ITS 
THE RURAE NEW-tOKKEH 
February 8, 
Hope Farm Notes 
Parcel Post. —All over the Central 
West the newspapers are printing ad¬ 
dresses of farmers who have produce 
for sale. This is good business, and 
will slowly lead to a good direct trade. 
In the East very little of this seems to 
have been done thus far. Here is a 
letter from the other side: 
Apropos of parcel post, can you refer 
me to a farmer sufficiently easy of access 
to ship to my residence, Bloomfield, Essex 
Co., N. J., farm products such as country 
sausage, ham, pork, head cheese, vegetables, 
etc., at not more than present market 
rates to me? e. w. c. 
Let us begin right here as an experi¬ 
ment. Are there any farmers near 
Bloomfield, N. J., who have such goods 
for sale? If they will make themselves 
known they may have a chance to se¬ 
cure this man’s trade. 
A New One. —We have never before 
heard the old question put at us in just 
this form: 
Do you know of some man who wants 
to learn something about fruit? I want 
some one this Summer who is willing to 
work (hoeing mostly) and I expect to set 
out about 300 fruit trees under the direc¬ 
tion of the New Hampshire College. They 
are to have full charge of it and then they 
help me more or less with the others, 
and with my berries, etc. It will be a 
good chance to learn about such work. I 
shall want him to commence about April 
1 and work until the fruit is picked in the 
Fall. If you know of such persons I would 
like to hear from them. 
New Hampshire. harvey t. corey. 
I do not know any man who wants 
to spend the Summer hoeing, but no 
doubt this will call some of them out. 
As between listening to lectures on fruit 
growing or sweating at the end of a 
hoe—the latter will prove more useful 
in the end. We have had some calls 
from people who wanted to study fruit 
growing.. Here is a chance. It has 
seemed to me that some of those who 
formerly applied wanted a good chance 
to view the landscape rather than hoe. 
Play.— The Hope Farm man' sat at 
the side of the hall and watched the 
children go down to defeat at basket 
ball. -Some of you will say this was 
a strange performance for a man who 
pretends to talk about farming. Is not 
farming one long round of labor? Can 
anyone expect to succeed h e 
keeps at w^ik all Jfo time? What part 
has pkiy m the life of a farmer any¬ 
way ? 
Do not overwhelm me all at once! 
Give me a little chance to talk back. 
I am inclined to think many of us 
never did play half enough when we 
were children. Play is the oil for the 
machine of life, and many of us do not 
know where to find the oil when life 
begins to grow a little stiff and rusty. 
Our young folks represent their school 
at basket ball, and both girls and boys 
went down to the county town to show 
or be shown. They were shown. My 
daughter’s “team” put up a good battle, 
but they never made a tally. The other 
girls were larger and had “team work,” 
and they deserved to win. Our boys 
gave the other side a hard fighc, but 
they finally went down. I was there 
when probably I should have been at 
work, but I enjoyed the sport. It did 
us all good. Organized sport of ibis 
kind is, I believe, one of the essential 
things in holding and developing our 
rural communities. The plan of send¬ 
ing a lot of young people off together 
to organize their sports and do as they 
please is all wrong. The desire to play 
is not a bad habit—it is perfectly legiti¬ 
mate. I think we shculd recognize this 
and try to organize and supervise our 
children’s fun as we do their work. If 
I had a suitable field, level enough for 
a baseball diamond, I would have one 
and help organize a field club. I think 
such a thing handled in a businesslike 
way would help any community by pro¬ 
viding a clean and legitimate outlet for 
the “animal spirit” of young farmers 
and hired men. For these “animal 
spirits” are as sure as fate. I doubt 
if I should care to have around me any¬ 
one so utterly “good” that he could not 
develop any power or spirit for mis¬ 
chief. That is a safe statement, for 
such people are rare. Peoole some¬ 
times wonder why, when a holiday 
comes, the overworked hired man or 
young farmer feels a desire to get 
drunk—and often chases hard after the 
desire. It seems to me natural enough. 
For weeks or months the fellow has 
been longing for a chance to play. He 
did not know it, but that is what it was. 
When he did get a chance for 24 hours 
or so he wanted play in the biggest of 
letters, _ and nothing but liquor and 
liquor in italics at that, would satisfy 
him. So he got drunk. You and I 
become disgusted and cannot realize 
why he should act so, but the chances 
are that work had taken the joy all out 
of him, and he saw concentrated play 
in the whiskey bottle. I think one great 
attraction which the town holds for 
country people is the fact that they find 
amusement there. We must, in some 
way, provide sports and clean amuse¬ 
ments in the country and, in order to 
do this, we older people must help 
organize and develop sports and games. 
You know well enough that I am no 
advocate of raising lazy, incompetent 
drones, but there is the other extreme, 
which is nearly as bad. I think we 
should all regard honest play as a legiti¬ 
mate part of life. 
