RSAY 28 
THE RURAL HEW-YORKER. 
it can be easily broken off after being inserted 
in the hole. Make the rivet long enough to 
project through about half an inch for the 
other head. After trying and finding that it 
■will fit, heat it hot and insert and break it off, 
then rivet down. Do not strike a flat blow, 
but go around the edge, holding the hammer 
so as to make a beveled edge, as shown in Fig. 
23. Now heat the jaws and bend the ends 
over a piece of three eighth inch iron, so that 
they will look like Fig. fl, and the job is fin¬ 
ished. In my next I will speak of making 
chain. 
Ithaca, N. Y. 
T 
( 5 . 
BUCEPHALUS BROWN’S NOTIONS AND 
IDEAS. 
On Luxury.— a Rural correspondent 
rather laughs at my idea that the American 
people might live in luxury, even under a 
prohibition tariff. He thinks many would 
be glad if they could live so now. They may. 
Luxury does not consist in “having every 
thing that heart could wish.” Luxury, at 
least in the sense in which I used it, and I 
think it the right sense, is the feeling of per¬ 
fect liberty, and a chance for the full enjoy¬ 
ment and employment of our powers. To 
me, American citizenship is the highest of 
luxuries, because, as an American, there is 
nothing that a man may rightfully be and 
have, that is not open for me to be and pos¬ 
sess. 
Getting a Living.— If men or women in 
America are willing to work at anything 
honest that they can find to do, they can 
always have plenty to do, and living wages 
for doing it, if they will do it industriously 
and faithfully. Bucephalus was once dropped 
down in a city of the Mississippi Valley, an 
utter stranger, with just five dollars in his 
pocket. It was in the dull times after the 
panic of 1857, and the town was full of men, 
“out of work.” Yet there were lots of work 
to be done; and Bucephalus started out;to 
hunt a job, without a doubt as to finding one. 
He felt sure there were a good many men 
who wanted just such a man as he knew him¬ 
self to be. It did not take him a whole day 
to find his man, though he had no reference 
or introduction save his broad shoulders and 
ready hands. He has never lacked a job 
since. 
Hard Times.— The times are always hard 
to people who are too particular about what 
they do, and who value their services above 
the market price. The secret of success is to 
get into the current of human activity, and 
keep there. “Standing fearful on the brink,” 
is what ruins a man. There never was, and 
I venture to say, there never will be a time, 
in any free country, when every man and 
woman who really want work cannot find it. 
Mind, I say work, not pay. The men and 
women who think first of the pay they want, 
and last, and as little as possible, of the work 
they mean to do for it, are the ones who have 
time to howl about “hard times.” 
We are Fairly Judged.—N o man or 
woman lives long anywhere, and mingles with 
the people, who is not, in the long-run, fairly 
“sized up.” What farming neighborhood does 
not know to a dot the real value, not only of 
the hired men and hired girls, but of the busi¬ 
ness and professional men, and of one another? 
Men are judged in this world as in the next, 
“out of the book of lives,” and it is given to 
them “according as their work shall be.” 
There is no escaping this judgment. It is as 
inevitable as it is righteous. 
Hard Facts.— In every part of this Union 
there i» land to be had, upon which human 
food and the material of human clothing can 
be produced, an acre of which can be bought 
for the price of one day’s to one month’s 
manual labor. Severe poverty is impossible 
In such a country, save by one’s own fault or 
folly. Even feeble women who have realized 
this truth have made handsome livings for 
themselves by a practical application of it. 
No employer can long oppress any man in a 
country where land is so plenty and so cheap. 
Seeking Soft Places.— “Big pay and little 
work” is the motto that makes men and wo¬ 
men poor. Let them know that big pay is in 
the hard places, because there the laborers are 
few and the field open. It is courage and the 
determination to win that make success. “It 
is not in our fates, but in ourselves that we are 
underlings.” Find out what you can do best, 
and do it with all your heart—and even if it 
is only washing, you will have success accord¬ 
ing to your merit? 
Over-crowding. —The soft places, the easy 
jobs are all over-crowded, and those who 
choose them are all underpaid, at least in their 
own opinions. People who seek this sort of 
work do not seek it because it is work, but 
because it is easy, and as loafing is easier still, 
they don’t have a hard time in persuading 
themselves and one another that they ought 
to stop work altogether. But even Powderly 
is convinced that this does not pay, as a 
steady thing. 
