THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
acre of land 800 bushels of onions. The variety 
was Yellow Danvers. He used barn-yard 
manure only... 
It is time to prepare for winter flowers. 
Have you rich loam ready?. 
The Farm Journal puts it in this way: “If 
the fair is a fair, attend, and help build it up. 
If it is a gambling concern in any form, stay 
to be had. But arid as is the country, the 
the people in Nevada praise the climate, and 
say that it is better tlmu that of Colorado. 
The soil for along way is alkaline, but not 
sufficiently so to unfit it for agricultural 
purposes. 1 he alkali penetrates every nook 
and corner of the cars, however, in the form 
of floe, light, gray sand, which makes the 
passage over the "Alkali Plains’* the dreaded 
part of the journey. But I have found no 
portion of the way uninteresting, although 
there has been a greater degree of sameness 
in crossing the Plains than in crossing culti¬ 
vated lands. But the curious formations of 
the hills, mountains, and rocks, evidently 
caused ages ago by the action of water, and 
the strange upturning of the rocks by’ vol¬ 
canic action, present continuous features of 
great interest. 
Through the entire length of the Salt Lake 
Valley, t he water lines along the mountains— 
one “ bench ” several feet above the other- 
are distinctly visible, showing to what hights 
the lake remained for long periods in former 
times. The cause of its fall remains as yet uuex- 
Soitnd as a $111 !—Our esteemed relative, 
Puck, has the following: “We are not an agri¬ 
cultural paper, and we do not know anything 
worth boasting of concerning bucolics. When 
you want, to know what “Short-horns” are, 
you should a.->k our esteemed brother-in-law 
the Rural New-Yorker. Short-horns, so 
far as we know, are pony drinks, in contra¬ 
distinction to lemonades. John Collinses and 
the like, which are popularly known as long 
drinks. Now, when you want to know any¬ 
thing about orchids or mangels, or the best 
way to lift a mortgage off a farm with your 
teeth, don’t bother us, but go to the authority 
quoted above, and you will get a correct an¬ 
swer.” 
Prickly Comkrky Condemned.—A reader 
of the N. E. Farmer, owniug a large dairy 
farm in Lynn, and who has given Prickly 
Comfrey a three years’ trial, at first with great, 
hope? of success, has now come to the conclu¬ 
sion that he 1ms enough other weeds upon his 
land without adding this to the list. With 
good growiug weather one large crop could be 
cut, but the stories about successive heavy cut¬ 
tings from the same roots without manure 
TRANSCONTINENTAL LETTERS 
MART WAGER FtsnKR. 
For some reason, the time card of the Cen¬ 
tral Pacific R. R. connecting Ogden with San 
Francisco, has not been arranged to suit the 
win sometimes learn to eat it. In the case of 
the experiment at Lynn, the cows fed upon it 
took to scouring, and children using the milk 
were made sick from the effects of the feeding. 
It will be no small job to clean out the Com¬ 
frey roots and destroy them, but their doom is 
sealed. 
^ . H. (.amp , the wheatkiugof Pawnee and 
Rush Counties, Kans., is uow busily engaged 
in harvesting 800 acres of wheat aud rye, 
which will probably average 25 bushels to the 
acre, says the Lamed Optic. Twenty thou¬ 
sand bushels, nt 75 cents per bushel, is about 
$15,000, “ain’t it?” And it is not an extra good 
year for wheat either. We are told that Mr. 
E. H. McKibbeu, of Belpre. has a field of rye 
which will yield 50 bushels to the acre. 
The Kansas Cowboy says that a gentleman 
remarked to the editor that, the recent rains 
would be the ruin of many a granger. Why* 
“Because,” said he, “this is not. a country for 
the plow, but for stock; and this is an oxcen- 
uuy i.o ascena tne oierra Nevada, and trees 
appeared more aud more thickly, and of state¬ 
lier proportions, as the ascent, was continued 
and the State of California was entered. The 
charm of the Sierra Nevada is that they have, 
in addition to the grandeur of the Rocky 
Mountains, a magnificent covering of timber 
—the trees alone forming a grand sight. At 
midnight we were on the top of the range, at 
Emigrant Pass, and at early daybreak the 
tram halted at Sacramento, with the moun¬ 
tains well in our rear. But we had entered 
into the "Promised Land”—a land flowing 
with “milk and honey” in many ways— and 
the train sped down the Sacramento Valley, 
fertile and fruitful with orchards and grain 
fields, gardens and vineyards, a goodly sight 
indeed! I forgot my fatigue in my endeavor 
to realize that I was indeed in California, the 
land I had long desired to Ree. At Beuecia 
the cars were run on a boat, in order to cross 
the straits, and the great boat steamed over 
the water without the slightest manifestation 
of having been loaded with a great weight; 
and when the opposite coast was reached, our 
locomotive rolled oil' the ferry and resumed 
its onward way toward the ocean. 
