[60]

LANDSEER’S FANCY

[61]

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

Chickamauga Creek had no place on the map until September, ’63. Then it ran blood and became history. For it takes blood to make history.

When Bragg went to pieces two months later, after the shambles of Missionary Ridge, Hooker’s Corps was the pack turned loose to harry him out of the valley. They rushed thoughtlessly—Hooker’s hounds always did—and the foremost quickly paid the tax which Rashness pays to Reason. Cleburne, the rebel general, who brought up the rear of Bragg’s army, turned, wolf-like, at a gap in the mountains and cut to pieces the hound that had outstripped the pack in its zeal to snap at harried haunches. The hound whimpered and fell back, but not before Cleburne had shingled the sides of the mountain with the dead of the Yankee army.

The General who claimed the cut-up regiment was mad, and as he rode, with his staff, to the front, he was swearing in a deep, jerky, guttural voice. He stopped to look at the bloody gap, the lusty, voiceless, blue-coated forms, lying so weirdly unnatural—as trees when the hurricane has passed: “Mountain gaps—they are little traps of hell,” he kept repeating, and he spurred on for a guide—to a cracker cabin higher up on the mountain side.

The General rode a clean-limbed, loosely-ribbed, long-back thoroughbred, fresh from a blue grass paddock in Middle Tennessee. For he was weak on horse-flesh, and had impressed this scion of a Derby winner before Rosecrans went North.

Two mountaineers stood in the cabin yard. One was middle-aged, sullen-eyed and stooped, but standing six feet with the stoop. He leaned on an unmounted axe-helm, and as he stood slouching, long armed, bowed in the legs, his hairy chest gleaming through open shirt front, he looked not unlike a great gorilla, brought to bay with uprooted club in his hands.

The other man was not much more than a boy, except in size. He was larger, bigger chested, bigger fisted, and his wonder-haunted, kindly face wore a smile instead of a scowl. Never before had he seen the flag which one of the officers carried. Never such a horse as the one ridden by the man in front—never such a horse, and how he did love horses!

But the thoroughbred shied at the sight of the bearded man and sprang sideways, snorting, and wheeled to run. The boy’s face broke over in a quizzical, familiar grin, and he drawled exultantly:

“Say, Mister, whut yo ridin’ there?” The man turned sullenly and knocked him down with the axe-helm. He went down helplessly and with a subdued surprise in his blue eyes. The man did not turn his body, but stood indifferently, watching him slowly arising, wiping the blood from his forehead and whimpering like a struck cub:

“Ef mammy hadn’t tuck an’ went an’ died—I promised mammy I’d nurver strike ye, dad.” He blew the blood from his nose and stood scratching one leg with the bare foot of the other, whimpering still, and dazed.

“Solomon Hosea Hanks, ye’re a blatherin’ yearlin’ an’ ’ll allers be one. Ain’t I knocked ye down often fur buttin’ in ye horns befo’ ye’re axed up to the trough?”

He was talking to the boy, but saying it for the men in front: “Gentlemen, ’light an’ look at yer saddles. I’m jes teachin’ the lad some manners—you hafter teach ’em to some folks with a club.”

The boy suddenly straightened up. Half defiantly, and with quick eagerness, he leaped across the path where sat the color-bearer. He stopped beneath the flag and began to fondle it as a child would—the pretty stars, the gold cord that fell from the eagle above: “Ye’ll nurver knock me down ag’in, Dad. Ye’re a g’erriller an’ ye know it, an’ ye wanter[63] make me one, but I’ve seen my country’s colors to-day an’ I’m goin’ ter jine.”

He turned to the group: “I know whut you want, Mister-men, an’ I’ll lead you over the mount’in ef you’ll let me jine. ’Taint uverbody I’ll let knock me down”—he wagged his head at the man with whimpering apology—“promised mammy afo’ she tuck an’ went an’ died I’d nurver strike him”—

A rattling volley of shots rang out across the mountain, down in the next valley. They were echoed back, then shouts, and when the General wheeled, the boy had struck out toward the firing, his tough, bare feet crounching the gravel as he strode on in his shambling way. They followed him, but could not overtake the long, swinging trot in the crooked path amid the boulders and clay roots. On a projection beyond the ridge he stopped, calling back to the man:

“Far’well, Dad—you’ll nurver see me aga’in onless I hear you’ve beat little Dinah Mariah—then I’ll come back an’ forgit I urver had a mammy.” He shook his great fist at the man still standing immovable, then: “Come on, Mister-men—Bragg’s a good dog, but Holdfas’ is better.”

And that is how Solomon came into the camp of the Tenth.

He led them to the firing line, where the General suddenly found plenty to do. So much that he forgot Solomon until the brigade went into camp five miles further, on the trail of the retreating enemy. Then Solomon staggered in through the darkness to the camp fire carrying a half dead Confederate on his back. He laid the man down on a bed of leaves near the mess tent of the Tenth. He lifted the helpless head very tenderly and gave him water while the stricken one kept whispering, “Water—more water—for God’s sake—and death!”

The staff had been laughing and swearing before, with tin cups full of mountain whisky. For they were tired, and death had sprung up so often and so suddenly that day from batteries and trenches and mountain gorges; and from still, restful copses of silent woods, peaceful and inviting, until—Spit! Spit!—and the rattlesnake of sharp-shooting rifles spat out the virus which had put comrades and mess-mates to sleep. But now the silence and the night fell from the deep treetops together. That dying man in the camp, that strange, solemn giant of the woods—

The General, his tin cup half emptied, spoke first, in a voice strangely soft, the staff thought, for the old fighter:

“Any kin to you, Solomon—the man there?”

“He’s mighty nigh to me—mighty nigh.”

“Ah—sorry—sorry. And who is he?”

“Jes’ my brother, that’s all.”

“Oh, too bad—sorry—sorry”—and the staff muttered the echo.

Then the General put down his cup, went over and glanced at the man. He stepped back quickly and hastily drained the tin cup: “Nasty fix, Solomon—sorry—but we’ll do what we can for him. When did you see him last?”

“Nurver seed him befo’—but thar’s hund’erds of ’em—all our brothers, ’specially when we’ve shot ’em an’ they’re helpless an’ dyin’.”

The General winced and turned quickly to the fire. The staff went after another drink. Solomon’s eye fell on the mess table—the supper set forth and waiting; then Solomon fell on the supper. Between mouthfuls he growled out:

“You fellers orter be ashamed o’ yerselves to shoot a man’s innards out like that. I found him three miles beyant the mount’in whar you-uns fit thar this mornin’ an’ I fetch’t him over on my back.”

That reminded him. He picked up some hardtack and bacon and started toward the groaning man. Then he stopped, disappointed: “Whut’s the use—he’s got no whur to put it. You-uns done shot his innards out. The fust lickin’ Dad gin me was fur shootin’ a b’ar in ther innards.”

He sat down again and ate everything in sight. The General and staff got busy at something else. Solomon gave the dying man another drink and began looking around like a huge bear-dog for a spot to roll up on, and sleep. He found it in the General’s blanket, his huge feet sticking out, bunion covered and black. They thought he was asleep and coming quietly back one by one, sat down, and[64] were eating in silence when a shock of hair blurred up out of the blanket:

“Say, Mister-men, but ain’t war hell sho’ nuff? But tell the boys not to shoot ther Innards out—’taint fair.” Then he slept.

The General waited till he heard him snoring: “Major, if you happen to lose him to-morrow in the first skirmish—really, I don’t think we need him, Major?” The Major was sure they did not—so were the others.

They made the dying man as comfortable as they could, the General sparing his own warm rain-coat for the limbs now rapidly chilling. But his groans kept them awake: “Water—water—oh, God—water and death—kill me, somebody!”

The cry fell out of the silence with the starlight, mingling strangely with the shivering wail of a screech owl—so uncannily mingling that they seemed as one.

It was nearly midnight when the General saw the foot withdrawn, the big form arise and slouch over to the dying man: “Water—water—and, oh, for God’s sake—have mercy and kill me.”

