1 889 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
663 
sioned. The illustration is truly an “ac¬ 
curate” one in many respects, hut, I must 
confess, to me there are several features 
which are far from what I consider “home¬ 
like.” 
S. R. Me., West Salem, Wis.— The 
Jerseyman’s article on horse-racing ex¬ 
presses just my views. The other day I 
was at our fair. About 20 race-horses were 
stabled on the grounds. I passed through 
and viewed these noble animals. Each 
horse was cared for by at least two men or 
boys. Their owners and backers were 
making bets, drinking whisky, smoking 
and cursing. I was invited to bet on any 
horse. The crowd who followed the race¬ 
course had all the marks of full-bred peni¬ 
tentiary stock, just what Jerseyman saw 
at the races. I then went out among the 
working stock and found them hitched to 
posts in open sheds fighting flies.- There 
was no one to rub and curry them; their 
hides were marked with scars that were 
made by ill-fitting harnesses; they drew 
heavy loads, plowed and dragged and made 
it possible for their fine-boned swift 
brothers to get their living without much 
work. The race-horses got $800 in 
premiums and the hard-working, honest 
draft horses got just $8. They were 
hitched to a stone-boat loaded with two 
tons of stone. They pulled the load. The 
crowd who followed the draft horses were 
farmers and lumbermen, natives and for¬ 
eign-born—a hard lot. 
Work for the Agricultural Depart¬ 
ment and Agricultural Papers.— An 
advance slip from the Department of Agri¬ 
culture gives results of an investigation re¬ 
garding the composition of baking powders 
which “ has been conducted under the di¬ 
rection of the chemist of the U. S. Depart¬ 
ment of Agriculture, Dr. H. W. Wiley.” 
If the department can legitimately make 
such investigations says the Farmers’ Re¬ 
view, why was not flour examined instead 
of baking powder? The latter article has 
been sold under chemical analyses for years. 
The public had no fears in using it. They 
asked for no further information regarding 
its composition. Private experiment had 
satisfied each family as to which brand to 
use. The Government was not expected to 
investigate the subject, and now that the 
Agricultural Department has seen fit to do 
so, intense surprise has been aroused among 
the farmers, and rightly so. 
Farmers and honest dairymen would be 
thankful, continues our esteemed contem¬ 
porary, were the Department of Agricul¬ 
ture to investigate the vile combinations 
offered for sale under the name of cheese, 
expose the adulterations of such fraudulent 
productions, and incidentally assist the 
sale of pure dairy products. If baking pow¬ 
ders are a character of goods which may be 
properly investigated and advertised by the 
Department of Agriculture, which pre¬ 
sumably works for the interests of farmers, 
the latter would much rather have them 
substitute for baking powder investigations 
those of coffee, tea, sugar, mixed paints, 
vinegar, fertilizers, alleged woolen goods, 
and a hundred other articles vastly more 
important to them than baking powders 
and most probably much more impure. 
The R. N.-Y. quite agrees with the spirit 
of the article above quoted and the Farmers’ 
Review does good service in thus forcibly 
condemning such apparently needless work. 
Turning from the shortcomings of the 
Department of Agriculture, the R. N.-Y. 
would feel pleased if the Review would 
heartily join it in condemning a culpable 
piece of business in which certain farm 
journals are engaged. The. publishers, 
owners, proprietors or editors, as the case 
may be, of these papers are pecuniarily in¬ 
terested in booming certain Montana lands. 
They praise them up to the skies editorially, 
while their advertising columns are liber¬ 
ally given up to Montana advertisements. 
Now all this is being done while the readers 
of those journals are kept in ignorance of 
t he fact that the editors or proprietors are 
cracking up the lands in which they own a 
share and for which they are stiving to ob¬ 
tain the highest price. 
Against Poor Butter.—O ne of the most 
disagreeable experiences of farm life, says 
Henry Stewart in the New York Times, is 
to grow crops, rear cows, feed them, make 
butter, and be forced to sell it for a few 
cents per pound when the best* market 
prices are as much as 25 cents per pound. 
In many places the quotations for farmers’ 
butter are as low as six to 10 cents, while the 
best dairy and creamery brings 25 cents. 
This takes all the pleasure out of the work 
and makes it most disagreeable drudgery. 
A well-known dairyman, whose butter sells 
for 50 cents a pound, writing on this sub¬ 
ject, says that he knows of many farmers’ 
wives who from the milk of two, three, or 
five or six cows make butter that is better 
than the best creamery butter ever sent to 
market. But in every case these women 
are educated and intelligent, and read and 
study as well as practice the excellent 
methods which their mothers taught them, 
with the help of all the new improvements 
which have eased and simplified their 
work. 
