148 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST!. 
VALUE OF CARROTS FOR MILK COWS. 
Messhs. Eds : I have tried feeding carrots 
to milk cows, and will give you one of my 
experiments. I have, (April 15th,) seven 
cows in milk—one calved in June, the rest 
in September and October. I raised eighty 
bushels rutabagas and four hundred bushels 
carrots, and fed them to my cows, commenc¬ 
ing the first of December. I gave them 
about 2£ bushels per day, at noon, the 
rutabagas first, and when they were all 
fed out, the same quantity of carrots. 
1 found, when I had fed the latter a few 
days, that my cows were each giving from 
two to three pints of milk more per day, 
than when fed on rutabagas. I was feeding 
my cows, meanwhile, with cut hay, and 
2 lbs. oil cake and meal, and 2! lbs. wheat 
screenings, ground. 
The thought struck me that I should like 
to know the value of carrots for making 
milk, so I selected the cow that calved last, 
for the trial. I weighed the hay, meal, and 
carrots, and fed perhaps 27 lbs. of hay, 4£ 
lbs. of mixed meal, and 22 lbs. of carrots, 
and she gave 35 lbs. of milk per day. I then 
left off the carrots and gave the same amount 
of meal, and all the hay she would eat, 
which was 33 lbs. per day. After feeding so 
for a week, I found she gave 23 lbs. of milk 
per day. • I then gave her the carrots as be¬ 
fore, and in eight or ten days she came up 
again to 35 lbs. of milk per day. 
This shows that carrots are worth to me 
to feed cows, 82 cents per 100 lbs. Hay is 
worth $20 per ton in the barn, and at 3 cents 
per quart, or one cent per pound for milk ; 
6 lbs. less hay, and 12 lbs. more milk gives 
18 cents for 22 lbs. of carrots. My carrots 
are all gone now, or I would try one or two 
more cows. Next winter I hope to have an¬ 
other opportunity for experiment. 
South Framingham, Mass. ABNER HAVEN. 
Rural New-Yorker 
MEADOW MUCK. 
We trust that many of our readers and 
correspondents will haul muck that has be¬ 
come dry and pulverized, into their barn cel¬ 
lars or under cover during the fall months 
If not convenient to get to barn or barn-yard, 
haul it on fields on which you intend to raise 
corn or potatoes, and put inheaps shaped so 
as to prevent soaking and leaching, as muck 
generally contains some lime and other solu¬ 
ble matter. If this should be attended to 
pretty generally by our readers and corre¬ 
spondents, we might expect to hear many 
favorable reports of the practice in the course 
of the ensuing season. That which is hauled 
to the barn or near it, should be used to mix 
up a fresh layer every week or so, with the 
contents of the privy, and to absorb the suds 
and discharges from the sink-spout in a vault 
dug near it. Some may also be used to mix 
with the droppings of the animals, and when¬ 
ever a compost of any kind is made, muck 
should enter into its composition. 
In any and all these ways excellent manure 
will be formed, which will speak for itself on 
the garden, corn-field or elsewhere. Muck 
by itself, a shovelfullin a hill, is agood appli¬ 
cation for potatoes. We hope muck will be 
used in all the ways named, and that we 
shall hear of it. [Credit Lost. 
English Farms and Farmers. —Farms oc¬ 
cupy two-thirds of the land of England. 
The number of the farms is 225,318 ; the 
average size is 111 acres. Two-thirds of 
the farms are under that size, but there are 
771 of above 1,000 acres. The large hold¬ 
ings abound in the south-eastern and eastern 
counties; the small farms in the north. 
There are 2,000 English farmers holding 
nearly 2,000,000 acres; and there are 97,- 
000 others who altogether do not hold more. 
There are 40,650 farmers who employ five 
laborers each; 16,501 have ten or more, and 
employ together 311,707 laborers ; 170 farm¬ 
ers have about sixty laborers each, and to¬ 
gether employ 17,000. 
A LETTER FROM A HORSE. 
As I am nothing but a poor quadruped, a 
mere omnibus horse, I suppose you will hard¬ 
ly care to publish this letter ; but I hope you 
will do it for the sake of humanity, if not for 
mine. When I lived in the country, where 
I was raised, I was accounted a good lively 
beast, and the country youngsters would 
spend all Sunday afternoons around me, rub¬ 
bing me down, admiring my fine proportions, 
and practicing me on the road. About four 
years ago, my owner getting rather hard up 
for money, to pay some bets he had lost on 
that famous mare Nancy Dawson, concluded 
I wouldbring agoodpricehereinNew-York; 
so he put his son Peter Adolphus on my 
back, and sent me down to that noted city 
horse-jockey Billy Button. I had oftenheard 
my master speak of Mr. Button as being a 
highly honorable gentleman, and as he had 
occasionally been in our part of the country 
on business in this particular line, I remem¬ 
bered that he used to wear a white cravat, a 
green cloth coat with brass buttons, and a 
bell-crowned hat with the brim a good deal 
turned up at the sides. I fully expected 
that, when I got among the scrawny city nags, 
the comparison would be all in my favor, and 
Mr. Button would crack my value up to a 
pretty high standard ; but I was never more 
mistaken in my life. Mr. Button, after look¬ 
ing at me a while, shook his head very dubi¬ 
ously, and told Peter Adolphus that I was 
hardly the horse for this market, and in fact 
he thought he didn’t care to buy me at any 
price. He made out that I had three or four 
horse distempers (that I had never even heard 
the names of before), and said I looked old 
enough for a horse ten years of age ; though, 
as true as I am now a jaded old hack, my age 
then was only five years and a week. Peter 
Adolphus was taken all aback, and looked as 
though he thought Mr. Button would be do¬ 
ing him a great favor by taking me off his 
hands as a gift; but my dander was up a lit¬ 
tle at being snubbed down in this manner, so 
when Mr. Button’s hand was fumbling about 
my mouth, I gave him a bite that I reckon he 
remembered for some time after. “ Oh, well, 
Peter Adolphus,” says Button at last, “ I sup¬ 
pose you don’t care about taking, the old 
fellow home with you again, so I guess I’ll 
give you seventy-five dollars for him, but if it 
wasn’t that your old dad is a particular friend 
of mine, I wouldn’t give him stable room.” 