Solomon tenderly lifted the gasping lips to the canteen: “Do yo’ means it—want me to kill ye sho’ nuff, brother?”

The man’s eyes were beseeching as he gasped: “I——can’t——live——death every——minute——put me——out of misery—God will——reward you.”

Solomon’s eyes were wet with tears. His great pitying heart thumped loudly: “How, brother? Whut with?”

The dying man nodded at a bayonetted rifle near by: “That——push that——through my heart——quick!”

The General arose just in time. Solomon, with a strange sob in his throat, stood over the man, the gun poised, the bayonet’s point—

“My God, Solomon!”—and he grasped the descending gun by the barrel. “This is murder—I’ll have you shot!” The giant turned on him astonished: “He cyant live—you-uns shot him to pieces. That’s war. I put him out o’ his misery—that’s murder. Strange—strange! Brother,” he stooped and whispered regretfully to the man, who beseeched him with fixed, unwinking eyes, “Brother, I’d do it—God knows I’d like ter ’commodate yer, but ye heurn yo’self.” Still lower: “But say, brother, ef you fin’ ye cyant stan’ it no longer—when they sleep—call Solomon—an’ I’ll sho’ ’commodate you in this. God bless ye.”

Later there was a rigid stiffening and gasps among the leaves and Solomon knew there was no need for his bayonet.

The next morning when the General arose, Solomon had fed and rubbed down Ajax, the thoroughbred. He stood talking to himself—he had forgotten the war: “Whut a hoss—whut legs—whut muscles, like bees a swarming! I’ve allers dreamed o’ keerin’ fur sech!” He turned to the General: “I’ll take keer o’ him from now on.” The General was touched and when he shook Solomon’s hand the bond was sealed.

“How long have you been up, Solomon?”

“Two hours b’ day—Gen’l.” It was the first time he had used the word and the old fighter inwardly scored one more point for the horse—that could prune the pride of the mountaineer—he who knew no titles, no superior.

“Ye see, Gen’l, forgot yistiddy to kiss Dinah Mariah good-bye. She’s the little deef-mute mammy lef’ befo’ she tuck an’ went an’ died. I raised her—gi’n her urver rappin she had ’cep the milk she drunk, an’ wish’t I c’ud er gi’n her that. Dad’s been so tarnel mean to her. D’ye know I had an idee that he wanted ter put her out o’ the way? So I steps back over the mount’in an into the cabin whur they all sleeps—all ’leven on ’em. But ye know I couldn’t kiss ’er good-bye, seein’ ’er sleepin’ thar so sweet?” He struck savagely at his eyes with his big-knuckled fist. “But I fetched this—I’ve jined fur the war an’ I wants my own gun—don’t like ther blunderbusses you-uns shoots. This un’s a Deckerd—been thro’ ther Revolushun, an’ with Ole Hickory at New ’leans. It’s fittin’ fur it to fit ag’in fur the Union. Thar—see!” and he pointed the gun high up at the limb of a big oak.

The General saw nothing until the great flint and steel snapped together like the jaws of an alligator, and he had a tender but headless fox squirrel for his breakfast, cooked, later, by Solomon’s[65] own hand. “An’ I don’t shoot ther innards out, nurther,” he growled.

“You needn’t lose him, Major,” chuckled the general, as he pulled off a succulent hind limb, roasted on a green stick-spittle over a pit of coals. The Major having the mate of it in his own mouth, could not speak, but nodded vigorously.

A hard winter and deadly fighting between Missionary Ridge and Atlanta: but Solomon enlivened it for the Tenth. For he was their brother and his quaint sayings became their intellectual stock in trade. For instance: “The —— Iowa flickered at Dug’s Creek. Then they sulked.” They had done it before. “What shall I do with them?” snarled the General that night in camp. Solomon drawled in:

“’Pint ’em ter bury ther dead—they’re nat’ul born pallbearers. I’ve seed lots o’ folks that was.”

When old Tecumseh Sherman heard of this he offered to promote Solomon to a corporalcy:

“Nun—no,” said Solomon, “then I’d hafter wear boots an’ a unerform. An’ say, them thar unerforms you-uns wear meks you-uns look jes lak them little flyin’ stink-ants that swarms out in the spring. God didn’t inten’ no two fol’ks ter be alike. Es fur boots, they fus’ jes make yer feet tender an’ then wears out. I’ve got on a pa’r thet nurver wears out.”

He figured next in a horse race with a Kentucky regiment which was first unwise enough to cast aspersions on the speed of Ajax and then bold enough to back them with the long green. It was a great race run between two lines of howling blue. “Nurver bet agin natur’,” said Solomon dryly, as he pocketed all the money of the Republic which the unwise Kentuckians had. “Ajax is by natur’ a horse an’ your’n ain’t.”

For a week after that the Tenth indulged in vain and effeminate luxuries.

Spring brought the fighting and the tragedy—of the latter, Solomon was the ink.

They made him color-bearer—he was so strong, and it was so easy to see him in his coon-skin cap, his Deckerd strapped to his back. For he would not lay it down even while carrying the flag. At Resaca he took the colors through balls which came thick enough to stop a bluebird. Mines cut the tail from his cap, a buck-and-ball cleared one foot of bunions, and canister carried his canteen bodily from his body; but in the thick of it he yelled out savagely at the General: “Say, thar, Gen’l, get out o’ thar on that hoss! You mout get ’im hurt!”

He spent the next week nursing the wounded enemy: “For ain’t they our brothers?” he asked, and the scoffers in blue were silent.

A beautiful valley beyond Resaca and Solomon had never seen such rich land. A grand mansion in the valley and Solomon had never seen such a house. The General had pitched his camp near by. A thousand other camps dotted the valleys and hills. A hundred battle flags fluttered from their staffs. There was planning, priming; trenches crept across the hills in the night, like mole-paths in a garden, and the valleys were billowed with them, cannon crowned and picketed with steel. They would give little Joe his death blow.

Solomon stood sentinel that night by the big house on the lawn. It was never the color-bearer’s duty to stand sentinel—but “Yer see, Gen’l, Ajax is stalled right over thar beyant, an’ them brothers o’ our’n from Kentucky loves a good hoss.”

It was past midnight and the army was asleep. There was a light suspiciously faint in the window of the big house. Solomon slipped up and peeped in through a blind slat, awry. He stepped back blushing, ashamed that he had peeped. He picked up his Deckerd. The light went out and the door opened silently and a handsome man dressed in citizens’ clothes kissed a Beautiful One good-bye. Then he slipped out into the dark and mounted a horse hid so securely as to surprise Solomon, with his keen mountain eyes.

“Halt, thar, brother, an’ gin the countersign.”

Pistol shots buzzing from the cylinder of Colt, and that quick grapple of horse hoofs in the gravel which tells of a rowel driven in suddenly; then[66] the sound of a flying horse through the lane.

Silence, then quaintly as if talking to himself: “A cyclone spiked with hell-fire! Solomon, yer nurver had so narrow a shave—yer’ll be keerful ther nex’ time yer brother a gatlin’-gun buckled to a thoroughbred.”

The girl clutched the window—white and with eyes lit with flashes of the weird starlight. It seemed a half hour to Solomon before he heard her give a rippling, cut-off laugh, and the dawn sprang to her cheeks as the starlight went out of her eyes. High up on the mountain she had seen what Solomon had not—a splinter of light leap out of the heart of the mountain beyond the picket lines. Solomon was still watching her—so strangely fascinated that he had not noticed the blood running down his arm. She closed the window with a happy laugh, and Solomon felt that it was now night—all around him.

And so the spell of the big house was upon Solomon and he begged to stand guard next day. It was early and he stood silent before the splendor of the house, the marble steps, the big, hooded gables, then—

“God! she’s comin’!”

He turned—no, he was a sentinel—he could not run. She wore white—fluffy and airy in the warm June morning. Above—

“Molasses candy hair,” said Solomon, licking his mouth, “an’, oh, Lord, Black-Eyed-Susan eyes!”