The best of butter may be made in 
any kind of churn. A jar even can be used; 
the old-fashioned up-and-down churn has 
made as good butter as the very best now 
made; but yet a modern improved churn 
is easier to use and more conveniently kept 
clean, and a clean churn is indispensable 
for making good butter. Churn regularly, 
not now fast and then slow, and do not 
leave the churn for an hour or two and 
then go back and finish it. The best butter 
is made in about 25 or 30 minutes. Look 
in the churn, if you do not understand the 
changing sounds of the splashing, and 
when the butter is in grains as large as 
wheat and peas, stop work; pour off the 
butter-milk and put clean cold water, with 
a little salt in it, into the churn and wash 
the butter until it is quite free from butter¬ 
milk. 
Never touch the butter with the hands. 
Use a paddle made of an oaken shingle to 
lift it by or one of the ladles sold at the 
stores. Put the butter in a clean wooden 
dish, well rinsed with cold water; spread¬ 
ing it out as flat as possible, gashing it 
with a ladle, and sprinkle one ounce of the 
finest dairy salt to the pound of butter over 
it. If the butter lies loosely in the dish 
you need do no more, but if it is necessary, 
the salt should be mixed with the butter 
roughly, and the dish put away for 12 
hours for the salt to melt slowly and mix 
with the butter. At the end of this time 
the butter is worked over by turning it 
with the paddle and squeezing it, taking 
care to avoid breaking the grain by plaster¬ 
ing it, and when the salt is well worked in 
and the water well worked out, the butter 
should be made into neat rolls or small 
cakes, and put in a clean dish in a cool 
place where there is no dust. Then take a 
sample of the butter to a family in the vil¬ 
lage or a boarding-house, and try to get an 
order for a regular supply every week for 
the whole year, and get a fresh cow when 
it is needed to keep up the supply regularly 
every week. As one customer is found 
look for another; but, as soon as you can, 
get away from the store where the butter 
is exchanged for soap and dry goods and is 
put on a box of codfish near the stove until 
it is traded off or packed with a lot more 
of the same kind and is sent off and sold at 
10 cents a pound for cooking and making 
pastry at the cheap hotels and boarding¬ 
houses in the cities. 
“ RAYS.” 
THE pig crop, says the Breeder's Gazette, 
seems quite commensurate with the prom¬ 
ised yield of corn, and in the face of pros¬ 
pectively large feeding operations the 
cholera question becomes once more an im¬ 
portant consideration. That Dr. Billings 
has made material progress in the line of 
extending relief to infected herds seems 
reasonably certain, and as this is the first 
tangible assistance yet tendered by science 
to a long-suffering and much-humbugged 
swine-rearing public it is to be hoped that 
this matter of inoculation will be made the 
subject of most thorough investigation, as 
suggested by the late Government Com¬ 
mission. In herds where the disease has 
already made its appearance inoculation 
should most certainly be given a thorough 
trial. 
Make a note to try next year the Igno- 
tum and New Jersey Tomatoes. The Pre¬ 
lude is the best very early tomato. Golden 
Queen is the best yellow. The Shah is one 
of t he so-called potato-leaf tomatoes. The 
color is yellow and it is no smoother than 
the Mikado. 
The Ohio Farmer heard a horseman say, 
not long since, that more men had lost 
money in trying to raise fast horses than 
cm r made money by either raising or own¬ 
ing them. This may be true. They lost 
money by attempting too much—not by 
breeding to good stock with sure, solid im¬ 
provement in view T . 
Sander’s Horse Breeding says that 
very fast horses are not produced with cer¬ 
tainty even by the most experienced breed¬ 
ers, wdth the best breeding stock to work 
upon, and the best trainers to develop them. 
This business affords enjoyment and recre¬ 
ation to gentlemen of w'ealth and leisure, 
with whom profit is a secondary considera¬ 
tion, and in such hands the breeding of 
horses for speed alone should be left. This 
is safe advice... 
The North-west says that any commu¬ 
nity which raises good draft horses w'ill be 
found prosperous and progressive. When 
a half dozen or ten good teams are put 
upon the market and bring into the neigh¬ 
borhood from three to five thousand dol¬ 
lars, it helps everybody in it and drives the 
wolf from many a door. 
The Boston Transcript is of the opinion 
that the overhead check-rein for the horse 
is refined and steady torture, not for the 
strain backward of the neck, but because 
the animal cannot see the ground on which 
he is stepping. The swaying of his head 
from side to side is evidence of his trying 
to find relief. 
In referring to the practice of docking 
horses’ tails, the Hartford Times says that 
the mutilation of a horse by chopping off 
his tail is no less a mutilation in reality 
than the cutting off of his ears, or taking 
out one of his eyes. In either case it is not 
only an atrocious act of cruelty to the 
horse, inflicting needless pain, but produces 
disfigurement. It is not only in bad taste, 
it is essentially barbarous. It belongs 
properly with the customs of tribes that 
flatten their heads, bore holes through 
their lips or noses, for the purpose of wear¬ 
ing a billet of wood suspended from such 
localities by a cord, and otherwise dis¬ 
figure the features made by nature. In 
Massachusetts it is an offence punishable 
by fine and imprisonment thus to mutilate 
a horse, and it should be in every State .... 
DIRECT. 