When all Work.— Did it ever occur to 
you to think what would be the effect if every 
well man and woman in this country should 
do a fair day’s work on every working day? 
With the aid we have from machinery we 
should soon be buried under the products of 
our own activity. So industrious a nation 
would laugh at foreign competition, and 
would bestir itself most earnestly to find a 
people, somewhere on the earth, who would 
swap with us some of their products for ours. 
How long would our “protective system” last 
then? For in order to sell we must buy, and 
in order to buy we must offer a good market 
to other nations for the things we want from 
them. Under such a state of affairs all neces¬ 
sary articles would be plenty and cheap. In 
our exchanges at home and abroad we should 
sell cheap and buy cheap, reckoning values in 
gold and silver, but all the people would have 
enough. 
What Is Enough?— Good food, clothing, 
shelter and means of communication; social 
pleasures, mental resources according to our 
desires, and moral development according to 
our aspirations, are what mankind desires, 
and with no lack of these man is rich. We 
have, in America, the solid basis of all these 
good things; but all Americans are not worthy 
of the blessings around them. It is by social 
development, under a due sense of our respon¬ 
sibilities to each other, and to “the Power 
of man which makes for righteousness,” that 
we may generally attain them. We want 
better government; but we shall get it, under 
our representative system, only as we become 
a better people. Laws alone will not make us 
better? When we call for a new law we are 
apt to think of it as something that will make 
other people do right by us. That is well; but 
what about the law written in our own hearts 
which tells us to do right by others? Is any¬ 
thing more lunatic than a popular ideal of 
law that would compel every other man to do 
right? There are many wrongs which legal 
enactments do not and cannot touch, which 
yet must be made right before we can reach 
that stage of civilization for which we long? 
“DOES FARMING PAY.” 
In the Rural of April 28 I have been read¬ 
ing the first chapter of the autobiography of 
T. H. Hoskins, M.D., entitled “The Black 
Side of Farming.” [That was not the autobi¬ 
ography of Dr. Hoskins, but that of a friend 
and neighbor. The Doctor merely prepared 
for the Rural the incidents related to him by 
his friend.— Eds.] He takes us into his con¬ 
fidence in a delightfully personal manner, 
suggestive of De Foe and of Swift and of the 
later Blackmore; only in these authors, how¬ 
ever much we may enter into their spirit, we 
are conscious that we are in the realms of 
fancy, while in reading this opening chapter 
of the Doctor’s we must admit that either he 
is writing plainly the true record of a farm 
life, or that, with the most adroit fancy and 
the skilled pen of a professional litterateur, he 
is simulating the shades and shadows to an 
extent that touches the sympathy. Let us 
hope that the latter is the case; that his con¬ 
clusions so boldly set forth at the very com¬ 
mencement of his story are incorrect, and can 
be so proven by drawing logical deductions 
from chapters yet to follow, else life, from the 
farmers’ standpoint, at least, would not be 
worth the living, as the sum of existence is 
only to be rightly measured by its success. 
The key-note, the chord, to which all of his 
story must vibrate is this: “Farming, taking 
all the risks, does not pay.” Were this a 
truth, it were better that the next comet that 
comes loafing this way should strike us 
“amidships” and distribute our particular 
atom of cosmic dust among our sister planets, 
where possibly the conditions for successful 
agriculture are more common than with us. 
For in all the past history of the human race, 
and as far into the future as the speculation of 
man dares to intrude, the great majority of 
the rational beings upon this globe have drawn 
and must draw their sustenance directly from 
the broad bosom of nature, be she kindly or 
churlish. 
What are all the great transportation com¬ 
panies, what the immense factories, but de¬ 
pendents upon the bounty of Ceres 1 How the 
heart of Wall Street throbs with exultation 
or sinks into lethargy as varying crop reports 
flash over the wires, and 'values of railway 
shares rise and fall with the billows of the 
great wheat fields of Minnesota, or the leagues 
of ripening corn of Kansas. A mine, be it 
gold or silver, iron or coal, once exhausted, 
can never be anything but a blemish upon th 
face of nature, a standing protest against the 
greed of man; blackened, desolate, horrible; 
but the farm brings forth each year the gold 
of its corn, the amber of its wheat, its jewels 
of fruit; and this in ever-increasing amount. 
We cannot all be merchants, lawyers, doctors; 
more is the pity! From the nature of the world 
as w e find it, this is impossible. The majori¬ 
ty of us must scrape an intimate acquaintance 
with nature; shall it be upon the surface, 
with all t^jat is beautiful around us, or in a 
miner’s shaft, subject to thousands of unseen 
dangers? 