He thought again of running. Then of the wild fawn that once ran to meet him, off in the mountain woods, so innocent that it knew not that death dwelt with man.

He slipped behind a tree. Never before had he been ashamed of his bare feet. He peeped out—she was still coming—no, she had come, and he turned pale and his knees trembled, for there she stood smiling as only an angel could, and holding something out to him:

“I know you must be hungry, and it is so good of you to guard our house. Now, please let me serve you your breakfast.”

Off came his coon-skin cap. Her smile, her eyes made him homesick. He saw the summer lightning playing at midnight around the peaks of Tiger Head. Then tears welled which made him hate himself—him a soldier of the Tenth—and he slipped farther around the tree. She was serious instantly, and her beautiful eyes had sized him up—gratitude, homesickness, all—and when she peeped around the tree again—after awhile, and he had had time to brace himself, she laughed a musical, comrady laugh, and—

“Now, please don’t be offended, for I should love so much to be your friend.”

Again the homesickness. That laugh, that voice—it was the silver ripple of Telulah Falls under the white stars of the mountain. That meant home and Dinah Mariah. Trembling, dazed and choking with the swelling that made him wish to do something—to do something grand for once in his life, he tried to speak, but ended in bringing his Deckerd to present arms. She laughed, saluting him in turn with a saucy military flash of her pretty hand.

“Miss—Miss”—

“Nellie,” she said, sympathetically, helping him out.

“Do they—breed ’em—all like you-uns down here?”

She laughed and handed him the plate. Solomon knew the ham, but did not know what the rolls and the orange were. His hand touched hers—he fumbled and dropped the plate: “God, but I thort I—I teched fire!”

“Oh!” and the hurt look made Solomon wish to fight something for her sake—“but I’ll soon be back with more.” She turned with a pretty gesture.

“Don’t—don’t,” he called, “send it by a nigger. Who can eat with a angel lookin’?” She laughed so heartily at this that Solomon was soon himself. When she brought him another plate he forgot everything except he had seen her, that at last into his life something had come. He wished very much to impress her—to say something grand, but everything he tried to say ended in a brag—so unusual for Solomon:

“I was heah las’ night a-guardin’ you-uns, an’ I come mighty nigh killin’ a man.”

“Oh!”—and the fun went out of her[67] eyes. “I am so grateful to you. Did—did—he hurt you when he fired?”

All the brag went out of him. Not for the world would he have her know that.

“No—but—it was a narrow shave.”

“I am so glad—you see he—was—my brother.”

“Sho’ nuff?” and Solomon guffawed. Somehow it relieved him so to know he was only a brother. “Wal, now, how strange! But the Gen’l was tellin’ us ’bout a Johnny Scout in here, a tall feller in citizens’ clothes. Oh, he’s played the devil with us. He knows our plans better’n we do. We ’low we s’prise little Joe at Dug’s Gap, but little Joe s’prises us. Then we ’low we’ll trap him at Resaca an’ swing round on his flank. But he come nigh trappin’ us. We laid for him mighty keerful at New Hope an’ saunt Howard to turn his flank. He turned our’n. It’s all that’r scout, and so the Gen’l sed when he saunt me out las’ night: “Solomon, shoot anything in citizens’ clothes that tries to buck our lines. Kill him fust an’ ax him whur he’s goin’ after’uds.” So when he steps out las’ night—that brother er your’n—I was right thar watchin’, an’ I flung up my old Deckerd an’ I drawed a bead on him—it was all so plain, him outlined in the starlight. But he looked so han’sum a-settin a hoss so lak Ajax thet I sed: ”No, I’ll not shoot him—he’s somebody’s brother. An’ sho’ nuff he was your’n!”

The girl turned white, then pink. Tears came to her eyes, the sight of which made Solomon’s jaws set in stern decision. He pitied her, thinking of Dinah Mariah—his sister. He swelled savagely: “Say, but don’t you cry. I’ll lick arry man that ’ud hurt yo’ brother!”

“That is so sweet of you,” she said softly.

“Then I fetched my piece down an’ axed him fur the countersign an’—wal,” he nodded his head up and down meaningly—“I got it!” He rolled up his sleeve and showed the red furrow of another across his arm.

“Oh, I am so sorry—do—do come in and let mamma and me dress it.”

Solomon laughed: “Now, don’t bother ’bout it, Miss—yo’ bein’ sorry has already cured it. I’d have it dressed but Gen’l ’ud find out an’ say I was a fool fur not shootin’.”

But she dressed it—she and a stately White-haired one, bringing the salve and bandages out to his beat; and when they had finished and the smarting pain had ceased, Solomon belonged to them.

Then came the strange change in Solomon. He did not know what it meant. Why he put on the uniform, the cavalry boots and the big spurs. Why he wanted to strut and swell in the pride of his six feet three, when the old General blurted out:

“Solomon, damned if you ain’t real handsome—what’s come over you?”

“Gen’l—Gen’l, I dunno—but I finds myse’f struttin’ jes like a wood-cock in the spring.”

“Oho,” laughed the General, “look out, Solomon.”

That was all open—seen of all men. But secretly, silently, painfully—in the depths of his great soul something stirred within him that he told to no man, for he knew not what it was. What it did he knew: “God, it lifts me out o’ the clay o’ myse’f!”

Never had he been so happy. Ride? He could ride Ajax over a whole regiment. He could lick Johnston’s whole army. “An’ the cu’is part, Solomon—yer fool—you are wantin’ to fight outwardly, but in’ardly you are cryin’ all the time.”

It hurt him when he saw her. He was sorry when she brought him his meals; he got behind a tree and wept when she left, and in this state he stopped one day and turned white: “God, mebbe it’s that thar blin’ staggers I’ve got—that I heur’n so o’ fo’ks havin’ in the rich valleys.” The dreadful blind staggers he had heard of all his life—that never came to those high up in the pure air of the mountain! He was sure they had him.

It was the third day and twilight, and when she came out, bringing his supper, the red ribbon in the white of her gown, her dark eyes above, made him think of the tiger lilies that grew by Telulah. He pretended not to see her and when[68] she blocked his path with a pretty smile and salute, he feigned astonishment:

“Law, but I thort the moon had riz!”

“Oh, you are a poet, Solomon, and a dreadful flatterer,” but she laughed in so pleased a way that Solomon swelled up in his great chest and blew deep and long, snorting it out, to loosen the great hurting feeling that was there. Then, too, he had seen Ajax do it with the thunder of battle in his nostrils.

She sat on the stump before him, kicking her slippered heels against the rough bark and watching him so keenly with measuring, wistful eyes.

“Solomon, I have been thinking, and mother and I want you to come in the house and hear my music. You have been so good to us and we are so fond of you.” She jumped down, took his hand and led him. It burned him—it made him gasp for breath, yet all he could do was to follow.

And the house—never before had he seen splendor. They had trouble persuading him to step on the rugs and to walk on the carpets. But the sweet-faced, white-haired lady came graciously forward and shook his hand which made him feel better. Then the Angel sat down before something Solomon had never seen and—

They both stood over him ten minutes afterwards, for he was sitting on a sofa weeping:

“’Scuse me—no—no, ’taint my wounded arm—it’s that’r thing over thar that’s waked up the cat birds in the roderdendrums at home, an’ I heurd the water failin’ over Telulah an’ the wind at midnight in Devil’s Gorge, an’ I nurver knowed befo’ whut little Dinah Mariah had missed bein’ a deef-mute an’—so—it sot me ter bellerin’ this away.”

They were very gentle with him after that, and more gracious, and when the Angel played another piece full of dash and jig and rosened-bow and thunder, he stood it until the blood began to boil under his hair and they found him again in the middle of the floor shouting:

“Hurrah, boys! Lord, but can’t he run? Come home, Ajax!” “’Scuse me—’scuse me—Mrs.—Mrs.—Angul—” after he came to himself—“but—but—she plays that thing ’zactly like Ajax runs.”

