<S«n 26 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
sisted largely of Welshmen, who came in large 
numbers to this country about 45 years ago, 
and settled near Utica, Oneida Co., N. Y., and 
were subsequently employed on many of the 
farms of Western New York. They were, as 
a rule, sober and industrious, and many of 
them were enabled by their habits of economy 
to secure homes of their own and a competency 
for life. The above would truthfully 
apply to their English brethren who were 
also employed at that time to a considerable 
extent on the farms of this county. But this 
class of farm laborers has long since disappear¬ 
ed, and the German element is now and for 
nearly 30 years past has been the predominat¬ 
ing help on our farms. Those now employed 
are mainly from the adjoining counties of Erie 
and Wyoming, appearing each year usually 
during March, visiting the different farms to 
hire for the season a period of about seven 
months, or until the regular farm work is 
completed; in either case the season’s work is 
considered to begin the first day of April. 
The wages paid range from $15 to $22 per 
month, according to the age and efficiency of 
the applicant. But it is considered good 
policy and money well expended to pay two 
or three dollars more per month to an experi¬ 
enced and reliable man, one who is fully com¬ 
petent to successfully manage and care for 
the various implements now used on the farm, 
who is conscientious in his work, with princi¬ 
ples of right and justice firmly established, 
and a suitable companion for our sons while 
engaged in the farm work But it is lamen¬ 
table to add that comparatively few of those 
employed for farm work are overburdened 
with the above virtues, or by their conduct 
illustrate them the-season through. When 
two or more hands are employed, it is often 
good economy to have one of them younger 
and with less experience than the other, as 
there are many things he could do as well 
perhaps as could a more expensive hand. 
Breakfast is served on most farms at 6 a m. 
Previous to this, the cows have been milked, 
the hor-es groomed and harnesspd. and other 
necessary chores cared for. About an hour 
and a half are taken for dinner, and, con¬ 
trary to the old time custom of serving sup 
per at 5 P. M , and then resuming field «ok 
until the time for night chores—the work for 
the day being finished at sundown, or nearly 
so—the work for the day now, on nearly all 
farms, ends at 6 p. M. Supper is eaten and 
chores are ca r ed for afterward, often afford 
ing the men nearly an hour’s recreation be¬ 
fore sunset 
The above applies to those who board, 
lodge, and have their washing done in the 
farmer’s family. 
Many farmers have comfortable and con¬ 
venient houses expressly for those men who 
have families, who furnish their own board 
and lodging. They are hired for a stipulated 
amount for the season of seven months, or by 
the year, including certain privileges, com¬ 
prising house rent, use of garden, keep for a 
cow and fuel (fire wood) for one year’s time. 
While the outlay for help of this kind is not 
materially lower than that for other men, it 
is generally admitted that owing to their pos¬ 
sessing a greater knowledge of farm work, 
and to the fact that their “ wild oats” have 
already been sown, they are, as a rule, more 
trustworthy and valuable. This, taken in con¬ 
nection with the fact that the labor and an¬ 
noyance for the housewife are materially less, 
is sufficient to recommend this mode of hiring 
hands wherever circumstances favor its 
adoption. Sunday work, consisting of the 
chores usually done on week days, is consid¬ 
ered obligatory, on the partof the farm hands. 
Argeements relating to time, wages, chores 
and other minor matters on the farm, are al¬ 
most universally verbal. Indeed written con¬ 
tracts are the exceptions, and however much 
we have at times realized the importance of 
adopting this method, I have never had a 
formal contract drawn up and signed, nor do 
I know of any of my neighbors who has done 
so. It is needless to add, however, that the 
adoption of this just and business like man¬ 
ner of hiring help would tend much to lessen 
the unpleasantness and dissatisfaction after¬ 
wards arising from misunderstanding or fail¬ 
ure to fulfill the conditions of an agreement. 
It rarely occurs that help from the cities 
is employed on the farms. A common preju¬ 
dice seems to exist against employing peo¬ 
ple of this character, owing, mainly, to the 
fact, no doubt, that the applicants are inex¬ 
perienced, and, as a rule their general appear¬ 
ance indicates their unfitness for active farm 
work. Occasionally, however, there are nota¬ 
ble exceptions. 1 have now in my employ a 
young man nearly 17 j ears of age who recent 
ly came from New Yoik Cny, who by dili¬ 
gence, good behavior, and the desire mani¬ 
fested to comply with all reasonable demands, 
is fairly in the way of making himself indis¬ 
pensable to those by whom he is employed. 
