1888 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
635 
ftmal Copies. 
BUCEPHALUS BROWN’S NOTIONS AND 
IDEAS. 
That “Mystery of Trade.”— Nothing is 
more telling than a well-conceived cartoon, 
like this of Mr. Berghaus. The Rural is 
doing, in the production of its powerful pic¬ 
tures of this class, a work that far surpasses all 
that can be effected by mere writing, however 
able and sound. Though exaggeration is an 
admitted element in pictorial satire, it but 
emphasizes stern truth—which in this case is 
that the grasping middlemen are a greater 
detriment to the farmer than all the other 
vermin which tithe and toll his productions. 
What is the Remedy?— I know of none, 
other than the most vigilant governmental 
supervision of all these agencies—mercantile 
and forwarding, as well as speculative—which 
injuriously affect industrial prosperity. Our 
railroad commissioners, State and national, 
are doing much, and can easily be made to do 
much more, to prevent the wholesale robbery 
of the poorer class of producers. The Grange, 
wisely used, as well as other similar organiza¬ 
tions of farmers, can help on the work; but 
an honest, fearless, faithful press, “ unawed by 
influence and unbribed by gain,” is the instru¬ 
ment above all others for strengthening, en¬ 
lightening and enfranchising the working 
man, upon the farm as well as in the factory. 
Horses vs. Bullocks. —Why is it, if it be 
true, as Professor Cook maintains, that it 
costs no more to breed and grow good horses 
than it costs to breed and grow beeves, that 
our farmers have been so long finding it out, 
and do not yet generally act accordingly! I 
do not believe that it is true. On the con¬ 
trary, I believe that the difference in selling 
price very closely gauges the difference in 
cost. Who will keep a fair and intelligent 
record to test the question? Can it not be 
done upon some of the farms attached to our 
agricultural colleges? While I know that the 
good ordinary farmer can raise one or two 
colts a year at a quite moderate expense, 
part of which will be returned to him in 
their labor, and that he may in the end, if all 
things are right from start to finish, find some 
profit in the business, yet to say that the 
horse will compete with beef creatures, so as 
to yield a larger average net profit to the 
breeder, is not according to the .'general ex¬ 
perience. “A horse dairy” is a phrase of 
contempt often applied in New England by 
their neighbors to the establishments of far¬ 
mers who have tried to prove the claims of 
Professor Cook to be true by actual experi¬ 
ment. I have known of a good many “horse 
dairies,” but I have never known one to yield 
a living profit to the farmer who main¬ 
tained it. 
Whynot? Well, the conditions are entirely 
different, and the two no more admit of com¬ 
parison than cotton spinning and silk,weaving. 
The fact that we have many ways to turn 
cattle to account from birth onward, while 
we nave only one way to utilize the norse, Is 
sufficient to fundamentally demark the two. 
A colt, if well bred, costs at birth more than 
the price that may pay a profit on a two-year- 
old steer. The colt is liable to many more 
accidents than the calf, and an accident that 
will make the colt worthless may not ma¬ 
terially injure the steer. The time, skill and 
labor bestowed upon the colt, day by day and 
month by month, if the best is to be made of 
him, are many times greater than with the calf. 
Finally, the calf, if ho does not die, is always 
worth something at the end of any given 
period of its life, while the colt may be, and 
often is, after much expenditure and labor, 
worth less than nothing. 
Yet Many Like It. —I concede that there 
is a great deal more fun to be got out of colts 
than out of steers, and a colt farm is a much 
more interesting place for a certain class of 
boys than a dairy farm, or a beef ranch. I 
like to breed and handle colts myself; and if 
my father had been a rich farmer, who would 
have let me do as I liked at home, I might 
have run out his estate quite easily by estab¬ 
lishing a horse dairy. I have seen the like 
done, time and time again. I have even seen 
sanguine young men unite to establish a stud 
farm for breeding purposes—and I have seen 
the stock sold out under the hammer a half 
dozen years after, for not enough (or half 
enough) to pay off the debts. 
