a neighborhood, whose- distance from 

 " timber " or railroad, drives them to dispense with this fence nui- 

 sance ; and the results to them in better houses, better out-buildings, 

 more land broken the first season, and the general thriftiness and 

 home-like look of their farmsteads amazed even the owners, and they 

 own most reluctantly to the truth. I repeat it, the west is bankrupt 

 with fences. Its thin woodlands are slaughtered, and lie rotting in 

 unsightly strings about the prairie; the settlers shivered in leaky 

 cabins last winter on account of that " string of fence." They couldn't 

 break but twenty acres last season when they needed eighty on 

 account of that " string of fence." Their cattle shiver and dry up 

 for lack of shelter, the orchard was not planted, and shade trees were 

 neglected for lack of time — good deep wells of water are wanting, 

 good cellars, books, papers, all sacrificed to that " string of fence," 

 and the hopes for future competence and peace are pushed far ahead 

 by this incubus of farm fences. There is not a single sensible reason 



