PROFITS FROM ¥ARM WOODS 17 
payment. The inspection showed that the thick sapwood had become 
dry-rotted and was worthless. The report of the inspector was sick- 
ening news. Instead of the five blocks scaling 2,105 board feet they 
contained only 980 feet of sound usable timber. (Fig. 11.) The 
farmer’s carelessness and delay in marketing had caused a loss 1n 
scale of 1,125 board feet. The factory was giving $24 per thousand 
feet for large-sized clear timber. His check, instead of reading 
$50.52, was written in the sum of $23.52—a dead loss of $27. 
The farmer’s journey home was a long and sad one for he needed 
every cent he could get for his family. 
But this is not the end of the story of how a well-intentioned but 
careless farmer marketed his prize tree. The other four blocks in 
the woods were never moved from their bedding place where they 
fell beside the creek. These great blocks scaled a total of 1,444 board 
feet and if they had been delivered to the plant soon after being cut 
would have brought $34.66. Here was the second dead money loss 
to the farmer. 
How much did the farmer lose altogether? For the nine veneer 
blocks from this monarch of the forest, if delivered in good condition 
to the factory, the farmer would have received $85.18. Because of 
his lack of information and carelessness in handling this one tree he 
lost the neat sum of $61.66. 
PINE POLES FROM A POTATO PATCH A GOLD MINE TO JOE MILLER 
Joe Miller and his wife Louisa have lived for many years on asmall 
farm in the midst of the great cut-over and burned-over section in 
south Mississippi. Joe’s place can be plainly seen lying about a 
“quarter” back from the graveled country road that leads to the 
httle town of Howison in Harrison County on-the Gulf & Ship 
Island Railroad. The place is marked by live oaks about the 
weatherworn house and outbuildings. Until the summer of 1927, 
the place was also marked by a patch of pine “saplins” standing 
out from bare acres dotted with a cabbage-topped longleaf pine 
here and there, veterans of logging days. *® 
Joe drifted into south Mississippi from Nebraska some 40 years 
ago and got a job as a hired man on the farm of John B. Evans, 
a pioneer, whose daughter, Louisa, Joe married within a year. At 
that time the Evans farm was a clearing in the great forest of giant 
longleaf pines, and beyond the barn and garden there was an old 
field 2 acres in area, which had been “ turned out” 10 years before 
and was thickly studded with sturdy little longleaf pines 6 to 8 feet 
in height. By the time that Louisa inherited the farm the pines had 
become a sapling thicket, and the forest beyond had been logged off. 
Joe had brought some appreciation of the value of trees from 
Nebraska, where “ trees is trees,” and where “if a man cut or even 
injured a tree it was necessary for him to give a mighty good ac- 
count of himself.” Therefore when Joe’s neighbors in a friendly 
spirit advised him to cut and burn his saplings in order to avoid 
the State tax on growing timber, he refused their advice and pro- 
tected his thicket while his neighbors were cutting and burning theirs. 
In the thicket of pines there were more than a thousand tall, 
straight, clean trees. Many of them now were good-sized thrifty 