It was the greatest day that had ever come into his life, and when he left to go back to his beat he proclaimed exultingly to the White-haired one that it was “Christmas, an’ hog-killin’ an’ heav’n all rolled into one.”

It was twilight when she came out on the lawn, dressed in white with ribbons in her hair. When he turned she had perched herself on her favorite stump and was beckoning him to sit by her. Trembling, weak he obeyed, his great arm touching hers, which thrilled him so that pains shot into his wounds. She was silent, looking at him with the same wistful, doubting eyes of the morning. He had seen them before, in camp, when the boys gambled and their month’s pay was at stake, holding a card aloft uncertain whether to cast or not. And how they held him—those eyes of hers with the tragedy in them!

“Solomon, you know how we love you, mamma and I.” He sat mute with bowed head. “And Solomon, if I trust you—if I tell you—will you never betray?”

“Whut—like that’r Judas I onct heurn of the time I went to meetin’?” She nodded. It hurt him. “I can’t betray—It ain’t in me,” he said simply.

“Forgive me, Solomon. I knew it,” and she put her hand in his just as Dinah Mariah had so often done, except that this made his heart beat so it bothered his breathing and unlike Dinah Mariah’s he could not—she being an angel—clasp it in turn. “Now, Solomon, my brother is coming to-night—he will slip in yonder,” and she pointed to a by road leading through shrubbery to a side gate. “You are not to see him, Solomon, and you are to let him out the same way after we have fed him. For he is hungry, Solomon, and in great danger—been surrounded and hiding for days—they are on his trail. Your men, you know, have killed his horse”—(Solomon winced—it hurt him to hear of a horse being killed)—“and, Solomon, this is the only way he can get out—can save his life—for—for, Solomon, they are to take him dead or alive.” She had ceased to smile. Tears were in her eyes and[69] Solomon’s great hand closed over her little one.

“So he’p me God, I’ll nurver pester him!”

“And when he is ready to go—to try to escape, oh, Solomon, you will stand by us—with Ajax ready?”

He started—he jumped from his seat. “Not Ajax—any critter we got but Ajax.”

“Oh, Solomon, they cannot run—it’s—it’s—Ajax or death for him.”

She was weeping, her head on his great shoulder, clinging to his arm, the perfume of her hair going into the soul of him like the odor of wild grape blossoms after the spring rains in Dingley Dell. “Will you—will you, Solomon; oh, save him for me!”

“So he’p me God, I will—he bein’ yo’ brother—my brother.”

“You are my brother, Solomon—the Brother of Nobility.”

Silence. He sat holding her hand as he would Dinah Mariah’s. “Will you—er—kiss yo’ brother—when he gits here?”

She blushed. “Don’t we always kiss our brothers, Solomon?”

He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Awhile ago you made a remark cal’k’lated ter sorter sot me to ’sposin’ thet mebbe I mou’t also be yo’ brother—”

There was a ripple from Telulah Falls, the pressure of lips on his cheek, a whiff of wild grape blossoms in the Dell, a rustle of skirts up the path, and Solomon sat breathing hard in silence.

“Wal, ef lightnin’ ’ud only give us notice when an’ whur it’s goin’ ter strike!”

In camp he heard news—strange news. The whole army would strike next day, for they had Johnston with his flank wide open; would bag him if that scout didn’t get back through the lines—Captain Coleman, the daring rebel scout. They had him surrounded now in a thicket by the creek, the man they would give a brigade for—he was theirs if the pickets were careful.

Then it all came over Solomon and with it a blow that brought the great strange man to dumbness. “I swore not to betray her—not to be her Judas—oh, God, enny body but thet white-livered, snivelin’—” He heard the flag rustling in the night air. He walked over, crept under the folds, pressing it to his hot cheeks, kissing and fondling it. “Judas! Judas!—oh, my country’s colors.” He looked across the night to the hills where a thousand camp-fires twinkled in unbroken lines of starry sentinels.

“Ye’ve got so menny to defen’ ye,” he said to the flag, “so menny twixt you an’ death. An’ she—jes’ me—jes’ me!” He sang low the song that had taken the camp.

He stopped and looks at the living scene before him—it was all so true. Then lower still:

He sprang up with a pain in his heart. “Siftin’ out the Judases, an’, oh God, I’m a Judas arry way you fix it! Why did you fling me in this heah pit among the wolves o’ war—away from my mount’in home—from little Dinah Mariah?”

When Solomon went back to his beat he had slipped out Ajax, saddled, and held him in the clump of orchard trees, near the sweet window where the faint light came out, that he knew shone also over her and her brother. He held his Deckerd proudly, for was he not all that stood between her and death? He swelled with the pride of it and that queer sullen feeling that came over him at times—that savage feeling he could not understand—that made him willing to kill—kill if—

“They’d better not pester her,” he growled as he heard the pickets go out for their night’s duty.

He heard them moving in the room. Her brother was preparing to go. He peeped and turned away his head. “Somehow it riles me to see her brother kiss her that away.” He tapped on the blind saying softly: “Ready—ready.”

“O, Solomon,” joyfully in a whisper, “bless you; bless you!”

“No Judas in mine, Angul.”

He turned, for Ajax had thrust his head over his keeper’s shoulder and the man laid his cheek against it and his lips had parted for the pet words which he never uttered; for there was a noise[70] in the dark behind him and two soldiers tried to rush by to the door of the room.

Solomon stopped them with his great Deckerd at port. “Halt fus’ an’ give the countersign,” he said, and he heard the scream of a woman, the hurrying of feet within.

“Stand back, you fool, we are men of the Tenth and we’ve got Coleman in there.”

“Stan’ back yerse’f—he’s her brother—my brother.”

There was a rush at him, into arms which made them think of a mountain bear, for he gathered them to his heart, and the breath of them went out. In the glare of the wide open door a girl stood white-faced with tragedy. A man leaped to the back of a horse and the swaying, struggling group were baptized in a shower of flying gravel. Shots and shouts behind and the scud of a flying horse into the night.

“You damned traitor!” Solomon dropped the two men in the paralysis of the bayonet thrust that sank into his back.

He quivered to the death stroke and turned beseechingly to the man: “Shoot me, quick, brother—in the heart—in the breast—I’m no traitor, no Judas—she’ll say I ain’t.” The man cocked his rifle but the great head with the shock of long hair had gone down and the girl stood between them.

“No—no—not Judas—she’ll swear I ain’t.”

She did not seem to notice them—her beautiful head was turned side-wise listening to the vanishing rhythm of flying hoof beats. “O, Solomon, Solomon; will they catch him?”

“Whut—an’ him on Ajax? Ho-ho-oh,” and the great chest, schooled to the mountain halloo, echoed it for the last time, like the sound of thunder among the hollow gorges of the hills.

Then joy, great, radiant joy in her face, and with the returning glory of it all—tenderness—tenderness and sorrow for him. “Can I—O, Solomon—can I do anything for you?” She sat by him, her hand on the sweat-damp brow.

“You mou’t—kiss—me ag’in—an’ ef—you—happen to see—little Dinah Mariah—”

The phosphates of Tennessee occur chiefly, in fact, almost entirely, in the strata representing the Silurian and Devonian geological ages, or, more properly, in the former, and in a transition period between the two.

The Silurian age was essentially the age of shell fish, animals with their skeletons entirely on the outside of their bodies. The deposits of countless millions of these shell fish and their remains form the immense beds of limestone representing the Silurian age. The composition of these shell fish was carbonate of calcium, or “lime,” and hence our common limestones are calcium carbonate.