Draft Horses Perhaps an Exception.— 
The Blue-grass farmers of Kentucky used to 
make mule raising profitable before the war, 
so much so as to work out a strong social line 
betwixt the mule farmers and the hog farmers 
of that State. A threo-year-old mule was 
then almost a legal tender for $160, and a 
three-years-old mule had not cost to rear more 
than six or eight hog*, worth ten dollars 
apiece. But a mule is tough; he is (or was) 
sold unbroken, and they were driven south in 
droves, like cattle. Perhaps on those same 
farms, or similar ones in other States, draft 
horses may be bred with profit, provided that 
at three years old they will bring an average 
of a hundred dollars more than the ante-war 
price of a Kentucky mule. Quien sabe 7 
WHAT I THINK I WOULD DO AS 
DIRECTOR. 
A. L. CROSBY. 
Investigate the value of fertilizers , and the 
cost of a cow's feed , and of her various 
products ; investigate the best and cheapest 
mode of constructing farm buildings; test 
farm tools; try new seeds and plants; 
poultry experimentation; all experiments 
would be usefully practical, none finical. 
“If you should be elected Director of an ex¬ 
periment station, what would you do to help 
real farmers!” 
I think the first point I would try to settle 
would be the value of fertilizers. Of course, I 
would have all fertilizers sold in the State 
analyzed for the benefit of those using them, 
but I would go still further and try the stand¬ 
ard sorts in different quantities, and on 
various crops and soils. I would get at least 
10 farmers in widely separated parts of the 
State to help me with my experiments, so as 
to make tests on all kinds of soil and under 
varying conditions. I wouldn’t ask these 
farmers to do this work without pay, but 
would pay them liberally for their time and 
furnish them with convenient blanks to fill 
up, so that they could make all necessary 
memoranda at the least expense of time and 
work. 
I would try and settle the question as to how 
much a cow ought to weigh to give the most 
profit. Above all, in this line, I would want 
to know exactly what it cost per annum to 
feed the three or four hundred pounds of ex¬ 
tra weight many cowscarry. I believe now 
that a milk cow should be larger than a but¬ 
ter cow; I would try and prove whether this 
was so or not, and would not be much sur¬ 
prised if it was not. I would try to find out 
exactly what a gallon of milk or pound of 
butter, beef, pork or mutton cost; I would 
not feed in these experiments 'palm-nut meal, 
blood, desiccated cocoanut or chocolate, but 
only such foods as are obtainable by any 
farmer. I would have the manure from 
those animals analyzed and find out the theo¬ 
retical value of it; then I would put it on the 
ground and grow crops with it, and find out 
what it was worth to the farmer. I would do 
this before I sent out a bulletin on manures 
in which I said that cotton-ssed meal costing 
$35 per ton, was worth $34.87>{ for manure 
after it had passed through the animal. 
I would not fool much (in my bulletins) with 
feeding rations that gave at much length the 
exact quantity of albuminoid*, carbohy 
drates, etc., necessary to maxe a perfect ra¬ 
tion, but I would first find out what a perfect 
ration was by practical experiments with the 
animals, then tell the farmer how many 
pounds of bran, corn-meal, linseed-meal or 
other foods it took to produce certain results, 
and show him that there was a living profit in 
these results, and he need not figure out an 
impossible value to the manure in order to 
get out whole. 
After I got him to using the profitable 
ration I might tell him how it analyzed and 
get him to thinking about the subject, but if 
I attempted to fill his mind with albuminoids, 
while his pocket-book was empty from loss in 
feeding too much albuminoids, he might 
“confound” me and the albuminoids in the 
same breath. And I would not blame him if 
he did. When I wa* pretty sure I had dis¬ 
covered something that would benefit farmers, 
I would send it out in a bulletin at once, but 
if too late for farmers to try it that season, I 
would send them a duplicate in ample time to 
try it next season. 
Another thing I would do, would be to find 
out the cheapest and best way to build all 
kinds of farm buildings, but especially stables 
and pens for all our farm stock. I would 
have them in every-day use on the station 
grounds, and would have plans and specifica¬ 
tions, to send to any farmer desiring them, 
showing how he could put up his stables, etc., 
himself and exactly what they would cost him. 
These buildings should be arranged to give 
the most comfort to both the animals and 
their owner, knowing, as I do, that unless 
both are consulted the profit is bound to fall 
off. I should invite manufacturers of farm 
tools to send samples for competitive trial at 
the station, and if I had not the right kind of 
soil or crops to try them fairly I would send 
them to such of my 10 experiment farmers as 
bad. I would report the result impartially, 
and could do this, many times, when the farm 
paper* could not, a* they would be accused of 
partiality, or worse. 