Denmark. —A German friend asks 
me to correct a statement which he 
finds in the little book “The Child.” 
Here it is: “Denmark seemed like a 
dying nation—beaten in war and with 
some of her best provinces stolen from 
her.” My friend, evidently an educated 
man, says that these provinces were not 
“stolen,” but that they really belonged 
to Germany. I do not wish to argue 
about it. There have been Englishmen 
no doubt who felt that much of our 
present territory was stolen from Eng¬ 
land. Spaniards no doubt feel that 
Cuba and Porto Rico were “stolen.” 
Mexico may feel the same about Cali¬ 
fornia, and what will the Turks think 
for the next few generations? I think 
we shall have to realize that these 
things are largely matters of opinion. 
The only point I wanted to make was 
that the poor little kingdom of Den¬ 
mark, beaten and exhausted, came to 
enjoy great prosperity through the 
energy and good sense of her people. 
There is an excellent statement of what 
I mean on page 358 of Carver’s “Princi¬ 
ples' of Rural Economy"—a notable 
book which students of farm living 
ought to read. 
Farm Notes. —As I write the January 
days are like April. No frost in the 
ground, and the sky bright and clear. 
Our weather prophet has promised 
several blizzards, but they have not ap¬ 
peared. It is a serious time with the 
fruit buds—peaches especially. These 
bright sunny days are liable to start lho 
buds, ^and no one saw a February 
Ut ihis latitude that did not struggle 
hard with zero. I should think this 
season would be about right for spray¬ 
ing the peach trees with a thick white¬ 
wash to give them a light color and 
thus hold back the buds. This is no 
time to brag about the next peach crop. 
. . . We are pruning and getting 
out rocks. This soft ground gives a 
good chance to dig around bowlders 
and work them out. Probably the best 
thing to do with such hardheads is to 
dig a big hole beside them and pry 
them over into it. Down below the 
plow point they are then out of both 
sight and mind. With the present cost 
of labor this work would lrardly pay. 
though when you consider the cost of 
digging ditches or holes in which to 
sink the rocks there is not much dif¬ 
ference. The rocks can be shattered 
bv dynamite, or we can build a fire on 
them and then throw on cold water. 
This will shatter most of them. It is 
the old trick that Hannibal played when 
he took his army over the Alps. 
The Hen Nuisance.—W e never had 
so many questions about trespassing 
hens as have come this year. 
Please let me know the law in New 
Jersey about chickens. I have been trying 
hard to have a nice lawn and the neigh¬ 
bors’ chickens scratch it all out. I asked 
them to keep these chickens at home and 
they only gave me the laugh. I have put 
up with this for the last three years and 
I put labor on my lawn and every year 
costs me about $5 for lawn seed and 
manure. A . a. 
Chickens stand in law with most 
other animals as regards trespass, it 
has been claimed that when the chickens 
come in and destroy property they be¬ 
come wild animals and can be killed 
like game. This is a mistake. All you 
can do in law is to sue the owner of 
the chickens for damage and this is 
hard to prove. You can shoot the 
chickens while they are damaging your 
property and the owner can sue you 
for their value. The best plan is to 
build a house or yard and nut a little 
grain on the ground. The trespassing 
chickens will go in. Shut them in and 
hold them until the owner pays the 
damage or agrees to keep them shut - 
up. Lnder an old law in New Jersey, 
if you notify any person in writing to 
keep off your property he must keep off 
or . be guilty of trespass. It must be 
said that the “Business Hen,” when 
kept in an unbusiness-like way, destroys 
more neighborly contentment than any 
other living thing. n. w. c. 
What Time 
Is It 
—by this Watch? 
Is it five minutes fast or five minutes 
slow, or exactly correct? Can you rely 
on it ? Does it remind you of the watch 
you now carry? 
Now see if you think you could rely 
on a watch that is made like this— 
The South Bend Watch is six months 
in the making, the cutting, finishing 
and assembling of the parts. 411 in¬ 
spections are given these operations. 
More than 60 men work on each watch. 
When the watch is assembled it is run 
in a test of 700 hours. We keep a watch 
sometimes six months longer than it 
spends in the making to make it attain 
our standard. Some “South Bends” 
stay a year in the factory. But when 
they come out they are right. 
That’s why “South Bend” jewelers can 
so easily regulate South Bend Watches 
to your personality. It is this personal 
regulation that makes good watches 
keep perfect time. It’s the lack of it 
that prevents others,even good watches, 
from doing it. 
Buy a watch of one of these men. Let 
him “ fit ” you with a South Bend Watch. 
You'll have a watch to 
rely on t a watch that 
will keep correct time 
for years. 
And then by this— 
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Our book, “How Good,\yatches Are Made,” tells all about watches— 
things you should know. J ust say on a post card,“Send me your book.” 
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2 Rowley Street, South Bend, Indiana 
tyaoiiaiRend” 
( 126 ) 
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