In the same way comforiable homes aDd a 
fair competency can be secured to those 
manifesting the same spirit, who are now 
struggling for a bare existence in our large 
towns and cities. 
Genesee Co. irving d. cook. 
FROM MICHIGAN. 
By far the larger number of our farm 
laborers are the sons of small farmers in the 
vicinity, and are mostly American-born, 
though frequently of foreign descent, mainly 
German or Dutch. Probably 50 per cent of 
them save money, and eventually buy or 
rent farms for themselves. Those who rent 
are naturally increasing in number as the 
country grows older, the number who buy 
correspondingly decreasing. What might be 
called the professional laborer is only begin¬ 
ning to be a factor in the community. M°n 
of this class are mostly limited to those who 
are mai ned and day laborers. 
Regular help is engaged by the month, us¬ 
ually for a period of nine months, beginning 
from about March 1. Extra help is secured 
by the day as needed, and both classes are 
employed without a written contract. A few 
hire for the year; but wages are paid on a 
monthly basis. The average wages are $16 to 
$18 per month, or $1 per day with board, or 
$1.25 per day without. These figures are for 
ordinary labor, about 50 per cent, being added 
for haying and harvest. Custom varies as to 
“chores,” but, as a rule, wherever such duties 
devolve upon a man th r ough the week, he ex¬ 
pects to discharge them on Sunday. 
We are fortuna'e in still being able to se¬ 
cure young men who are sober, industrious, 
honest and reliable—men who are working 
for an object, and to that end, labor for the 
best interests of their employer. This is what 
every one should do, and while such men are 
to be had I would have no others Such a 
man is a gentleman and should be treated as 
such, and may be safely made a member of 
the family. The only doubt or risk in the 
matter is to be sure he is that sort of man, 
which may only be known on trial. 
I believe in stating the case plainly 
to a new man; in substance, that hir 
ing him is strictly a business transaction 
in which he is expected to work for 
my interest; that I shall willingly pay him 
the highest wages, as I expect the most valu¬ 
able service, and that no other will be satis¬ 
factory. As a protection to both, it should be 
fairly understood that when either party for 
any reason becomes dissatisfied, the agree¬ 
ment is to terminate, I want no unwilling 
services,and besides,I always reserve the right 
to be the judge whether the man is what I 
need. While I should not xact an agree¬ 
ment of him to be a gentleman, I should cer¬ 
tainly discharge him if he proved to be any¬ 
thing else. Let it be plainly understood that 
quantity of work performed will not be the 
measure of efficiency, but that the quality 
must be of the best. I have seldom seen a man 
that did his work well who did not perform a 
fair amount of it. With a different class of 
help these plans would need modification, but 
this has been the custom at our place, and 
many of the best of men have rendered con¬ 
tinuous service under it till ready to engage 
in business for themselves. Our best laborers 
are drawn from the same class of people as 
their employers, and are in every way worthy 
of considerate treatment. 
City help has not been tried, and I have al¬ 
ready stated my views upon cheap labor. I 
never employed auy yet that did not prove an 
expensive nuisance. Im fficient help causes 
much weariness of the flesh and vexation of 
spirit, and a vicious man is an unadulterated 
curse. E. DAVENPORT. 
Ingham Co. 
FROM LONG ISLAND. 
The problem of securing farm help is quite 
a serious one for both in doors and out. Our 
help is mostly German with very few Irish, 
and a few negroes. Perhaps five per cent, 
are native whites of American parentage; 20 
per cent, are born in this country of foreign 
parents; three per cent, are colored ana the 
rest are foreign-born. Rarely one saves 
anything. I know of but three or four who are 
working places on their own account, and 
tw i or three who have built on lots and own 
their own homes, but still work out 
Yearly help is secured from the neighbor¬ 
hood, mostly men who have long lived there. 
Only extra for summer is secured from the 
city, or drifts along and is tried for a few 
weeks. If satisfactory, the bands are kept 
and may become permanent, otherwise they 
tramp on. Wages $10 to $18 pfr mouth with 
board; good day hands $1, without board. 