For me, I am willing to let the “pauper 
labor of Europe” have their fill of the latter, 
so long as I can keep the green sod under my 
feet and the blue sky over my head. 
If “farming doesn’t pay,” what does? What 
proportion of merchants have been uniformly 
successful? What proportion of lawyers or 
doctors reach high positions in the scale of 
life? From what stations of mankind are our 
prisons, asylums and poorhouses filled? There 
must be statistics that answer these questions. 
The farmer’s life is one of toil, of never-end¬ 
ing anxiety and study. While it may not call 
into constant action all of the highest intel¬ 
lectual faculties, it is not necessarily brutaliz¬ 
ing. There is plenty of room for expression. 
The beauty of living is in the common things 
of life. In so far as the rapid accumulation 
of property goes, it needs be confessed that 
“farming does not pay.” But there is room 
for only one Jay Gould on the North Ameri¬ 
can continent; what can the remainder, the 
majority of us, do? We are here through no 
consent of our own, and the curse of Adam is 
upon us. But we can do the work closest to 
hand; surround our homes with whatever 
of beauty our means will allow; teach our 
children to love the farm instead of looking 
upon it with abhorrence; and, then, though our 
estates may not figure up big when divided 
around among our heirs, it may be said of us 
perhaps, that we “made the farm pay.” 
CHARLES J. WRIGHT. 
Otter Tail Co., Minn. 
Memoranda for Farmers. —Get a pass 
book about three by five inches, containing 
about 100 pages; carry it in an inside vest 
pocket. Write the name of whatever you 
wish to keep a record of at the top of the 
pages, giving one or more pages to a subject, 
according to the number of items you wish to 
write. After keeping the book a year or two 
you can guess very closely with regard to the 
space needed for wheat, oats, rye, hogs, 
sheep, milk, etc. Every item should be en¬ 
tered under its own heading, and the last 15 
or 20 pages should be devoted to items that 
will not go under any class. At the end of 
the year copy all these items a record of 
which is desired, in a year book, which you 
can make yourself. Get a blank book and 
rule it yourself, according to your subject. 
WHEAT. 
Year. 
Kind. 
Acres 
Hogan 
Finished 
Ds. 
to sow. 
sowing. 
1879 
Lost Nation. 
13 
Apr. 7, 
Apr. 9, 
3 
1880 
II »» 
8 
Mar, 23, 
Mar. 24, 
2 
and so on through harvesting] thrashing, etc. 
Give every item that occurs every year a 
space for itself; also give every year a line. 
Memoranda kept in this manner may be 
found in a minute after years have passed. 
Eagle, Wis. t. J. s. 
£avm Cc0it0mij 
FERTILIZERS FOR CROPS. 
Results of corn fertilizer experiments at the 
R. G. unsatisfactory, fertilizers applied 
directly to the seed are often starters, not 
retarders-, over-feeding the exception ; 
amount of plant food taken from the soil 
by crops a poor criterion of the quantity 
that should be applied-, the soil a savings 
bank for fertility. 
SECRETARY E. WILLIAMS. 
I have read the account of corn fertilizer 
experiments at the Rural Grounds, as pub¬ 
lished in the issue of March 10, with a good 
deal of interest. The results given show little 
or no effects from the use of the fertilizer, as 
440 pounds per acre were quite as efficient as 
double or even four times that quantity, and 
all were a useless expense as far as increasing 
the yield was concerned. This is more appar¬ 
ent if we extend the yield to the rate per acre, 
the same as given for the fertilizer used. 
This would stand about thus, allowing 70 
pounds of ears to the bushel: 
Plot 1. 880 pounds fertilizer per acre, broad¬ 
cast, 67.52 bushels, increase 4.14 bushels. 
Plot 2. 880 pounds fertilizer per acre in 
drills, 61.02 bushels, decrease 1.76 bushel. 
Plot 3. 440 pounds fertilizer per acre in 
drills, 67.1 bushels, increase 3.72 bushels. 
Plot 4. 1,760 pounds fertilizer per acre broad ¬ 
cast, 65.65 bushels, increase 2.27 bushels. 
Plot 5. No fertilizer, 63.78 bushels. 