- O. C. Farmer: “ If such an elixir as 
that of Dr. Brown Sequard w r ere among 
the possibilities and it would prolong life 
to the age of a hundred years, it is question¬ 
able if it would be a blessing. The very 
men whom we least need would lie the 
first to try a barrel of it.” 
-Mr. Anderson at American Florists’ 
Association: “About all the Hybrid Per- 
petuals that are really fall-blooming are 
Paul Neyron and Mrs. John Laing, no oth¬ 
ers being hardly worthy of being so called.” 
-Post-Express: Passenger: “Say cap¬ 
tain, I'd like an egg for breakfast.” 
Captain: “ When the ship lays to I’ll try 
and get you one.” 
Passenger: “Oh, thanks. But if she 
doesn’t ? ” 
Captain: “ Then you’ll have to wait till 
I get the lay of the land.” 
- Garden and Forest: “ Colonel Pear¬ 
son writes that the copper sulphate mix¬ 
ture has again proved itself preventive of 
both rot and mildew even in this exception¬ 
ally wet summer. The grape-crop about 
Vineland is, however, almost a total fail¬ 
ure, even where the clusters were bagged, 
and bagged early.” 
-The American Florist: “Mr. Craig 
tells us in his essay that catalogue cuts 
have been sent back to the engraver to have 
the flowers made larger and more of them 
on the plant, and we are convinced that cat¬ 
alogue cuts are frequently made simply 
from a description—that is the engraver is 
told to make a cut like one already in exis¬ 
tence, ‘ changing it so that it will look dif¬ 
ferent, but make the flowers larger and 
more of them, as this novelty is an improve¬ 
ment on that sort.’ 
-Life: “ The summer hotel is the 
doctor’s fast friend. One of the con¬ 
spicuous risks that poor people are spared 
is the hazard of travel-for-the-health. 
Many an ill-timed intimacy with an under¬ 
taker might have been indefinitely post¬ 
poned if only the contracting party had 
been too poor to stir from home ” 
-PUCK: “ How has it come about that 
nearly 327,000 veterans and over 93,000 
widows and children of veterans are to-day 
drawing pensions? It has come about 
through the pension agents. The business 
of these men began toward the end of the 
war. They were useful middlemen between 
the disabled veterans and the pension 
office. But the deserving veterans—uine- 
teuths of them—got pensions long ago.” 
-Garden and Forest: “ The pea- 
weevil (Bruchus pfsf) and the bean-weevil 
(Bruchvs fnlxr) can be destroyed by put¬ 
ting the peas or beans into a pail and 
covering them with water; if the water is 
warmed to about blood-heat all the better, 
but this is not necessary as cold water will 
answer. If the seed remain in the water 
from eight to 12 hours every weevil will be 
destroyed, as the cavity containing the in¬ 
sect is soon filled by the water absorbed by 
the seed and the weevil is drowned. This 
simple remedy, which is recommended by 
Professor .1. W. Clark, of the Agricultural 
College of Missouri, is not only effective, 
but does no injury to the seed, and if the 
seed is not soaked until the day before 
planting, it will germinate more readily 
than before.” 
-New England Farmer: “Farmers 
cannot raise hogs to compete with cotton¬ 
seed oil, any more than they can make but¬ 
ter to compete with oleo.” 
-American Farmer: “No farmer can get 
to the head of the procession by hanging to 
the tail of a scrub cow.” 
-M. A. C’RAGIN, in New England Farm¬ 
er: “ The rich man can afford two things— 
he can afford to do without silage, and he 
can afford to burn green wood. But the 
poor man can afford to do neither.” 
iUissccUiitteou.si Advertising. 
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that tired feeling, tone your nervous system, purify 
your blood, sharpen your appetite, cure Indigestion 
and sick headache, and ruafce you cheerful and hap( 
py. Be sure to get Hood’s Sarsaparilla. 
9 Cords 
Runs Easy. 
NO BACKACHE 
HOURS 
BY ONE MAN. Write for descriptive catalogue con¬ 
taining testimonials from hnndreds of people who hate 
sawed from 4 to 9 cords daily. 25.000 now successfully used. 
A genev can be had where there is a vacancy. A KKW 
INVENTION for filing saws sent free with each maehine, by 
the use of this toed everybody can tile their own saws 
now and do it better than the greatest expert can with¬ 
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owns a saw should have one. Ask your dealers or write 
FOLDING SAWING MACHIN E CO., SOS to 811 
South Canal Street, Chicago, 111. 
Leads All its Competitors. It works either rags or 
yarn, is Simple, Durable, and Easy to Operate* 
Price, by mail. Plain, SI; Nickel Plated, 
SI.50. Satisfaction Guaranteed or money 
refunded. Send for Circulars. Agents M anted 
C.W.CRIFFIN & CO., Franklin Falls, N.H. 
Newtown Double Seared, Level Tread Horse Powers. 
. AND THRESHERS ASP CLEANERS ARK THE BEST. 
We also manufacture Self-Dump Rakes, Corn Shell 
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Lists. A. RLAKF.K & CO.. Newtown. Bucks Co.. Pa 