So, Peter Adolphus gave me along, linger¬ 
ing look as farewell, pocketed his seventy- 
five dollars, and packed off home in a rail car. 
I now found that Mr. Button began to see all 
at once that I was a very valuable horse. 
He had Mr. Foodie and Mr. Racket to come 
and look at me. Well, they smoothed me 
down, and looked in my mouth, praised my 
head, admired my legs and talked of my fine 
points ; so that I began to think that I was 
some horse after all, and pricked up my ears 
like an animal of spirit. Racket said I was 
well worth two hundred and twenty-five dol¬ 
lars, and Foodie offered two hundred for me 
on the spot: but Mr. Button shook his head 
(in a very different manner, though, from 
what he did when Peter Adolphus was on 
my back) and said that the best man’s money 
in town wouldn’t buy that critter unless it 
counted up to two hundred and fifty dollars. 
There was quite a run after me ; a fresh ar¬ 
rival of a nag of character will draw the 
horse folks in shoals, and if I had been a 
prince of the Cannibal Islands I couldn’t have 
been examined with greater interest. At 
length Button got wind that Dr. Epsom 
wanted a good horse, so Dr. Epsom was 
brought to the stable ; he was a thin, tall 
man, and had practice enough, as I afterward 
found to my sorrow, to kill or cure all the 
sick folks in town. When Button showed 
me off, I could see the doctor’s eye glisten. 
He said “he wanted ahorse that could stand 
it day and night,” and Button told him “if he 
should have a horse made to order he couldn’t 
hit the mark better than to buy me,” and af¬ 
ter a little parley I was sold for two hundred 
and fifty dollars, when a black boy mounted 
me and rode me to the doctor’s stable. Here 
my troubles began ; I had no companion to 
share my labors or spell me off, and, as the 
doctor said, I had to be on the strain day and 
night. 
How many dismal, dreary hours, in the 
cold, dark nights of winter, I have spent 
standing before the doors of my owner’s pa¬ 
tients, it is not in horse arithmetic to compute. 
As you may suppose, in a year or two, my 
constitution began, to break, and I found some 
of those distempers that Button told Peter 
Adolphus about, creeping over me in earnest. 
I lost my flesh and got dispirited to such a 
degree that Dr. Epsom concluded he wanted 
a more sprightly nag, so he sold me to the 
omnibus proprietors to whom I now belong. 
Ah ! what a tale I could here disclose of an¬ 
guish and horse suffering. It would draw 
tears, I am sure, from anything but an omni¬ 
bus driver. How I was whipped, and raced, 
and over-driven and over-laden, and jerked on 
my haunches every minute or two to take in 
passengers, no tongue but the tongue of an 
omnibus horse can tell. I sighed for my old 
place at Epsom’s, which, hard as it was, 
seemed in comparison, a horse paradise. I 
longed for death, and as my eye occasional¬ 
ly caught a glimpse of the glassy surface of 
the river, I sighed for a chance to jump in 
and drown myself. I thought that the high¬ 
est point of endurance in horse agony had 
been reached, but I was yet to find a deeper 
depth in the refined cruelty of beings who call 
themselves human. Some demon, who takes 
special delight in inflicting curses on horse 
flesh, put it into the heads of my owners to re¬ 
duce their omnibus fare to three cents. Now, 
from being beaten as it were, with ox goads 
to make us go, my companions and I are 
threshed with scorpions. The greatly in¬ 
creased number of passengers at the ridicu- | 
lously low fare, and the long spell of intense¬ 
ly hot weather, (ended a few days since,) 
have kept us for the last two months in a 
state of living death. 
Four of my poor brethren; who one after 
another groaned and panted with me in our 
toilsome lagging, have dropped dead at my 
side. I have not many days more to live 
myself, and some few mornings hence, 
should you pass through the Bowery, you will 
see my poor racked and beaten carcass lying 
in the gutter, with my visible ribs and ghast¬ 
ly countenance objects of derision to the pass¬ 
ers-by. Oh, I weep as I write this, for horses j 
have sensibilities as well as men; more | 
keen, I should hope than some men have, j 
You probably remember that there is quite a I 
rise of ground in Chatham-square. Do try 
and be here some afternoon, between six J 
and seven o’clock, when the pressure of 'i 
travel is up town, and you will see us as, 
with almost bursting veins and perpetual ' 
lashing, we are straining up hill with an 
omnibus containing outside and in from 
thirty to thirty-six passengers. I have no 
doubt that the ghosts of my deceased broth¬ 
ers are flitting about this scene of their late 
torture, this place of inquisition for the blood 
of the wretched victims of my race. At the 
stables where I spend a brief portion of my 
miserable life, I am accustomed to hear the 
stable boys very freely consign each other to 
a certain place, the name of which I shal 
