meditate on the long fast to come, to lock 
up their houses and go to bed. The latter 
may seem somewhat hard, as curfew rang 
at eight; but people could not very well 
sit up without fire or light, for the houses 
were made of wood and quite inflammable, 
and there were no fire extinguishers then, 
so it was a very prudent law and prevent¬ 
ed many a conflagration. When I was 
young, and read Gray’s ‘‘Elegy”, I used to 
think, from the line commencing: “The 
curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” that 
the curfew was some kind of a bell, just as 
you may have done in reading, or having 
read, “Curfew shall not ring to-night;” but 
it isn t. A bell was tolled in the evening 
as a signal for the people to cover their 
fires, and the instrument used to accom¬ 
plish this was called a fire coverer, from the 
French words— cnuvrefeu —and hence we 
get curfew. This instrument was of cop 
per, rivitcd together, as solder would have 
been liable to melt with the heat; it was 
ten inches high, sixteen inches wide and 
nine inches deep. Now we will tell you 
how this was used: “The wood and em¬ 
bers were raked as close as possible to the 
back of the hearth, and then the curfew 
was put over them, the open part put close 
to the back of the chimney; by this con¬ 
trivance, the air being almost entirely ex¬ 
cluded, the fire was, of course, put out.” 
Our article this month is somewhat 
shorter than its predecessor, but it must be 
borne in mind that February is always a 
short month, and the Lenten season coming 
within the same, put a stop to many of its 
sports and festivities. 
How We Raise Plants. 
The question is put to me many hundreds 
of times every season, as to what is the 
best method to produce plants of cabbage, 
cauliflower and lettuce for early Spring 
planting. Although we grow several hun¬ 
dred thousands of Fall sown plants annual¬ 
ly (which are wintered over in cold frames,) 
yet increased experience seems to show 
that plants grown as below are cheaper 
and produce nearly as good plants as by 
wintering in cold frames. We make our 
first sowing Feb. 1, in greenhouses, tem¬ 
perature about 60 degrees at night, and 80 
degrees during the day. A hot-bed, made 
with manure, about two feet deep, in a prop¬ 
er manner, produces about the same gen¬ 
eral conditions as a well appointed green¬ 
house. We sow the seed in shallow boxes, 
with about two inches of soil in each box. 
We use any light, rich soil, sowing enough 
seed in each bcx to produce 1,000 or 1,600 
plants, or if in the hot-bed without the 
box, each 3x6 foot sash should grow about 
5,000 plants, but we find it more convenient 
to use the boxes, put directly on the bench 
of the greenhouse, or on the manure of the 
hot-bed. The seed sown Feb. 1, will give 
plants fit to transplant in three or four 
weeks. We then use the same shallow 
boxes, putting in the bottom of each about 
one inch of well rotted manure. Over that 
we place an inch of any ordinary rich, 
light soil, smoothing it so as to have it as 
level as possible. In these boxes, 14x20 
inches, we put about 150 plants. The box¬ 
es are then taken direct to the ordinary 
cold frames, which have been protected 
with m inure, as it would not do to put the 
boxes of tender plants on a frozen surface. 
If the sun is bright, it is well to shade them 
for a few days until they take root, but 
the most important point is to cover the 
sashes with straw mats at night so securely 
that no frost will reach the plants. For the 
past three years we have each season grown 
about half-a-million of cabbage, cauliflower 
and lettuce plants in this way, and have 
had no trouble to keep them from freezing 
even when the thermometer has reached 
zero. 
These plants will be ready to transplant 
to the open ground any time after the 1st 
of April, if they have been carefully attend¬ 
ed to by watering, airing and protecting 
from frost. These dates refer particularly 
to the vicinity of New York city, where we 
can set out usually in the open ground all 
kinds of cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce 
plants about April 1. In districts where 
they cannot be planted out sooner than the 
middle of April, the sowing should be made 
about February 15. In sections where cab¬ 
bage cannot be planted in the open ground 
before May 1, the sowing should be delayed 
until about March 1. There is another and 