At Oakland, the largest, and best known of 
the cities outlying from Sau Fraucisco, and 
which lies six miles from it across the bay, 
we left the cars for a ferry, and both the ferry- 
house and the bout are worthy of special men¬ 
tion, as being quite superb in their way—the 
ferry being, by far. the finest I have ever Reen. 
It was seven o’clock in the- morning, and a 
heavy sea fog lay over the bay, its Islands, 
and the city of San Francisco. Men were 
clad in overcoats and women were wearing 
fur garments. When the fog lifted at Inter¬ 
vals, 1 could see*the hills back of the city 
brown and bare, and remembered that this 
was the “dry season.” As we landed, the din 
of hotel runners was overwhelming—there 
seemed to be enough of them for a city of a 
million inhabitants, instead of a modest one 
of something lass than 800.000. 
Bat I liked the city at once. It has the “go” 
aud stir and cosmopolitan air of New York, 
but in a different way. It has been built with’- 
in the life time of a generation, built with 
gold chiefly, and an abundance of it. It has 
the largest mint and the largest hotel in the 
world, and its private dwellings are famous. 
One room alone in the Mark Hopkins’ House, 
I have been told, cost $250,000. A house, in 
process of erection opposite to it, is to cost 
...... uum experimental Station sowed 
wheat all the way from August 25 to October 
10. The following is the result: 
vr „ , Yield of Yield of Welirht 
Da “* of ‘■■ralu per straw per of hu. Dnte of 
plot .sowing, acre-tiu. acre. Ibs. -log. rh'lntr 
1 Aug 28,. 3S.8 4 711 Tl ,,_ , 
i BUb 83 & 8* M ! 
*•' sis jJJIJ l 
Oct' an" iH «?.# July 2 
'0 ® ^_«Jj_ St! j® 3 
According to the last bulletin of the Now 
Jersey Experimental Station, Ralston’s Pota¬ 
to manure is estimated as worth $.31.80 per 
ton; the selling price of it is $39 00; Lister’s 
U. S. superphosphate Is worth $21.10, and sells 
for $25.25; Moro Phillipps’ pure Phnine is 
worth $7 25 loss than is asked for it; Baugh’s 
New Process 10 per cent.-Guano is worth $9 
less than is asked for it; Forrester’s Corn Ma¬ 
nure is worth $4 less than is asked for it; 
Gaskill’s High Grade Fertilizer is worth $5 
less than they ask for it; Lister Brothers’ Dis¬ 
solved Bone sells for $1.50 less than it is 
worth; Gaskill’s Special Fish manure is worth 
FINALLY. 
convenience of sight-seeing passengers. There 
is but one express daily, and that leaves 
Ogden in the evening, necessitating two 
nights on the road and one day, instead of the 
reverse, and the greatest of all the sights— 
the passage of the Sierra Nevada Mountains_ 
is made in the night. This road, a long stretch 
of nearly a thousand miles, follows closely 
the old emigrant trail, and as frequeut 
glimpses of the latter come into view from 
the car windows, one cannot but feel burdened 
with the thoughts that those weary marches 
awake in the mind—the long, long tramp 
through what was a few years ago culled 
the Great American Desert, but which, like 
so much of the country between the Rocky 
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, only needs 
water to make it a garden. But with water 
lacking, it is treeless, and grassless, and house¬ 
less. The few rivers are slender streams, and 
for 40 miles between Humboldt Sink and 
Truckee River, there is not a drop of water 
“In all the country,” says Mr. Olcott. in the 
essay to which we have several times alluded, 
“we have something like 150 journals devoted 
to farmiDgand kindred pursuits Some are 
merely advertising sheets, with scarcely 
enough agriculture to disguise the trade circu 
lar. All, so far as be knows, are more or less 
engaged in trade, andsomedeal in all manner 
of goods.” Mr. Olcott should except the 
Ki-Ral New-Yorker, which has nothing 
whatever to sell, except copies of itself.“ 
In another part of the essay Mr. Olcott Bays 
that publishers sometimes aver that farm*™ 
-just above the 