I would try all new seeds and plants as in¬ 
troduced and should hope to save much loss 
to farmers by so doing. 
As the Rural has hinted so strongly sever¬ 
al times about poultry, I would, for the bene¬ 
fit of farmers’ wives and daughters, endeavor 
to show by actual practice how any farm 
woman if her husband or father would do his 
duty, could dress herself and have money to 
spare for “pins’ - out of the profit of her poul¬ 
try after she had paid for all the food con¬ 
sumed. 
In my Annual Report I would not waste 
time and space in long tables of the annual 
rain-fall in different parts of the world, and 
show that if it had rained an eighth of an 
inch more in May, the hay crop would have 
been 145 pounds heavier per acre in July ; or 
how, in the experiments in cutting potatoes 
for seed, if an old hen had not scratched up 
two hills where (single eyes had been cut in 
half, the yield would have heen half an ounce 
to the row greater than on the next row where 
eyes were quartered ; or how, by simply put¬ 
ting a hot brick to the roots of one hill of corn it 
out-yielded its neighbor by four perfect grains 
and (one imperfect one, which may possibly 
prove to have sufficient vitality to germinate. 
But I might tell how I hired a man to curse 
oneiof my trial cows,and the butter-fat in the 
milk that night decreased 10 per cent.; or how 
because it was raining the man who fed the trial 
pig did not stop to clean out the trough before 
he dashed the slop in it, with the result of no 
gain on the pig that day; or how the man cul¬ 
tivating the corn was a bigger fool than the 
horse, and losing his temper because the latter 
could not count the rows, jerked the reins, got 
the horse scared and himself angry, with the 
net result of 10 hills of corn destroyed instead 
of the one the horse accidentally put his foot on, 
and, as it proved, did not injure in the least. 
I might put some things like these in my re¬ 
port and would then collect all my bulletins 
and bind them with it for convenience. If I 
had only sent out one bulletin I would collect 
that and not try to make a big report, stuffed 
out with useless tables and theories. In short, 
I would aim rather to help 1,000 farmers $1 
each per annum, sure, than to try to help 500 
at the rate of $100 each and only succeed in 
making them all mad. 
Very few of the swindles practiced on 
farmers have anything original about them. 
During the nine or ten years in which the 
Eye-Opener has been flashing his lantern on 
the tricks and rascalities of crooks of all sorts 
who seek their prey in country places, he has 
very seldom had an opportunity of telling 
about anything new. The same old [line of 
swindles always finds dupes, so that there is 
not much need of fraudulent inventiveness. 
A swindle just played upon farmers about 
Red Cloud, Nebraska, has, however, something 
of the merit of originality. The sharpers— 
there were two of them—introduced them¬ 
selves as S. E. Hall and G. H. Cook, and pro¬ 
fessed to represent the Cook Anchor and Cable 
Company, of Blue Rapids, Kansas. They 
claimed to have a patent cyclone cable, by 
which houses and barns could be anchored. 
In connection with this was a feature by 
which every house with a “cable attachment” 
was to be insured against cyclones for 10 years 
free of charge. They informed the farmers 
that under the State law before an insurance 
policy could be issued, a certa’n amount of 
money must be deposited with the State 
Treasurer, as a garantee for a certain length 
of time, when it would be refuuded, and of 
course they would take charge of tne amount. 
Well you’d hardly believe it, of course, still 
it is a sad fact that the rascals secured quite 
a large sum of insurance money chiefly in the 
fonn of negotiable notes, and sold several 
township rights for the cable, before the sus¬ 
picions of the victims were aroused. They 
thought they had a * ‘sure thing” however, and 
lingered too long in that neighborhood, so 
that they were arrested as rogues, and finally 
effected a settlement last Monday by surren. 
dering all the money and notes they had re¬ 
ceived. Now the“ game” or something on the 
same principle is certain to be tried in other 
parts of the country in the near future, if it 
is not being tried already. Hence this cau¬ 
tion to Rural readers. 