The Devonian age was the age of fishes or vertebrates, and owing to the need of greater elasticity of their bones and smaller weight, they are composed of phosphate of calcium, or “lime.” Far back in the Silurian age the “Hand that fashioned all things well” began to change some of these shell fish to provide for the future order of things, so that their outside skeletons, or shells, were composed of phosphate of lime instead of carbonate. These two commingling, the resultant beds of rock became somewhat phosphatic and formed the “phosphatic limestones” of the Silurian age. In some places the phosphate shells were in considerable proportion, and subsequent erosion, proper underground drainage and leaching, dissolved out the carbonate of lime to greater or less extent and left the “brown phosphate” of the middle basin, varying in grade according to the preponderance of phosphate shells in the original deposit and the extent of the subsequent leaching. Meantime the transition stage between the two ages had been reached and the resulting deposit spread over the central basin and the highland rim in the form of a thin blanket of varying thickness and quality of the so-called blue rock, which is blue, brown, gray and black, according to the coloring matter present or absent, composed of a preponderance of microscopic shell fish with skeleton composed of phosphate of lime, but mixed with enough carbonate to make the resulting mass vary from sixty-five per cent to as high as eighty per cent calcium phosphate.

The subsequent depression and deposit of Devonian shales and subcarboniferous beds and subsequent great pressure hardened all these into rock, and about the middle of the subcarboniferous age all these were elevated above the surrounding[72] country, and while the rest of the land was taking its turn in being formed under the seas, this old central basin was undergoing the wear and tear of erosion that finally produced the “Dimple of the Universe,” surrounded by its chain of hills and ridges and flatwoods of the highland rim.

In the central basin where conditions were favorable the intervening strata between the blue rock and the phosphatic limestones that were being converted into “brown rock” were sometimes partly and sometimes entirely washed away, and the blanket of the blue rock, cracked and broken into plates of the hardest and most durable parts, settled down on the brown rock, sometimes resting directly on it and sometimes with a clay seam left to represent the former intervening strata.

A glance at the illustrations will show the process. Let Figure A represent the deposit as it originally was before the erosion and leaching started in.

No. 1 represents the layer of blue rock in its original position; 2 the layers of limestone underneath; 3 the layers of highly phosphatic limestone in suitable condition for leaching; 4 the hard, insoluble portions of the limestone, and 5 the soluble portions of the limestone, nonphosphatic.

In Figure B, No. 5 has dissolved out and disappeared. In No. 3, the carbonate has leached out and it has separated into laminations and falling into the places left by No. 5, has assumed the jumbled condition found in the dips between lime boulders; No. 2 has dissolved down to the clay seam so generally found, varying in thickness from one or two inches to two or three feet, and No. 1 has settled down conforming to the general bottom of 3 or top of 4, forming the top rock generally prevalent in the brown rock field.

If the analysis of the original phosphatic limestone was, say, 50 per cent phosphate of lime, 38 per cent carbonate and 12 per cent insoluble, and other matters, and the leaching took out all the soluble carbonate, the resulting mass would be 80 per cent phosphate, which is generally the analysis of the bottom rock at Mt. Pleasant, or the “export,” as it is termed. The top rock varies in analysis from 65 to 80, just as the original blue rock did.

In the highland rim this process took place only on the slopes of the narrow creek valleys and occasionally in projecting points, instead of over large areas of country as in the central basin.

In the portion of the highland rim left intact the blue rock remains in place as a general thing with its varying quality and thickness, retaining its original compact form and density.

Occasionally, however, is found the layer of blue rock resting immediately on the layer of phosphatic limestone, and where this is the case numerous faults and dips occur, showing a similar structure to the Mt. Pleasant formation typified.

Again, in the central basin or brown rock region, the top erosion first disintegrated and then partially took off the upper layers of shale or flint, sometimes entirely, sometimes leaving it from one to forty feet thick, which accounts for the varying overburden.

In some places the limestone layers were entirely soluble or reduced to clay and some acid condition of soil water dissolved the upper layers of phosphate and redeposited it in the boulder and stalagmite forms of the “white rock” found in Perry and Decatur counties and near Godwin, in Maury County, and the “boulder rock” found everywhere to greater or less extent but in especially heavy deposits near Nashville on the McGavock Place. These latter redeposit varieties vary in analysis from 50 per cent to as high as 90 per cent phosphate, and are uncertain as far as the general variety goes, though individual deposits varying in extent from one to twenty or thirty acres, are found of very uniform quality.

The first phosphate rock discovered in Tennessee was the kidney formation that almost always attends the blue rock and black shale deposit. The eminent physician, naturalist, botanist and geologist, Dr. Gattinger, of Nashville, of revered and beloved memory, was first to recognize these as phosphate rock, but being much more interested in determining the family and pedigree of some new[73] beetle or plant than in the commercial aspect of any mineral proposition, he never gave his discovery to the world, and only by his casual mention of the fact one day to Will Shirley and Maj. W. J. Whitthorne, of Columbia, are we able to give him credit for the knowledge. Dr. Safford, in his “Geology of Tennessee,” describes in detail both the blue and brown rocks geologically, referring to the blue rock as a blue fossiliferous limestone nearly always occurring under the Devonian shale; but no chemical investigations being provided for, he did not find out that it was a phosphate rock. Major Whitthorne and Mr. Shirley kept up a systematic hunt for a deposit of commercial value and finally the former located one on upper Swan Creek simultaneously with the discovery made lower down the same creek by Messrs. Bates and Childs. These latter gentlemen were insistent that the black shale, commonly called slate rock, so abundant in the highland rim country, was a form of, or indicative of the proximity of, coal, and at regularly recurring intervals they would send in particularly promising looking samples to Professor Wharton, of Nashville, for analysis. One day they dropped into their bag of samples a piece of blue rock which they informed Professor Wharton was nearly always present under the “slate,” and seemed to be a “bloom.” What was their astonishment to receive from Professor Wharton the report that their coal was still worthless, but that their bloom was phosphate rock, analyzing over 70 per cent. This was in December, 1893, and like the news of William Tell in Switzerland, of old, “From hill to hill the summons flew,” and the whole country went phosphate and option mad.

Lack of transportation and timidity of capital, coupled with the large amount of territory occupied by the deposit and the numerous parties holding properties caused the development to be spasmodic and comparatively small and scattered, and in consequence the price soon fell from $4.25 per ton f. o. b. Aetna, which was the first sale, made by the old Southwestern Phosphate Co., to $2.25 per ton, which was the price at which blue rock guaranteed 65 per cent was sold in 1896, being just a small margin over the cost of production and hauling to the railroad.

In January, 1896, at a time when negotiations were on foot for the sale of a large tract of blue rock land on Swan Creek, Mr. S. Q. Weatherly, former county judge, and prior to that county surveyor of Lewis County, while on a trip to Mt. Pleasant, noticed the peculiar brown rock in the ditch at the roadside on the W. S. Jennings’ farm west of Mt. Pleasant, and being interested in minerals, picked up a piece of it. Noticing the analagous appearance to the weathered blue rock, which is generally brown on the surface, he dropped it in his buggy. On his return to Swan Creek, he showed it to Mr. Harry Arnold and Col. D. B. Cooper, who were interested in the negotiations above mentioned. These gentlemen had it analyzed and finding it to be 75 per cent phosphate rock, induced Mr. Weatherly to say nothing about it until after their deal was consummated. Associated with these gentlemen was also Mr. W. J. Webster, and during the time from January to July, 1896, when the negotiations for the sale of the blue rock properties were finally closed, they ascertained partially the extent of the Mt. Pleasant brown rock field.

When their “big trade” was made they formed the firm of H. I. Arnold & Co., bought two and one-half acres of land from Mr. Mumford Smith, ostensibly for a calf lot for Mt. Pleasant’s present genial mayor, Mr. W. D. Cooper, leased at a royalty of ten cents per ton a few acres from Mr. Cooper and a few from a darky named Tom Smith, got an option from Mrs. M. G. Frierson on the present Columbian & Blue Grass Hills, and commenced mining rock and putting it on the cars at a cost of about eighty-five cents per ton. This rock, without preparation, ran 75 per cent instead of 65 per cent, but whereas the blue rock had never run higher than 3 per cent I. & A., this rock ran, in the state they shipped it, from 4½ to 6 per cent I. & A.

