328 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[September, 
form width for country roads. We can hardly 
conceive it proper for a public highway to be 
less than two rods (33 feet) wide. Many roads 
are narrower, but even this width is inconven¬ 
iently small if a road is much traveled. For 
merely practical purposes, a road two and a half 
rods wide is almost always wide enough. In 
thickly settled neighborhoods, if the traveled 
road be not less than two rods wide, as much 
space may be taken for side-walks, lawn, etc., 
in the side strips, as may be agreed upon. 
The accompanying diagrams exhibit cross- 
seetions of roads of different widths, from two 
A ^ 
DIAGRAMS OF BOADS. 
rods to four rods wide. They represent such 
roads as might be made through a rolling coun¬ 
try, not liable to wash. The two-rod road is too 
narrow for shade trees standing in the highway. 
Space may very well be afforded them in the 
two-and-a-half-rod road, and in the broader 
roads they are almost a necessity, for a part of 
the use of these roads is their beauty, and they 
would look naked and dreary without them, if 
kept in good order. In the diagrams, we allow 
about two feet for the width of the outer slope 
of the ditches, and suppose the road to be so 
graded that it rounds up evenly from the tenter 
of each ditch. In the four-rod road, side-walks 
will be seen outside the belts of grass, which 
are 12 feet wide, and afford abundant room for 
forest or fruit trees, alternating perhaps with 
evergreens, which may be cut away after a few 
years if they take too much room. 
Tim. Bunker on Chips. 
-•- it* 
Mb. Editob. —Hookertown is a pretty quiet 
sort of place, generally, but just now we are 
having a big swell in our waters, and it is all 
about chips. I wish we could have had the fel¬ 
low that makes pictures for you up here yester¬ 
day ; I guess he’d ’a died a laughing, and cam¬ 
phor wouldn’t ’a brought him to. We haven’t 
had such a time since my subsoil plow first 
came to town, and the great chip machine has 
taken the shine all off of that. If Mr. Hoppin 
could only put that on to paper, somebody 
would burst their waistbands, or I’m mistaken. 
You see, the way it happened was just this. 
Deacon Smith, you know, is a pretty cute man, 
and means to keep up with the times, and get 
ahead of them if he can. He got ahead of 
them about one generation, I guess, when he 
went into the peat speculation two or three 
years ago. It looked well on paper. Coal was 
thirteen dollars a ton on Hookertowm street, 
and peat could be manufactured and sold for 
half the money, and make large profits. The 
Deacon bought a fifty-acre peat swamp, of un¬ 
known depth, and went in. By the time he got 
his machinery in, and got nicely to work, coal 
went down lcerchug , like a bull-frog into a pond, 
clean out of sight. There was no trouble in 
making the peat bricks, and in burning them, 
but they would not sell at a profit when folks 
could get coal for six dollars a ton. So Tucker 
and Jones, Jake Frink, and the rest of that 
tribe, begun to laugh at the Deacon for his 
great peat failure. They thought 
the Deacon was fiat on his back, 
and wouldn’t come up again, 
but I knew he would. You 
see, Deacon Smith is the most 
sot man in town, believes in the 
decrees, and had no doubt that 
there w’as money in that peat 
s r .bog for him, if he could only 
\\CJ> get at it. When the peat failed 
he thought of cranberries, be¬ 
cause they grew in small patches 
all around the swamp. But to 
make a cranberry plantation, the 
whole surfacehad to be cleared of 
brush and bogs, and covered with 
gravel, which was a big job, and 
would cost three or four hundred 
dollars an acre. He got wind 
of a machine that would cut 
brush just as a hay cutter cuts 
up cornstalks. He thought he 
had brush enough to pay for the 
whole expense of clearing and 
planting, if he could only git it 
into shape to be handled. He bought his ma¬ 
chine, got it into the factory he put up for peat 
making, and turned on the steam yesterday. 
It was like a huge cornstalk cutter, only a great 
deal stouter, and would cut off sticks three 
inches through, and make no fuss about it. 
They poked the brush right into the jaws, big 
end foremost, and the chips flew in all direc¬ 
tions. The brush w T as all chawed up into the 
nicest kind of kindling-wood, in short order. 
The Deacon fairly laughed to see the chips fly. 
“ Give it to ’em, shillalah 1” cried Patrick, as 
he brought on the brush and fed the machine. 
“A great cracking among the diy bones 1” 
said Seth Twiggs, as he took a dry chip and 
lighted his pipe at the fire. 
