THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
55i 
1&00 
The Grasshoppers. 
There was consternation on the 
prairies about Tarkio way. The farm¬ 
ers stopped one another in the roads, on 
the way to church, and shouted across 
the fields. Women gossiped together, 
and the small boys knew of the feared 
approach of a great calamity. It could 
all be compressed into a single word— 
“grasshoppers.” Those of the men about 
the Brown farm, and John’s uncle him¬ 
self was one of the elect, had been 
among that army of adventurers who, 
with white-topped wagons and a gypsy 
spirit, had gone westward to Kansas in 
the early days. They had seen buffalo 
thuhdering across trackless prairies, 
shot antelope and caught sunfish in the 
Ninnescah River. They had “taken up” 
government claims, bought plows, raised 
the “sod corn,” planted wheat, built sod 
“shacks,” “batched it,” or taken with, 
them dragged-out women and tow-head¬ 
ed children. They had toiled, suffered 
and endured. And a pestilence had come 
upon them in a night, the old Israelitish 
plague of locusts, and the fruits of their 
labor were swept away in an hour. And 
they had come back to Iowa and Mis¬ 
souri penniless, to begin life over again. 
And to such as these there was nothing 
so terrible as that one ominous, devour ¬ 
ing word, “grasshoppers.” 
The Brown farm lay on slightly roll¬ 
ing prairie, with 80 acres of corn which 
stood nearly three feet high at this time. 
There were 40 acres in wheat and 40 
acres in oats. Both oats and wheat were 
ready to be cut, hut everyone was wait¬ 
ing for his regular turn, and anyway, 
who ever heard of grasshoppers in Iowa? 
But Tom Brown had been one of the 
“prairie-schooner” crowd, and he got 
scared. He jumped on a pony, rode post 
haste to Comity, and made a contract 
with a dealer to buy his grain in the 
field. The dealer screwed him down a 
trifle, but finally the papers were signed. 
“You’re afraid of the grasshoppers, I 
reckon,” said the dealer. “Not now,” 
replied Brown. “They ain’t coming to 
Iowa,” said the former. “Coming or 
going, they won’t get any wheat or oats 
from me,” replied Tom’s uncle. “Where 
did you hear of ’em last?” said Billings¬ 
ley. “Chicken Bristles,” was the an¬ 
swer. “Chicken Bristles! Why, that’s 
only twelve miles south of you.” 
“Eleven miles,” corrected Brown. 
“When I was down last week trying to 
buy from you old man Wood said they 
hadn’t heard of ’em nearer than Cen¬ 
tral City.” “They’ve moved,” replied 
Brown, briefly. “By cripe,” said the 
dealer, thoughtfully, as he took off his 
slouch hat, “what would you advise me 
to do?” 
“Hire 25 men and some boys, get into 
that grain to-morrow, work night and 
day—moonlight nights now, you know— 
and get her out as quick as luck will let 
you,” was the cheerful response. John 
and bis uncle got on their ponies and 
rode home slowly. “Didn’t he cut you 
down some on the price, Uncle Tom?” 
said John. “Yes,” said his uncle, “but 
if it was cut and thrashed right away, 
as I think it ought to be, it would cost 
me more to do that than the reduction. 
I feel happy. It’s lifted a weight off me. 
I reckon your grammaw’ll be mighty 
glad, too.” When they got home John’s 
uncle laughed and played with the dog, 
and it was a cheerful family that gath¬ 
ered around the supper table that night. 
“I may be all wrong. Mother,” said 
Uncle Tom to grammaw, “but if the 
‘hoppers’ ever strike this section they’ll 
lick up a county like a cat laps milk. I 
didn’t go to Kansas for nothing.” 
The next morning at daybreak there 
was an irruption of men and boys on the 
Brown place and a rattling of machines, 
and a gigantic thrashing machine was 
among them. Billingsley had taken his 
seller’s advice and he worked night and 
day till the grain had been thrashed. 
The men cut and bound it in the field, 
and it was then brought in and fed into 
the thrasher by men who stood on a 
platform with sharp knives and cut the 
“bands.” It was a quick way of work¬ 
ing, and with 24 hours out of the 24, the 
job was finished and an immense straw- 
pile left before people realized what had 
happened. A week passed and the ex¬ 
citement died down. Tom Brown’s corn, 
80 acres, was growing beautifully. 
On Sunday the folks at the Brown 
farm went to church, leaving John, who 
was nursing a foot which had been hurt 
by a log from the woodpile falling on it. 
Ferris was expected over to while away 
the time, and at nine o’clock he made 
his appearance. The boys fooled around 
until dinner time and then went in and 
fried some eggs and built a cup of coffee. 
They were in the house about an hour. 
As they went in they said, looking to¬ 
ward the 80 acres of three-feet emerald 
blades flashing in the sunlight, "Ain’t 
that a stand of corn for you?” There 
was a brisk wind from the south, but it 
was a hot day. Ferris stepped to the 
door and was out before John. A sound 
burst from his lips like a cry. John 
rushed out and Ferris pointed, first high 
above the cottonwood trees to the 
south, and then to the west, where the 
cornfield had been. 