Of course the manufacturers had bought blue rock for $2.25, and knew they were getting it at very nearly the cost of production, and when they saw the “snap” the miner had, they took the[74] stick this excess of I. & A. gave them and proceeded to beat the price down with it until $1.25 and eventually $1.00 per ton were common prices.

Capitalists were rendered more timid than ever before, and even astute phosphate man that he was Col. D. B. Cooper threw up both hands and quit. He said, “Boys, if that is phosphate, the whole basin of Middle Tennessee is full of it, and it will never be worth mining, as every farmer will pick it up off the ground and haul it to the railroad.”

Mr. John S. O’Neal, in a paper presented to the Engineering Association of the South, as late as 1897, said, “the owner of a bed of phosphate rock, is not as well off as the owner of a sand bank, given the same proximity to market.”

The poor fellows in the phosphate business, however, couldn’t get out, and kept digging away, until gradually capital decided it was worth buying the lands after all, and as a result nearly $2,000,000 has been paid for property in the Mt. Pleasant field, about $500,000 in other portions of Maury County, and over $1,000,000 for property in the counties of Decatur, Perry, Lewis, Hickman, Giles, Williamson, Davidson and Sumner. Rock has gradually advanced in price until now 65 per cent blue rock sells at from $2.60 to $2.80 per ton, 75 per cent brown rock at from $3.10 to $3.60 per ton and 78 per cent domestic (4½ I. & A.) at $3.75 to $4.00, while 78 per cent export rock with 3 to 4 per cent I. & A. sells for from $4.00 to $4.25 per ton.

As the prices have increased the cost of production has increased for one reason and another, until now each ton of phosphate rock put on board the cars represents an average cost in labor and salaries of $2.00 per ton. The production for 1904 having been 540,000 tons, the wage earners of Tennessee have profited by this industry to the extent of $1,080,000 during last year alone. On the other hand, fertilizer factories have sprung up all through the interior of the country like magic, and as they now get 75 per cent rock at their factory for less than the freight they used to pay on 62 per cent rock from South Carolina, acid phosphate is cheaper than ever before, and consequently the farmer gets cheaper fertilizer or else better fertilizer for the same money.

The first thing which impresses itself on the mind of almost any visitor to the phosphate fields is the almost universal dependence on hand labor of the simplest pick and shovel kind. This is partially due to the fact that they “just started that way,” and hence the most “experienced laborers” have always done that way; and partially to the fact that after sufficient capital was at hand for the purpose, the varying conditions met with in the deposit made it very difficult to devise appliances suitable for one portion of a mine that would answer the requirements in the closely adjacent portions.

For instance, it is possible in the same open face of a mine to find the overburden varying from two feet to twenty and the rock from a few inches thick, sticking tight to the top of a lime boulder, to fifteen feet in the “dip between two boulders,” while the rock itself will vary from the shaly, partially disintegrated top rock through various sizes to heavy blocks six to eight inches thick and often ten or twelve feet long.

It will therefore be seen how difficult it is to design a machine that will accommodate itself to the handling of this material. The removal of the overburden has been generally accomplished with wheel scrapers. Two companies have used the New Era or Western machine plow with elevator belt loading the dirt into dump bottom wagons alongside. Two steam shovels are now in use, being of the traction type, and occasionally these have been used in digging the rock, though apparently with not sufficient success to justify its continuance. Cableways have never been used to transport the material and this is done largely by wagon and team, though many tram roads with cars propelled either by mules or dinky engines are in use.

The bulk of the rock, however, is dug by the miner with pick and fork, loaded into wagons, hauled out and dumped in windrows on the ground, stirred with a potato plow and harrows, allowed to dry in the sun, taken up again into wagons and hauled either direct to cars for shipping[75] or put under sheds for storage. When an extra good quality of rock is wanted, as for export, a few layers of cordwood are put down and the sun-dried rock put on that. Then, when ready to ship, the wood is fired, and after the rock is cool, it is broken and loaded with forks, when most of the dirt sloughs off, leaving the rock almost perfectly clean.

Some rock can be put from the mines immediately on the wood and burned for export, but generally this will only be a safe domestic rock. Some companies who have water accessible, pick out the large pieces and send them direct to the dry kilns and then the small pieces with the dirt, known as “muck,” are passed through washers, the rock coming out clean, and being deposited on cordwood and burned as above described.

The resulting rock, after being crushed, is passed through screens which separate it in three sizes, from one and one-half inch up going for export, between that and one-fourth inch for domestic, and the dust and one-fourth inch pieces being ground up and sold for direct use or to small factories.

The Century Phosphate Co. has installed a system of dryers and do not wash the rock, but dry it thoroughly in mechanical dryers and then screen and separate it as above.

The reason the larger pieces are as a rule of higher grade than the smaller, is that the dirt and impurity is mostly on the surface of the rock and the greater the proportion of surface to volume the lower the grade in B. P. L. and the higher in iron and alumina.

Owners and operators of mines are gradually turning their attention to labor-saving devices for primary operations, and for systems of reclaiming the immense amount of waste that has heretofore gone on, both in the mining and the preparation of the rock.

One marked step forward in the business is the establishment of a small mixing plant for making complete fertilizers, and the commencing of operations on a large acid phosphate factory, with prospects for additional ones later on.

At least ten per cent of the present output is thrown away to prepare the high grade rock necessary, and this waste will make good 13 per cent acid phosphate, so that every year 50,000 tons of valuable material is absolutely thrown away. This is more phosphate rock than is annually used by any one fertilizer factory in the world, so far as known to the writer. This waste product could easily be transported to a local factory for an average cost of less than 50 cents per ton. Sulphuric acid can be bought laid down at Mt. Pleasant for $7 per ton. The mixing and other preparation will not exceed $2 per ton, so that using half acid and half rock the cost of the acid phosphate will not be more than $4.75 per ton, while it will probably sell for at least $8 per ton. From these figures we appear to be throwing into the waste pile at present material that should represent a profit of not less than $162,500 per annum. That this will be allowed to continue does not appear likely. The question might arise, however, “What will you do with the acid phosphate thus manufactured to keep from overcrowding or at least injuring the market?” I should answer this by calling attention to the immense area of land in Maury, Lawrence, Lewis and Hickman counties, known as “The Barrens,” which are gradually being denuded of their timber for cordwood that is shipped to Mt. Pleasant for use in drying the phosphate rock. There are at least 250,000 acres of this land, which is now readily purchasable at $3 per acre, with the cord wood on it. The wood alone will yield in value more than this price, thus leaving the land clear. Now, it has been demonstrated at Lawrenceburg, Summertown, Loretto, St. Joseph, Hohenwald and numerous other places that systematic and intelligent farming, even with the meager supply of fertilizer (almost entirely in the shape of bone meal) that has been used, will bring these lands up to a point where they will bring from fifteen to twenty bushels of wheat or from twenty-five to thirty bushels of corn per acre. Such lands that have been so brought up readily sell for from $10 to $40 per acre, according to location.

From experiments it has been ascertained[76] that the principal element of plant food lacking in these soils is phosphoric acid. The application of 275 pounds of acid phosphate per acre each year on these lands would consume right at our doors the entire output of the proposed acid factory, even if none were sold elsewhere. This appears chimerical to the casual observer, I must confess, but a careful investigation will demonstrate the soundness of the position taken.

A feature throwing some light on the development of the business at Mt. Pleasant is shown by the following table:

The lengths of track built in each year are as follows:

In addition to these tracks, there are about six miles of narrow gauge tracks and about eight or nine sidings and spurs have been built in Lawrence County for loading cordwood for shipment to Mt. Pleasant.

In Hickman County, the N. C. & St. L. Ry. has built and acquired by purchase from private owners about seven miles of track, which it is now engaged in extending three miles farther up Swan and Blue Buck creeks, and some five or six miles of private tracks have been built.