Uncle Jotham Sparrowgrasss poked his cane 
into the pile of chopped brush to see that there 
was no mistake about the chips. He admitted 
that he had never seen anything like it on the 
Island, but thought it wouldn’t amount to much. 
“ It’s another of the Deacon’s humbugs, see if 
it ain’t.” 
Jake Frink, who had just come from the 
tavern, began to sing, “ Molly, put the kettle on, 
We’ll all drink tea.” Mr. Spooner wanted to 
know if the chips would kindle coal fires as 
well as charcoal. 
“Guess the old peat bog’ll come to .sutliing 
arter all,” said George Washington Tucker. 
“ The Deacon is a master man to carry his 
pint,” remarked Benjamin Franklin Jones. 
“ Yes,” said Jake Frink, “ but you could al¬ 
ways carry a quart better than he could a gill.” 
“ Charcoal has gone up,” remarked Jones, 
maliciously, to a group of White Oakers, who 
looked on with mouths agape, as they saw the 
pile growing rapidly. 
“No more charcoal wanted, I see,” responded 
Kier Frink, for the company, as he pulled a 
soiled bandana from his hat crown, and wiped 
his nose. “ This is jest the hardest world a 
feller ever got into. Jest as you git started in 
business, somebody comes along -and knocks 
your heels right out from under you. Wood 
used to pay pretty well, but coal spiled it. And 
now they’ve got to making chips by machinery. 
Every old woman will be crazy after Smith’s 
chips, and j'ou can go the whole length of 
Hookertown street crying ‘ charcoal,’ and not 
sell a bushel a day. White Oakers’ll have to 
move away, or starve.” 
Nobody except Kiev’s company seemed to 
feel very bad at this prospect. The Deacon’s 
figuring on chips looks very well, and he says 
they are already doing a good business in this 
line, over west of the river, where he got his 
machine from. He calculates that a brush 
swamp will yield from two thousand to seven 
thousand bushels of chips. It will cost about 
three cents a bushel to cut the brush and run 
them through the machine. They sell readily 
at eight cents a bushel, wholesale, and ten 
cents, retail. These chips are the best thing 
yet used for lighting coal fires, and are so handy 
in summer for making quick fires, that many 
will buy them who use their own wood for 
fuel. It costs less than to draw their own 
brush and chop it with an axe. Some are buy¬ 
ing up cheap, rough lands covered with brush, 
just for the sake of the chips they will make, 
and they find it a paying business. If an acre 
yields five thousand bushels, the gross receipts, 
at ten cents a bushel, are $500, which will pay 
for a good deal of labor. If there is only four 
cents profit on a bushel, it makes $200 on an 
acre. The prospect for the White Oakers is 
by no means so gloomy as Kier Frink would 
have us believe. If they would stop cock- 
fighting and drinking rum long enough to buy 
a brush cutter, they might turn their rough 
lands and swamps to better account than grow¬ 
ing wood for charcoal. A new machine only 
costs $1,000, and three horses will run it. But 
it makes better work with more power, and 
there are still plenty of idle streams. It not 
unfrequently happens that the swamp that fur¬ 
nishes the brush affords a brook quite large 
enough to turn the machinery. This machine 
will remove one of the serious obstacles to the 
growing of cranberries on peat bogs. These 
swamps are generally covered with brush, and 
often with a heavy growth of wood. It costs 
from $100 to $200 to get the brush off, in the 
most rapid and wasteful way, by cutting and 
burning upon the ground. If, now, the clearing 
can be made to pay a profit in the chips it 
yields, many will think seriously of planting 
these wastes with cranberries. The chips are 
already a fixed institution in some of our cities 
and villages, and those who have used them 
will never go back to charcoal. No paper is 
needed. A match will light the fine twigs, and 
the larger ones give body enough to the fire to 
kindle the coal. These chips are now sent by 
the car load to our city markets, and are likely 
to affect the kindling-wood men even more 
than the charcoal burners. If housekeepers 
can get a bushel of kindlings for ten cents, they 
will not pay twenty-five for a coarser article of 
pitch, or yellow pine. Deacon Smith is might¬ 
ily tickled with his machine, and walks round 
straight as a ramrod. His horse drives up 
prompt every Sunday morning to the meeting¬ 
house and seems to say “chips.” The new har¬ 
ness and carriage are “chips” from the same 
block. In a little while I expect we shall not 
sec a coal cart in all Hookertown. 
Hookertown, Conn., j Yours to Command, 
Aug. 15/A, 1SG9. ) Timothy Bunker, Esq. 