Usually no contracts are required. If sever¬ 
al hands are employed, they do the Sunday 
chores in turn, or they do the chores morning 
and evening without extra pay if they are 
regularly hired; a man that will not help in 
doing chores is not usually kept long. The 
bands should be treated as men. The “golden 
rule” has always served me best. My head 
man has been with me 23 years next May 
without a quarrel. I don’t like change and 1 
change only for cause. Good men are always 
the cheapest, but are hard to get and poor 
ones will ask the same terms as if they 
were good. As in the work-shops, it is hard 
to scale prices. City boys are but little 
thought of, and when they are brought out 
here, they soon drift back to the city after 
the novelty has worn off country life. We 
are too near their old homes, for they can 
walk back in a day. I know of none that have 
been out here two years. H. 
Creedmoor. 
FROM KANSAS. 
A majority of the farm laborers in our 
section are colored After them in point of 
numbers come American bom whites. Com¬ 
paratively few are foreigners—Germans pre¬ 
ponderating. Only a small percentage lay 
up money, but still some do. A number of 
•tenant farmers among us began life as farm¬ 
hands, and a few of our proprietary farmers 
started from the same level. 
The supply of help with us is fully equal to 
the ordinary demand, so that no effort is 
needed to s°cure it from abroad except through 
potato digging, when it has to a small extent 
been imported from Kansas City and Law¬ 
rence. Wages are about $16 per mon'h and 
board for eight months; day hands get from 
$1 to $1 50 per day, according to the pressure 
of work in the neighborhood. Contracts are 
rarely signed. Monthly bands generally 
have some regular “chores” assigned them, 
which they do Sundays as well as week days. 
City boys have sometimes been brought 
out for extra busy times, but no persistent 
attempts have been made, that l know of, to 
break them in to farm work. The small ex¬ 
periences some of us have had with them 
have not disposed us to an extended acquaint¬ 
ance. 
The question is not whether it is better to 
hire go* d men or poor at their respective 
prices, and will not be till there are enough 
good men to go round. My lather used to say 
the “ good hired men have farms of their 
own"—a rather extravagant statement of 
what is, after all, a general truth. And the 
really “capable" men who have failed on 
their own farms, can still do better than take 
the small wages that farmers can afford to 
pay them. We are left to do the best we can 
with the residue. Many of the p rplexities of 
their employment and occasions for their 
short-comings might be avoided by simplify¬ 
ing their duties 
On the average farm, the hired-man is put 
at so many and such diverse jobs in the course 
of the year, that to do them all fairly well he 
needs to have an acquaintance with more 
processes and a familiarity with more details 
than it is reasonable to expect of him. Per¬ 
haps, too, he would do more if he were not so 
often shifted from task to task. The loss of 
time and effort imposed by the short pulls and 
frequent changes of ordinary farming is too 
often unjustly charged to the hired man’s in¬ 
efficiency. The farmer is, in a sense, a man¬ 
ufacturer, and he can, as it seems to me, with 
great profit to himself, imitate, as far as prac¬ 
ticable and much farther than is commonly 
practiced, the method by which manufactu¬ 
rers in other lines secure fairly good service 
from unskilled and indifferent laborers; viz: 
by work within narrow limits. It is advan¬ 
tageous, also, to concentrate as far as possible, 
all the help on the farm on one thing at a time 
under the direction of the farmer himself or 
a competent foreman; then the shirk can be 
held to his task, the ignorant instructed, the 
careless prompted, the talker silenced and the 
whole gang watched and pushed. 
Edwardsville. edwin taylor. 
(Continued on Page 57.) 
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. 
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BONE AND WOOD CHARCOAL AS PURIFIERS 
AND DEODORIZERS. 
V. L., Caledonia, N. Y .—Will a water 
filter made with what the seller is pleased to 
call animal charcoal, free the water from 
typhoid germs any more than vegetable 
charcoal? Will either do it? 
