1436 
December 4, 1915. 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
m 
Smart Men. —The Bible is well filled 
with illustrations or admonitions about 
foolish men. These broadsides against 
people who lack common sense extend 
into all literature, so that we may say 
that the dunce has been well advertised. 
With all this advertising, however, I 
doubt if history has found a more worthy 
candidate for the cap and bells than the 
man of middle years who undertakes to 
tell his children how to do their school 
work. Men who do that are usually of 
the “smart” or know-it-all variety. Prob¬ 
ably they have not looked into a text 
book for 30 or 40 years, yet when the 
children have trouble with an “example ’ 
or some problem in other studies these 
gentlemen scoff at the youngsters and 
proceed to show them how. As a rule 
these men were once children of the 
“smart Alec” variety—young bluffers and 
good guessers in the class room. So they 
proceed to take pencil and paper and 
show' their young folks how the present 
generation has degenerated! 
School Work. —Few things do me 
more good than to watch the comedy of 
the Smart Man and his son ! The man 
starts in with an airy and cocksure man¬ 
ner to prove that the man who wrote 
that arithmetic was in the primary grade 
of mentality. The boy looks over his 
shoulder to see this wonderful parent of 
his untangle the figures. Mother is near¬ 
by. very wisely silent. She knows this 
man of hers. On several occasions he 
has gently intimated that the Jones fam¬ 
ily—from which she came—is responsi¬ 
ble for the rather slow and dull action 
of the children’s brains! She is an old 
school teacher and has learned to be pa¬ 
tient. Somehow father cannot make those 
figures come right the first time or the 
second. Then lie tries it again. lie be¬ 
gins to rub his hair a little, or w'ipe his 
spectacles, and there are both sweat and 
wrinkles on his forehead. He is no 
fool—only “smart,” and he begins to 
realize that he can’t do that example 
after all. The boy has begun to realize 
that the man who made the arithmetic 
is a bigger man than father, and a w'ide 
grin spreads over his face as he sees 
that father is more or less of a bluffer 
in his preaching about that wonderful 
school record! Mother waits until father 
is desperate and then she says: 
“Let me try it!” 
She has taught much the same thing, 
and she understands the rule, and in a 
few' minutes the trouble falls apart and 
the whole thing is clear. Then the boy 
stands and looks first at one parent and 
then at the other. They both know what 
he is thinking about, and the way mother 
acts at that moment of victory for the 
Jones family will mean much for the boy. 
Say what you will, in every family where 
there are children there is what I may 
call a conflict of pedigree, each side of 
the house seeking unconsciously to show 
that the good qualities of the youngsters 
come from the Jones family rather than 
from the Brown folks. I know one wise 
man who openly states that the beauty 
of his children clearly comes from Moth¬ 
er’s people. Of course, after that, it 
is understood that father’s folks are re¬ 
sponsible for character and brains. For 
who ever saw them all combined in one 
stock? If the Jones family is truly en¬ 
titled to rank among the great, Mother 
will not “rub it in” on father’s failure. 
She will just smile and ktok at him. 
They will all three understand and have 
greater mutual respect. 
Modern Teaching. —So I say that the 
gold medal for folly may well go to the 
average man who undertakes to show his 
children how to work their school les¬ 
sons. Some men have kept up with edu¬ 
cation and can do it, but most of us have 
too many other things in mind, and we 
are out of it. Not for me. The boy 
wanted me to name our town and county 
officers, and I could not do it—nor could 
I name the towns in our county. He was 
expected to get this information as part 
of his school work, and I find they are 
giving 'him a far more practical course 
than I ever had. He cannot give the 
length of the Amazon River or the height 
of the Rocky Mountains as I could at his 
age, and 1 am rather glad of it, for those 
figures worked into my brain with so 
much effort never stuck there at 
all. We older people are bound to do 
THE RURAL 
more or less growling about, modern edu¬ 
cation, but the people who make text 
books, and who teach, know more than 
I do about it and while I do not like 
some of their methods I must confess my 
inability to give them real constructive 
criticism. All this leads me to ask how 
many country people have read “The 
Brown Mouse,” by Herbert Quick. I re¬ 
gard it as by far the best story of school 
and country life that has appeared since 
“The Hoosier Schoolmaster.” It is the 
story of a practical and thoughtful hired 
man who taught a country school and in¬ 
troduced new methods in line with the 
life of country boys and girls. You may 
not all agree with the thought of the 
story, but it is one of those books which 
every country man and woman ought to 
read. We shall have a full review of it 
soon. 