The following table shows the production of phosphate rock in Tennessee, 1894-1904:

With more or less frequency, according to whether the news supply is sufficiently good to enable them to get “their per column,” correspondents fire into the several papers of the State some sensational head-liny article about the new “discovery of phosphate rock at Crossroadsville, 5 to 40 feet thick, analyzing from 60 to 90 per cent bone phosphate of lime.” For fear of being behindhand with the news all the papers copy it, and before the report can be corrected to its proper reality of from 6 to 9 per cent, it has been heralded to the four corners of the earth and its effect on future and pending sales can better be imagined than estimated.

If one will take the reports of the geological survey he will find that every possible deposit of phosphate rock in the State is absolutely and positively located. There will be no new discoveries. Of course there will be much new development, but the location of such development will have been discovered long before.

The principal localities in the State where operations are now in progress, are: Mt. Pleasant, Kleburn, Jameson and Century, in Maury County; Lower Swan Creek, Twomey and Totty’s Bend, in Hickman County; near Gallatin, in Sumner County; Wales Station, in Giles County, and near Nashville, in Davidson County.

The principal localities where developments will gradually take place as the demands of the business require are: Southport, Estes Bend, Bear Creek, Neeley’s Valley, Little Bigby, West Fork, *Baptist Branch and *Leiper’s Creek, in Maury County; Richland Creek, in Giles County; Station Camp Creek, in Sumner County; north and west of Franklin, in Williamson County; Brentwood and Bellevue, in Davidson County; Beech River, in Decatur County; Tom’s Creek, Buffalo River, *Hurricane Creek and Cane Creek, in Perry County; *Forty-eight Mile Creek, in Wayne County; *Upper Swan and *Indian Creek, in Lewis County; *Lower Swan, *Indian Creek, Ship’s Bend, Gray’s Bend, Persimmon, Haleys and *Leatherwood creeks, in Hickman County.

Anything exploited outside of these[77] known and designated deposits is very apt to prove either a flash in the pan or will be found to be only worked by the newspaper correspondents at so much per column.

Of the present working localities the principal one is Mt. Pleasant, and while the property owners there are beginning to figure a little on how much they have left, still the prevailing impression that Mt. Pleasant is about through mining is an exceedingly mistaken one. With the present rate of output, the visible supply of the Mt. Pleasant field proper will last for seven years longer, without taking into consideration the Southport field, which is practically part of the Mt. Pleasant field. With the Southport field mining will last here at the present rate of output for eleven years. It is very easy to understand that as work progresses at Mt. Pleasant and the end comes more nearly in sight, some miners drop out by selling, some by working out their small deposits and these naturally go to the other fields above referred to. In none of the other fields is found the persistently uniform high grade brown rock of Mt. Pleasant except Southport, Century and Kleburn, in the two latter of which operations are now in progress, and in the former the extension of the Mt. Pleasant Southern Railway will soon cause development work there.

As these deposits afford practically the same grade of rock as Mt. Pleasant proper, they will be worked out simultaneously with it and will cater to the same market.

With their knowledge that the visible supply of this character of rock is comparatively limited, producers are gradually increasing their prices, and by reason of such increase they are slowly reducing their output and giving opportunity for the marketing of the lower grades in the other fields, notably the Swan Creek and Indian Creek deposits in Hickman County.

This, of course, means that the producers at Mt. Pleasant will make more money from their product, and that it will last a considerably longer time, so that it is safe to say that mining in force will be carried on at Mt. Pleasant and kindred localities for at least twenty years.

During the next decade, to supply the diminution of Mt. Pleasant’s output, will come the gradual development of the vast blue rock field of Maury, Hickman and Lewis counties, and the white rock of Perry and Decatur counties, which form the backbone of the phosphate industry in Tennessee, and whose millions of tons will cause these counties to be considered the phosphate reservoir of the world for the next seventy-five or one hundred years.

The change of base will be gradual and easy, and the trade will have ample opportunity and time to adjust its operations so as to utilize the lower grade blue rock as it becomes advisable and necessary to do so. Its many points of superiority for acidulation and for direct use without acidulation will largely make up for its lower grade, and as a mining proposition it more nearly approaches a technical field of operation.

The blue rock field proper covers a territory bounded approximately by a trapezoid having as its four corners Centreville, in Hickman County; Kinderhook and Mt. Joy, in Maury County, and Lewis Monument, in Lewis County. Traversing this territory are Duck River, Indian, Swan, Blue Buck and Cathey’s creeks, and their tributaries, and outcropping along these valleys and underlying the ridges between them are deposits of blue rock running in bone phosphate from 60 per cent to 78 per cent, with less than 3 per cent iron and alumina, that will aggregate in the neighborhood of 40,000,000 tons.

This field will soon be developed by the extension of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis branch up Swan Creek and the Louisville & Nashville branch down Swan Creek, with side lines and spurs leading off each, surveys for which have been made, and work on construction will soon be under way.

If, however, the Florence Northern Railroad should ever be built from Florence to Nashville it will run through the heart of this territory as well as the magnificent iron deposits of Wayne and Lewis.

With the above road and a road from[78] Huntsville on the southeast to Milan on the northwest all of the phosphate territory would be fully developed, and this section of Maury, Hickman, Lewis, Perry, Giles, Davidson and Williamson counties would be the site of more fertilizer factories than will be found elsewhere in the world in the same space.

Contributary to such prospective development is the present opening up of pyrites deposits at Pyriton, near Talladega, Ala., with ore running two to four units higher than the Virginia ores, and while from four to six units lower than the best Spanish ores, it is much more free burning than the latter, and with its advantage in freight rates, will likely give manufacturers equally as good a product at a lower price.

The vein of pyrites is about one and one-half miles long and from four to fifteen feet thick and has been exploited to a depth of 430 feet, the ore improving in quality with the depth. It is reported by manufacturers who have used it to be the freest burning pyrites ore known, leaving only about ½ of 1 per cent of the sulphur in the cinder and containing no deleterious ingredients. The deposits are controlled by the Alabama Pyrites Company and the Southern Sulphur Ore Company, the latter owned by Messrs. Carpenter & Howard, of Columbia, their vein running from eight to fifteen feet thick. The railroad into this deposit has been built from the Louisville & Nashville, at Talladega, a distance of twenty miles, at a cost of nearly $400,000.

The consumption of fertilizers has increased 200 per cent in the United States in the past twelve years, and while the visible supply of phosphate rock is rapidly decreasing, the consumption of fertilizers is almost as rapidly increasing, and with this fact in view, the large fertilizer companies are and have been for several years gradually buying up phosphate lands to provide themselves for the future. This tendency has put a large amount of phosphate property in such strong hands that little or no danger is possible of the old scramble to sell, with its attendant low prices. At the same time, a considerable amount of land valuable for its phosphate deposits is still uncontrolled by manufacturers, so that a healthy competition in the business is still open.

The amount of fertilizer used in Middle Tennessee is almost a minus quantity, but this state of things cannot long exist. The horse worked continuously without feeding soon dies, and so it will be, nay already is, with much of our land in the “dimple of the universe.”

Farmers know that the crops of ten years ago cannot be raised to-day and are all waking up to the fact that something is needed. The large stock-raiser, who husbands his stable manure, can partially take care of the thin spots on his land. But the small farmer, the backbone of the country, whose acres do not afford him land sufficient to till and still have the rich pastures necessary to raise much stock, contents himself with simply wearing out his farm, selling it at a low price, generally with the mediation of the sheriff, and moving elsewhere for better or more probably for worse. To this class the use of fertilizer in Tennessee is practically unknown, but their successors of the next few decades will form, as is the case in other States, the bulk of the fertilizer consumers, and when this comes to pass Tennessee will indeed have come into her own.

The use of fertilizer in the cotton States has enabled the planters to continue year after year to raise the enormous crops of cotton and has also enabled them to diversify their crops by being able to produce the same yield of cotton on a less number of acres.

