1350 
December 20, 
Hope Farm Notes 
This is one of the days you would like 
to get away from if it were not Sunday. 
Nearly the middle of December and a 
hard, gloomy rain. In former years at 
this season the ground has been frozen 
solid—so we could haul out the manure 
for mulching strawberries. Now the 
soil is deep mud. The peach buds seem 
to have been fooled iuto thinking Spring 
has come. On the East slopes they are 
swelling and off somewhere in the north 
Jack Frost is watching them, ready to nip 
them with his cold fingers when they swell 
far enough. The rain drips away from 
the barn and runs from the house spouts 
into the road. One good thing is that 
it cannot loosen up the hard macadam 
on our public street. A horse goes by 
on the trot. Ten years ago the buggy 
would have been hub-deep in mud. 
Mother and a few of the children started 
for church. Old Jennie, the black horse, 
trotted off with them well covered with a 
rubber blanket and holding her old black 
head high. When she strikes that stretch 
of old road between the two good ones 
her head will go down as the wheels 
sink in. The hens and the cows and 
the horses are safe and dry. Mollie 
and Spot are chewing mangels and sweet 
cornstalks to their heart’s content. The 
gray cat on the house stoop starts for 
the barn in search of some stray rat, 
but a few hard pellets of rain make her 
think that a sure thing on a dry porch 
beats a possible rat steak with sure wet 
feet. It is a dull, grey, gloomy outlook 
from the window—the redeeming features 
of the landscape being the bright green 
spots where the cover crops of rye, vetch 
and clover are having the time of their 
life. The rest of us may call this weather 
all sorts of names, but nothing could 
suit the cover crops better than this cool 
moist day. How they are drinking this 
water in. Above ground they are sprout¬ 
ing out, while below to the depth of near¬ 
ly a yard, they have filled the ground 
solidly with roots. No runaway nitrates 
can get by these roots, and there can be 
little wash over the surface where these 
crops are growing. Next Spring, when 
the thick mat is plowed under, it will 
be as if Nature had hauled 10 or 12 tons 
of good manure up that steep hill and 
spread it over each acre. Of course this 
rain is washing some of the goodness out 
of our stalks, but this is a better time 
to think of what is coming through the 
cover crops—not what is going. 
This is no day for trying to save the 
cost of lights. Better pull down the cur¬ 
tain and “light up” and start a good 
blaze in the fireplace. That is what I 
have done, and I call it good practice. 
If you had your choice, what book would 
you take for such a day? I have been 
reading “John Woolman’s Journal” over 
again. This quaint old book fits well 
into a dull and sleepy day before the fire. 
More than 180 years ago Woolman prac¬ 
tically started the organized protest 
against slavery by refusing to take out a 
bill of sale for a slave. I confess that 
there is too much fight in my blood to 
permit me to live as this humble Quaker 
did, but without knowing it he was what 
we may call a great man. 
Bound into the same volume with this 
“Journal” I find “Some Fruits of Soli¬ 
tude,” by William Penn. Surely, from 
the title, you would call this a good book 
for reading on a dull December day on 
a lonely farm before an open fire. Here 
is what Penn said about the education 
of children nearly 250 years ago. 
“We are in pain to malce them schol¬ 
ars, hut not men! To talk, rather than 
to know, which is true canting .” 
This thing of teaching children to talk 
without knowing what they talk about 
seems, then, to be about as old as lan¬ 
guage. As society puts on more and 
more varnish, the tendency to teach chil¬ 
dren to skim a little of everything and 
talk about this thin skimming seems to 
grow. What is a man who never knew 
just how to study and who picked up an 
“education” as one would pick a basket 
of chips cut from a sound log, to do about 
selecting a proper school for his children? 
One school might in a few years, turn 
his child out a brilliant parrot fit, as 
Penn says, “to talk rather than to know.” 
Another school might, in the same time, 
turn out a plain and rather silent man 
or woman who had really begun to think. 
THE RURAL NBW-YOKKEK 
There comes into all this too the ques¬ 
tion of hereditary influence and bodily 
or inherent tendencies. I have seen par¬ 
ents who tried in every possible way to 
make a left-handed child use his right 
hand. They whipped the poor thing, de¬ 
nied him food and tied his left hand so 
he could not use it. They were, without 
knowing it, fighting an impossible fight, 
for Nature had decided that the child 
should be left-handed by making one lobe 
of the brain larger than the other. I 
am not surprised to have some great 
scientist state that stammering is often 
caused by this trying by physical means 
to cure “left handedness!” I have no 
doubt that mental or moral stammering is 
often caused by forcing boys and girls 
into general habits or methods which an¬ 
tagonize some old tendency which was 
born in them. For what are we but bun¬ 
dles of tendencies and habits handed to 
us out of the centuries by tlx>se who have 
gone before? We may shape and twist 
these habits more or less by our own 
thought or action and some of us may 
be “bred in a line,” but there is always 
the spring or “kick” in the old tendency 
which may throw out all our work. Some¬ 
times, too, it seems as if Nature, in her 
very perversity, throws a crooked stick 
into our bundle. 
Don’t believe this? Watch sometime 
when a young woman, the pride of the 
family, comes home from school or col¬ 
lege with a good record. See Mother 
watch her across the room—adjusting her 
glasses to have a better view at this big, 
beautiful paragon of all knowledge and 
virtues. You may read the good lady’s 
thoughts upon her face. “That is my 
daughter. Anyone would realize that by 
looking at her. Uncle John had just 
such a head as that, she talks exactly 
like Aunt Susan, and she is her grand¬ 
mother all over again in her domestic 
habits!” 
