IN THE POULTRY YARD. 129 
young calves. In my district the farmers carried on dairying to a 
considerable extent, and as milk was too valuable they did not care 
to raise any calves, except promising young heifers. And as it was 
a criminal offense to sell very young calves, they were compelled 
either to keep them until they were some weeks old or knock them 
on the head and bury them in the manure heap. When it became 
known that I would give from fifty cents to a dollar apiece for 
them, at any age, I had as many as I could use, and this at a time 
too when they were needed—that is, just as my spring chickens 
were coming forward. The bones of these young calves are easily 
cut up—indeed, our meat chopper sufficed for much of them—and 
an ordinary calf made two very nice desserts for 500 birds. 
But in addition to these articles fowls need green food. My lay- 
ing flocks, which were allowed to wander over a large range, did 
not suffer for want of this in summer, but during winter I found 
it necessary to give them a regular and abundant supply, and at 
first I fixed upon the cabbage as the best vegetable for my purpose. 
At first I did not succeed very well in growing cabbage, the land 
not being rich enough, and the former owner not having paid suf- 
ficient attention to the saving of manure. Mrs. B. was so neat and 
orderly that the sight of a lawn coated with manure in the spring 
would have thrown her into hysterics, or some other womanly non- 
sense, and she would gladly have allowed all the manure to be 
given away, merely to get rid of the sight’and smell of it. As may 
be readily supposed, therefore, the arrangements for saving manure 
were none of the best. My views, however, were very different. 
Brought up in a country where the motto was “No manure, no 
crops,” I looked upon the manure pile as one of the most 1mport- 
ant things about the place, and to me a grass field covered with a 
rich coating of manure was by no means an unsightly object, be- 
cause the intellectual beauty of the “eternal fitness of things” was 
more agreeable than the sight of a plot of ground thinly occupied 
with starved plants. One of my earliest “jobs,” therefore, was to 
construct a good manure bed. This I began by staking off a piece 
of ground thirty feet by forty. ‘The soil from this plot was removed, 
so that I-had a pit four feet deep along one of the 40 foot sides, and 