Several of the States have passed strin¬ 
gent laws against the “green goods” or “saw 
dusfc” swindlers. So severe are the laws passed 
by the last New York Legislature that most 
of the rascals of that sort who used to operate 
in this city, now carry on “business” across 
the river in New Jersey. Congress has just 
taken the matter in hand; but, of course, it 
can only do so by punishing those who use the 
U. S. mail for fraudulent purposes. Last 
Tuesday Mr. Enloe, of Tennessee, introduced 
in the House a^bill^the text of which is as 
follows: 
Be it enacted, etc., that any (person who 
shall knowingly deposit, or shall cause to be 
deposited, in any post office, letter-box or 
other receptable for the United States mail, 
any letter, circular or other communication 
addressed to any other person offering to soil, 
give, deliver or transfer to any person any 
imitation of any coin, bill, note, bond or other 
security of the United States, or bank notes, 
shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and upon 
conviction thereof shall be punishable by a 
fine of not more than $1,000, and by imprison¬ 
ment at hard labor for notj more than three 
years. 
To Several Inquirers,— Yes, the Silver 
Mining Company, of this city, is merely an 
alias for H. D. P. Allen, or H. A. Bennett, 
or Smally and Gale, and the many-named 
concern is quite untrustworthy_The Frank- 
ford School Fund Lottery, of Louisville, is an 
outright fraud which ought to be promptly 
suppressed... Investigation leaves no doubt 
that the Dime Distribution alias the Marion 
Trust Co., of Indianapolis, Ind., is a humbug. 
....Yes; we are informed by a nearby sub¬ 
scriber, that “Border City,” in Southern 
California, is a bogus concern. The location 
is wretched, and it is merely a paper city 
advertised to swindle “tenderfeet.” . . We 
have frequently said we do not recommend 
the nostrums advertised by “Dr.” E. D. 
Abbey, of Buffalo, N. Y., nor “ Dr.” Church¬ 
ill’s Restorative Remedies, offered by Reeves, 
of this city; and our opinion of their 
concoctions is the same now as it has always 
been. 
TUommt’s XDffirk. 
CONDUCTED BY EMILY LOUISE TAPLIN. 
CHAT BY THE WAY. 
An economical practice with some house¬ 
keepers is that of buying chipped or broken 
pieces of good china and then neatly mending 
them for use. Really good ware for table use 
is often bought in this way for a few cents 
and when deftly mended there is no apparent 
disfigurement. We have heard of one lady 
with whom this has become a (perfect craze; 
she is a positive enthusiast on the subject of 
broken crockery. 
* * * 
A Michigan friend gives a mode of canning 
rhubarb or pie-plant, which is surprisingly 
simple and satisfactory. She washes the 
stalks, skins them and cuts them into inch 
lengths, just as if preparing for cooking. She 
fills quart preserve jars with the cut pieces, 
then pours cold water over tnem, covering 
the rhubarb completely, screws on the top and 
the operation is completed. The bottles are 
put away in a dark place, and the contents 
keep perfectly until the rhubarb season comes 
round again. The flavor is perfect; in fact, 
one cannot tell it from that freshly gathered 
and it may be cooked in any way desired. 
* * * 
Women with shapely figures will be glad 
to know that.the tight redingote is'.to be a fav¬ 
orite garment again. In fact the polonaise 
in every style is to return to our wardrobes. 
The straight redingotes (are usually open at 
the sides, showing a slash of some contrasting 
color. Sometimes they have a full draped 
back—often they are quite straight. The 
bodice is often trimmed with wide revers, and 
large ornamental buttons. Sometimes large 
pocket flaps are put on the hips; silk “crow’s- 
feet” are worked at the corners of pockets 
and at the top of the slashes. A frugal woman 
who wants to look well will find one of these 
garments very useful to wear over a partly- 
worn skirt. Like charity it will cover a mul¬ 
titude of defects. 
* * * 
An exceedingly pretty handkerchief-case is 
made of chamois leather. It requires a piece 
of leather eighteen inches square, which folds 
together like a book. It is lined with gobelin 
gray china silk; a layer of cotton batting, 
perfumed with sachet powder, lies between the 
silk and chamois, making it very puffy. All 
around the edges the materials are very neatly 
overhanded together with gray silk, the 
lining being turned in to prevent ravelling. 
A styap of gray moire ribbon with a picot 
edge, went all across it inside to hold the 
handkerchiefs in place. The chamois had an 