The grasshoppers. Above the cotton¬ 
woods they were drifting by in vast 
clouds, which looked white at times, 
like the floating seed of the cotton¬ 
woods, but which darkened as the wind 
sometimes drove them higher, so that at 
times they were a cloud between earth 
and sun. Silently as the grave these 
hosts of insects floated in the air, a be¬ 
wildering storm of frail life that seeded 
down to the ground as might a swirl of 
snowflakes. To the west the great field 
of corn was as bare as a clean-swept 
kitchen floor, not one vestige of green 
appearing where an hour before had 
tossed and waved so many acres of 
splendid growing blades. Not even the 
racehorse speed and fiery flowing mane 
of a prairie fire could have wrought such 
utter desolation when the dry grasses of 
Autumn were scorched, and the flames 
leaped twenty feet at a bound. This was 
a new form of blight, a tumultuous si¬ 
lence of flying shreds that fell and de¬ 
voured and multiplied until their myr¬ 
iads piled high on barren fields and 
wasted acres. Far up the torrent of 
grasshoppers was carried by varying 
winds, to oe finally sent circling, eddy¬ 
ing down on the doomed land. 
The boys were stupefied. They ran 
and got barrel-staves and killed thou¬ 
sands of the insects. The grasshoppers 
were sticking to the side of the house 
that was protected from the wind, in 
banks several inches deep. They swept 
them down, but other hordes filled their 
places. It was useless. They went to 
the cornfield and found millions of the 
insects eating at the stubs of the corn 
at the edge of the ground. The corn it ¬ 
self had all been eaten. In the stubbles 
the insects rose in such clouds that the 
boys were almost blinded, and were 
compelled to leave. In the garden the 
grasshoppers had eaten every particle of 
garden-stuff excepting the tomatoes. 
And from that day to this John refuses 
tomatoes, even in soup. On dozens of 
farms about them where the farmers 
still had their wheat and oats standing, 
the “hoppers" cleaned the fields to the 
ground, and left no kernel of grain and 
no sign of harvest. It was a withering 
visitation out of the trackless paths of 
the sun, silently sent as the dew, blast¬ 
ing as pestilence, terrible as death. The 
boys looked at the sky and the spent 
fields, and still the filmy wings of the 
grasshoppers gleamed in the sunlight 
and hungry armies followed in the track 
of the first destroying legions. It was 
a sight never to be forgotten. 
When Uncle Tom and the folks got 
home that night he had been prepared 
MOTHERS.—Be sure to use “Mrs. Wins¬ 
low’s Soothing Syrup” for your children 
while Teething. It is the Best— Adv. 
for his loss by the reports he heard 
along the way from those who had lost 
their entire crop. He was a man of 
nerve, but when he looked on his wide 
tract of bare fields the next morning it 
shook him. But all he said was: “I’m 
luckier than some of the boys. I was 
lucky to get rid of the wheat and oats.” 
—Ernest McGaffey, in Chicago Record. 
Intellect and Goodness. 
“If I were a girl again I do not think 
I would be quite so set as I was on my 
own intellectual development,” says 
Mary Lowe Dickinson, general secretary 
of the Society of King’s Sons and 
Daughters. ‘You think so much of 
whether people are clever or not,’ as a 
friend of mine said to me, when I was 
a little over 20, ‘and so little of anything 
else.’ Well, time has its revenges; and I 
can honestly say that I am inclined to 
think of ‘anything else’ a good deai 
more than of cleverness in the men and 
women that I meet. I think far more 
of cheerfulness, and honesty and truth¬ 
fulness and amiability than I did in 
those days, and I would rather that 
some of my young friends were a little 
less concerned about being clever and 
much more concerned about being good. 
“I know that it means so much to us 
in our youth that our friends should 
honor as well as love us; that the world 
should begin to know that we exist! We 
like to see our names in a newspaper or 
at the head of an examination list, we 
long for the advantages that other girls 
have—the lectures, the college life, the 
foreign travel, the elaborate training in 
science, music, or ai’t. Right ambitions 
enough if they are kept in the right 
place. But how about the years at col¬ 
lege for which some one else is kept 
toiling in an office or at a desk, break¬ 
ing himself or herself down with over¬ 
work for love of you? How about the 
loneliness of one whom, perhaps, you 
leave behind when you set forth airily 
upon your foreign tour? You must learn 
that your own improvement, your own 
education and training, may not be the 
thing that you ought to put first of all. 
The cultivation of your intellect is not 
so important as the cultivation of your 
soul!” _ 
A Homemade Broiler. 
There are many trying features con¬ 
nected with Summer cooking, and many 
town conveniences are quite out of the 
reach of some rural housewives. French 
cooks use charcoal to a surprising ex¬ 
tent, this fuel being both convenient and 
economical, and it is quite possible to 
adapt an ordinary stove to its use, with¬ 
out a “boughten” charcoal brazier. A 
writer in the Woman’s Home Companion 
gives the following instructions: 
To make a charcoal broiler which will 
serve the purpose of the 'best of patent 
ones, you should first fit an iron drip¬ 
ping pan in the kitchen stove so that it 
will rest just at the top of the fire-clay 
lining. A flange riveted on the rim will 
make it absolutely secure against falling 
to the bottom of the grate. When the 
pan has been fitted, take n out (it should 
be as easily adjustable as a stovelid) and 
drill the bottom full of holes. A large 
nail and a hammer will accomplish this. 
Then the broiler is done. To use it, put 
some paper in the bottom, fill it with 
charcoal, and light it underneath, as you 
would light a fire in the whole grate, 
using the stove’s drafts as in managing 
a regular fire. In four or five minutes 
you will have a splendid bed of coals for 
broiling, making a pot of coffee or doing 
any other cooking for a light Summer 
breakfast. Every kitchen should have a 
gas stove for Summer use, but as every 
kitchen is not so provided, the charcoal 
broiler is a boon not to be neglected. 
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