Ans. —Animal charcoal has a mechanical 
as well as a chemical effect when used as a 
filter. Its mechanical effect is to catch and 
retain among its particles all suspended matter 
so that fluids passed through a mass of finely 
powdered charcoal flow away clear of this 
mat f er. Its chemical effect is due to variou 
properties it possesses as follows: it is ex 
tremely porous, a cubic inch of it having a 
total surface, within and without, of about 
100 square feet. Porous bodies like this have 
the power of occluding and condensing gases 
to a large extent, and oxygen is thus absorbed 
by charcoal to such an extent that it wil 
sometimes spontaneously take fire and pro¬ 
duce combustion, by the effect of the oxygen 
condensed into its pores. Animal charcoal is 
more porous than wood charcoal, because of 
the very intricate cellular structure of the 
bones of which it is made. Consequently 
liquids passed through a mass of charcoal are 
chemically purified by the oxidation and de¬ 
struction of the organic germs which may be 
contained in them, and tainted meat is freed 
from its bad odor in the same way, and on 
account of the difference mentioned, bone 
charcoal is more effective than wood charcoal. 
But charcoal is not an antiseptic, but, on the 
contrary, an active agent of decomposition 
by oxidation; yet at the same time it is a deod¬ 
orizer and disinfectant, because it absorbs and 
destroys by the same oxidation the new, 
nulodorous products of decomposition as fast 
as they are formed. It might be interesting 
to mention here, that the purifying effects of 
common ear h and the more active properties 
in this direction of black vegetable (carbon¬ 
aceous) soils are due to the i-ame porosity, 
aided by the presence of finely divided car¬ 
bonaceous matter (a sort of charcoal) in it. 
THE PECAN TREE. 
C. E. P., Ocean Springs, Miss.—I have 
about 200 pecan trees five years old from seed. 
They are from four to seven inches in diame¬ 
ter. Will their nuts be like those of the trees 
from whi h the seeds were obtained? Would 
it pay to let them bear first, and then gradu¬ 
ally graft or bud them with better sorts? 
Which would be the better—grafting or bud¬ 
ding? Wbatis a remedy for a greenish-white 
worm that destroys the pecan buds. 
ANSWERED BY T. V. MUNSON, OF TEXAS. 
Pecan trees grown from nuts taken from 
trees growing in the vicinity of other pecan 
trees or of pig-nuts (Cary a glabra) will be more 
or less mixed with the latter. But if they 
are fiom nuts from isolated trees, most of 
them will closely follow the parent in charac¬ 
teristics. The pecan is what the botanists 
term monoecious. Every tree produces both 
the male and female flowers separately, and 
the pollen of a'tree will either fertilize its own 
pistillate ^flowers, or, still better, those of 
other trees. At blooming time the pollen 
flies long distances in the air and may ferti¬ 
lize the pistillate flowers after being wafted 
for hundreds of yards or rods. Generally 
the experience of those who have planted 
fine pecans collected in the woods, is that 
among the seedlings there will be one tree in 
100 or in 500, that will produce nuts as fine as 
those of the parent tree. If the nuts planted 
were extra fine, I would let the trees bear, and 
then top-graft all the inferior ones with the 
finest; but if the young trees are only one 
or two years old, and wood of very fine 
kinds can be obtained, I would graft the seed¬ 
lings. For the greenish-white worm that de¬ 
stroys the buds, although I have no definite 
knowledge of it, I would, on general princi¬ 
ples, try spraying the trees with the kerosene 
emulsion or Paris-green mixture. This would 
certainly destroy the tent caterpillars which 
do a great deal of injury to the pecan. 
TOBACCO WATER FOR INSECT PESTS. 
L. E. A., Smy7~na, Del. —1. Can tobacco 
water be made strong enough to injure foliage 
of any kind? 2. How much tobacco will it 
require in a barrel of water, and how long 
must the mixture stand before it is strong 
enough to use? I want to try it on rose-bugs 
and the flea-beetle this coming season. 
Ans. — 1 . Yes. But much depends on the sorts 
of plants, also on the age or consistency of 
the leaves. 2. Use a bushel of stems to a bar¬ 
rel of water. But here, again, much depends 
upon the strength of the tobacco—for it isn’t 
all equally strong—and on the age and condi¬ 
tion of the leaves on which the iuiusion is to 
be used. We generally steep it over-night, 
and in this way extract most of the strength 
from the tohacco; but if it is required for im¬ 
mediate use, we will get pretty strong juice in 
half an hour, or if we use boiling instead of 
cold water, in 10 minutes. When we have oc¬ 
casion to use large quantities of tobacco 
water, we fill the barrel with dry stems, then 
fill up with water and let the stems 
soak over-night. In the morning we use this 