The Contest Birds. —There is no use 
in my claiming that our Red pullets at 
the egg-laying contest have painted any 
record in their natural color. In two 
weeks they had not laid an egg. There are 
about 15 other pens at the contest which 
have this zero record with them. I re¬ 
member that Tilly last year never laid an 
egg for the first five weeks, and yet came 
forward with 254 during the remaining 
47 weeks. We have no excuses to offer 
or complaints to make. Those pullets 
are all right. They are a little young, 
but they have the blood of egg-layers in 
them and will be heard from yet. We 
are not worrying about them even if they 
resemble the turtle in their start. We 
have seen freshmen at college before now 
have a struggle to get going. 
Those “scrubs,” however, have disap¬ 
pointed me. Older readers will remem¬ 
ber that these pullets were, most of them, 
picked out of a lot of Southern birds sent 
to the New York market for the poul¬ 
try trade. They were just common 
stock P. Rock, Leghorn and mixed breeds. 
They cost about 60 cents each at live 
weight. My object was to see just how 
such birds would respond to scientific 
care and feeding. They went to the con¬ 
test and never laid an egg before the mid¬ 
dle of February. Then one of the Leg¬ 
horns began. During the year these 10 
pullets laid 1287 eggs and paid a profit on 
their food. In May and June they gave 
a fine performance, and I expected them 
to make a good finish, but like most 
scrubs they faltered in the home stretch 
and quit at about the middle of August, 
and demanded a new suit of clothes! I 
thought the trouble was that they made 
too late a start and that another year 
they would come back and lay more eggs. 
So I entered them for another year and 
backed them to lay 1400 eggs! The 
truth is that these scrubs fell down on 
me. Here is the year’s record. They 
finished with nine birds. Early in the 
Summer one of them committed suicide 
in trying to get out of a trap-nest. 
Production by months of scrubs: 
EGGS 
November . 3 
December .*. 0 
January . IS 
February . 80 
March . 125 
April . 154 
May . 152 
June . 140 
July . 146 
August . 113 
September . 88 
October . 28 
1047 
Figuring in what the missing hen 
would have laid, we have about 1100 
eggs, or 111 each for the second year’s 
record. Five of these scrubs have been 
killed and eaten. Three of the Leghorns 
made fair records and they will be kept 
.another year. I have no doubt these 
hens did their best—all they were capable 
of doing. This is so much poorer than 
our Reds are doing that the lesson is 
clear to me. No use feeding a scrub. 
H. w. c. 
Corn Fails to Mature. 
I had some late sweet corn which did 
not mature well. Ears were not filled 
out, and were far from plentiful. Stalks 
were easily broken, and a heavy wind 
blew the patch over. This is a heavy 
clay soil. Do these facts, as given, indi¬ 
cate a lack of some element of fertility? 
Apparently there is enough nitrogen, as 
plants grew quickly and were deep green. 
Maryland. M, p. L. 
Our guess would be that this indicates 
first of all a lack of phosphoric acid. The 
use of 400 pounds of acid phosphate per 
acre would give much better corn. 
NEW-YORKER 
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How would you test 
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When would you plant? 
How deep would you 
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kernels in each hill? 
How would you make 
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How many acres ought 
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FERTILIZERS 
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