Now father is probably better able to 
read this lady’s face than any other ob¬ 
server. If he is wise he will not contra¬ 
dict those mental statements. When he 
gets a good opportunity he will say as 
nearly as he can get back to his court- 
ing-da^s voice, “It is wonderful how much 
the child looks like you. There can be 
no question about where her good looks 
will come from !” There will be prompt 
agreement with this, and then if father 
has courage as well as wisdom he will 
hunt in his books for the easy proof that 
extreme beauty and brains are rarely if 
ever found in the same person. The very 
habit of hard, laborious thought must give 
a face that strength which is the reverse 
of “beauty.” Father will do well if he 
stops right there and leaves the rest to 
inference as to his part in his daughter’s 
mental accomplishments. 
But it is a hard case if you and I are 
to take our bundle of tendencies from our 
ancestors and hand them on to our chil¬ 
dren the same or worse than when they 
came to us! Education and culture are 
the things which are to straighten out 
and soften these tendencies before we 
pass them on. Many of us are forced 
to pick up education and culture in al¬ 
most any way which is presented to us. 
It is like taking crude chunks and trying 
to polish them without knowing just how 
to do it. The college and the school are 
supposed to give our children the training 
which we never had. The natural trot¬ 
ting speed of a horse may be 2:40. A 
skilled trainer may take the colt and get 
him down to 2 :10 by showing him how. 
On the other hand, another trainer might 
try to train this natural trotter to run 
and turn out a misfit and failure. Thus 
it is something of a gamble to send a 
child to some large school where 1.000 
children are turned out much as a baker 
makes 1,000 hurried loaves of bread. 
What each child needs is the patient 
study and care given the one homemade 
loaf. But here we come to another 
thought in this old “Fruits of Solitude”: 
“If we tvould amend the world, we 
should mend ourselves; and teach our 
children to he not what we are, hut what 
we should he!” 
Can you beat that? I am aware that 
William Penn might frown upon a ques¬ 
tion put in these four short words but 
I will let it stand. “We should mend our¬ 
selves!” I fear some of us will look like 
a patched-up performance when the mend¬ 
ing is finished, but there is great truth 
in the idea. But here comes Redhead 
to tell us dinner is ready. Come along 
at once—Mother does not like to wait 
when the table is prepared. I will cut 
you a good piece of roast lamb and you can 
have potatoes, beets, turnips, celery and 
boiled rice with your bread and butter. 
Then we can try some Crosby peaches out 
of the cans, and I know where to find 
the baked apples. Come along—William 
Penn says we must mend ourselves. Let’s 
begin mending the physical man! 
I have a live snapping turtle which 
weighs about five pounds. I would like j 
to know how to kill him and cook him 
and eat him. d. h. 
Connecticut. 
Personally I would willingly offer my 
share to someone who likes turtle. I do 
not. If, however, it were my job to pre¬ 
pare this delicacy for others I should pro¬ 
ceed as follows: Hold a stick before the 
turtle and let him snap at it. Pull his 
head out and kill him in the old-fash¬ 
ioned way of killing chickens. Then the 
following recipe by Marion Harland 
ought to satisfy those who wish to imag¬ 
ine they are eating terrapin. This is 
called “fricasseed” turtle.” We go along 
with Marion until she advises sherry 
wine—then we step off the track and 
advise lemon juice. 
Throw the turtle into boiling water 
after cutting his head off. Then take 
the meat out of the shell, cut into small 
pieces, season with salt, pepper, onion 
juice and anything else desired; put in 
a saucepan with cold water enough to 
cover the meat and let simmer for half 
an hour. Add a tablespoonful of 
browned flour rubbed to a paste with a 
spoonful of butter. When this is blend¬ 
ed with the liquid in the pan, add a little 
lemon juice and stir in gradually the 
beaten yolk of an egg. Boil and remove 
from the fire, work up a strong appetite 
by working hard in the sun and forget 
your troubles. H. w. c. 
A little girl’s father had a round bald 
spot. Kissing him at bed time not long 
ago she said: “Stoop down, Popsy! I 
want to kiss the place where the lining 
shows.”—Tit-Bits. 
The tourist was looking over western 
Kansas. “It looks pretty dry down 
here,” he said. “How long has it been 
since this section had a rain?” “Well, 
sar,” replied the farmer, “you will have 
to ask someone else. You see, I’ve lived 
here only five years.”—Credit Lost. 
Genial Idiot: “Hullo, White, old man. 
Not seen you for centuries; scarcely rec¬ 
ognized you; moustache and all that’s 
altered you so much.” Perfect Stranger: 
“Pardon me, sir, my name is not White,” 
Genial Idiot: “That’s bad. Altered your 
name, too !”—Punch. 
An advertisement praising the virtues 
sof a new make of infant’s feeding-bottle, 
says: “When the baby is done drinking, 
it must be unscrewed and put in a cold 
place under a tap. If the baby does not 
thrive on fresh milk, it should be boiled.” 
—Woman’s Journal. 
Tiie workman was engaged in excavat¬ 
ing operations—i. e., he was digging. The 
wayfarer of the inquisitive turn ofxnind 
stopped for a moment to look ou. “My 
man,” said the wayfarer at length, “what 
are you digging for?” The workman 
looked up. “Money,” he replied. “Money!” 
ejaculated the amazed wayfarer. “And 
when do you expect to strike it?” “Sat¬ 
urday,” replied the workman, and re- j 
sumed operations.—Tit-Bits. 
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