A very sorry showing, indeed, and, as you * 1 
say, it teaches nothing further than that con¬ 
tingencies beyond the cultivator’s control are 
liable to upset all calculations. The yields 
above given cannot be considered more than 
fair average crops, but the little variation, 
when we consider the fertilizers applied, pre¬ 
sents a conundrum apparently unsolvable. It 
is such failures to show results that prejudice 
people against fertilizers, and one such is more 
convincing that they don’t pay than half a 
dozen more favorable ones would convince to 
the contrary. 
I cannot, however, share in the Ru- 
ral’s doubts that fertilizers applied direct¬ 
ly to the seed ever act as starters but 
rather as retarders. There is no doubt that 
instances do sometimes occur where seeds are 
injured from contact with chemical fertilizers 
of too great strength or in excessive quanti¬ 
ties; but I think the general experience of 
farmers is favorable to such applications. 
The kind of fertilizer also makes a difference. 
For corn, planted early before the ground gets 
warm, a little fine hen manure or a handful 
of powdrette is admirable for giving the young 
plants a good start, and hill and drill applica¬ 
tions of commercial fertilizers for potatoes are 
to be commended as far preferable to broad¬ 
cast applications, not only on the score of 
economy, but because the plant food is where 
it is needed, and within reach of the plants. Of 
course, this can be overdone, but I doubt if 
double the usual applications would work any 
harm if care is taken to properly mix the fer¬ 
tilizer with the soil. 
We often hear of over-feeding plants; but I 
incline to the opinion that instances of this 
kind are the exception rather than the rule. 
The results of the above experiments, if they 
are to be regarded as teaching anything in 
this direction, would seem to be opposed to 
even the most moderate feeding of that par¬ 
ticular soil for corn, but the crops would 
hardly justify this conclusion. 
Chemi.-ts undertake to tell us that a crop of 
potatoes, corn, etc., of a certain amount con¬ 
tains so much potash, phosphoric acid and ni¬ 
trogen taken from the soil; hence these ele¬ 
ments to that extent, if not already existing 
in the soil, must be applied in order to produce 
such crops, and any excess of the require 
amount is a waste and useless expense. Pro¬ 
fessor Roberts, in a recently published state¬ 
ment, says, “The amount of plant food car¬ 
ried off by the removal of a ton of potatoes is 
6.8 pounds of nitrogen, 11.4 pounds of potash, 
and 3.2 pounds of phosphoric acid.” 
Ten tons of potatoes—333% bushels, not an 
extraordinary crop for an acre of ground— 
would therefore remove 68 pounds of nitro¬ 
gen, 114 pounds of potash, and 32 pounds of 
phosphoric acid. All soils not strictly barren 
contain more or less of these elements of fer¬ 
tility; but if, to make sure, we add these 
amounts which are actually necessary for the 
production of such a crop, it does not follow 
that we shall harvest it, as the crop may from 
some cause fail to find and appropriate them. 
If we were to apply double the amount of 
these ingredients necessary to produce the 10 
tons, we might increase the yield to some ex¬ 
tent, but we could hardly expect to double it 
under the most favorable circumstances; yet 
the unappropriated fertility is not wasted; 
the soil still holds it in reserve for future use, 
a reserve fund not actually employed but 
ready to be drawn on at any time. The econ¬ 
omic aspect of the question therefore seems to 
be whether the cultivator should study to sup¬ 
ply only sufficient fertilizing elements to pro¬ 
duce the crop desired, depending on its full 
appropriation; or whether he should aim to 
supply an excess so that the crop cannot fail 
to find abundance for all its needs and the soil 
improve in fertility at the same time. 
In view of our limited knowledge of the hid¬ 
den processes continually going on in nature’s 
laboratory, I incliue to the opinion that it is 
policy to err, if at all, on the generous side, 
and supply to our crops more feed in varied 
forms than they can possibly appropriate, 
rather than that they should suffer for lack of 
any. Tne deposits are in a good savings 
bank. 
Essex Co., N. J. 
A CONVENIENT WATER SUPPLY. 
A supply by means of a hydraulic ram and 
a barrel reservoir; cost-, durability of the 
supply, figuring on its advantages ; a pro¬ 
motor of cleanliness and health. 
I have often wondered why so many farm¬ 
ers are content to carry or pump the water 
used for household purpose and for watering 
stock; it is without doubt a very expensive 
sort of water supply. To show one way in 
which this trouble may be done away with, I 
will describe how a friend of mine gets a good 
supply of water with the least possible outlay 