So fertilizers will enable the Middle Tennessee farmers to raise the same amount of feed on fewer acres, leaving more land to grow up to blue grass, and our present greatly depreciated live stock interests will come up by leaps and bounds until we will rival the famous blue grass section of Kentucky, if we do not far outstrip it.

When one stops to consider (1) that the wheat crop alone annually removes from the soil of the United States more phosphoric acid than is the equivalent of twice the amount of phosphate rock produced in the country; and (2) that over half of the amount mined is exported so that the fertilizers used in the United States return to the soil only[79] one-fourth of the phosphoric acid that is taken away by the wheat crop alone, without considering the other crops, we can readily see that the consumption of fertilizer and phosphate rock not only will, but of right ought to, enormously increase, and that the industry is a permanent one that will last without cessation or danger of serious interruption as long as the world eats bread. That it has been and still is being developed almost entirely by outside capital is one of the features that seems to attend the development of practically all the industries of the State.

A complete analysis of a dry sample of average “brown rock,” which the writer had made several years ago, may be of interest, and is as follows:

The rock which is exported from Tennessee goes to England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Japan. The domestic rock is consumed by the various fertilizer factories all over that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, some of the principal points being Philadelphia, Pa.; Buffalo, N. Y.; Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Chicago, Ill.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Lynchburg, Staunton, Norfolk and Richmond, Va.; Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn.; Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, S. C.; Charlotte and Winston, N. C.; Macon and Atlanta, Ga.; Meridian, Miss.; Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile, Ala.

In conclusion, a word might be appropriate on the subject of the direct use of raw ground phosphate rock as a fertilizer, without acidulation.

The experiment stations of the great States of Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey have made exhaustive experiments with this material, and their bulletins may be had by any farmer desiring them, showing that this material has given results that prove it to be more valuable for many soils than the acidulated phosphate. The great State of Tennessee, on the other hand, without any practical experiments to back it up, in the face of the opinions of some of its most eminent chemists and experts, continues on its statute book an absolute prohibition against the sale of this material within its borders.

Mr. Cyril Hopkins, of the Illinois Experiment Station, says that the discovery of the Tennessee phosphate deposits is the greatest thing that ever happened for the farmers of Illinois.

Each year many carloads of this material are shipped into other States and wherever it has been used its use is spreading, yet these people have to pay more in freight alone than it would cost the average Tennessee farmer at his farm.

Immense deposits of this rock exist in Tennessee high enough in grade to meet the requirements for direct use, and if this prohibition were removed, almost every county seat in the sixth and seventh congressional districts would have phosphate mills to supply the local trade, just as they have flour mills.

The next Legislature should certainly correct the errors of the past by allowing the Tennessee farmer to exercise the same amount of free agency, common sense judgment as his fellows of the other States.

The principal mines in Tennessee are shown in the table on the following page:

[80]

CHAPTER II.
THE PACER’S FAST DEVELOPMENT.

The achievements and development of the pacer in the past ten or fifteen years, since the advent of the Hals, and the swift tribe of trotting-bred pacers, has been so marked and so great that a special chapter is needed for its explanation. The old “side-wheeler” has gone—the new, beautifully gaited, true striding pacing race horse has taken his place. No other feature of a race meeting brings out the crowd and the enthusiasm equal to the free-for-all pace. Never before had such races been witnessed as those first seen in the days of the Big Four—the queen of which was Mattie Hunter 2:12½, the first great Hal mare to attract the attention of the world. She was the star of the Big Four, the others being Blind Tom, Lucy and Rowdy Boy. Later, some of the great free-for-allers were Little Brown Jug, Brown Hal, Hal Pointer, Robert J, Direct, Joe Patchen, John R Gentry and many others whose names will be readily remembered by every horseman. The very mention of these names brings a thrill to the heart as, toward the last of the century, Robert J, John R. Gentry and Joe Patchen and Star Pointer began to bring the pacing record to the two-minute mark. This was first done by Star Pointer, an inbred Hal, crossed again and again in the thoroughbred blood which, undoubtedly, gave to the Hals the staying power so characteristic of the family. And so, looking back, the following article, written by Trotwood December 29, 1892, seems prophetic—that is, if there were such a thing as prophecy. But, alas, there is not, for prophecy is merely another name for the cause of the future as foreseen in the present’s effect. And though this was written thirteen years ago, it is embodied into this history, as fitting so well the present:

“There can no longer be any doubt that the pacer, as a future product on the light harness race course, will be a still stronger factor than he is to-day. Even if desired, it is now not possible to eliminate him from the light harness breeding world. He has come to stay. It matters not to us whether the honest, but sturdy, rascal can trace his ancestors to Marsh’s five-toed orohippos, weighing about forty pounds, and which had all he could do to keep out of the way of Darwin’s “missing link,” and thus save himself from drudgery, even before the days of the Silurian serpents, or whether he was developed in Trojan wars as carved on the frieze of Grecian temples; the fact remains the same, that to-day he is here by a large majority, and though snubbed by his more aristocratic brother, he persistently refuses to stay behind in the procession, and is never happier than when he can get up a good,[82] rattling fight in a five-heat race, or stick his common, but inquisitive, nose a few seconds beyond the trotting record securely placarded on the front of old Father Time. Flung into the world without prestige, friends or influence; his coming regarded as the epitome of a breeder’s ill luck; condemned before he was born, and damned before he could walk; a little too good to kill, yet hardly good enough to be allowed a square meal once a week that he might grow up like any other horse; toe-weighted and hobbled and banged about, and forced to trot in spite of the laws of nature herself, yet the game and honest little fellow, when relieved of his owner’s prejudices and hobbles, has flown to the front with the ease of a swallow through the air and the grace of a game fish in the lake, and now holds the first record for speed and the chief place on the program in the eye of a grand stand that paid its way to see an honest horse race.

“It is the old story of the rejected stone, and he now holds up with surprising popularity his corner of the race horse structure. And yet twenty years ago a pacer was scarcely allowed on a fashionable race course; his pedigree, they said, took to the woods on the first cross; he was regarded by the trotting world as a camel-backed, cat-hammed, narrow-chested, curby-legged beast who paced because he couldn’t trot, and was alive because nobody cared to buy powder enough to kill all of them in the woods of Tennessee and Kentucky. He was allowed to exist on the race course very much on the same idea that a slave is allowed to breathe the same air and view the same heaven his master does. He began his career because he was a good kind of an animal to have around to do the race act at the pumpkin show and come in along with the fat woman and the five-legged calf. His coming to the front was his own work; and to use a classical phrase, he was purely the architect of his own fortune. The American people are a long time finding out merit, but nothing helps them to see it as quickly as the image of the American eagle stamped on the back of a silver dollar—and this the pacer has shown them.

“Despite the oft-repeated theory of ‘the Canadian pacer,’ there is no doubt that the pacer as now found in Kentucky, Tennessee and the West came originally from the older Atlantic States, such as Virginia and the Carolinas, and that he was brought there by our forefathers from England. The fact that there are pacers in Canada merely proves that in that Dominion also they have been brought from the mother country. To trace their origin in England is both a tedious task and a most uncertain one. Yet, from the best information obtainable, there appears to be but little doubt that the pacer was originally a product of Spain, where many years ago he was bred in the purple as a pleasure animal for the nobility of Andalusia and other Spanish states. In fact, it is more than probable that he was bred with more care than was bestowed by the Spanish upon their now favorite animal—the ass. We know that the pacer was safely domiciled in England as far back as the Norman Conquest, for in ‘Ivanhoe,’ written by that most painstaking scholar and novelist, Sir Walter Scott—a man who wrote truer to nature and with as much historic accuracy as any novelist who has ever lived in England—we find many allusions to the pacer under the style of the palfrey and the ambler.

“The following is an extract from Ivanhoe, Chapter II., the scene being in the time of Richard I. In reading it we must remember that the name jennet did not mean then as now the female of an ass, but it meant the palfrey which the lay brother was riding. Says Sir Walter: ‘This worthy churchman rode upon a well-fed, ambling mule, whose furniture was highly decorated and whose bridle, according to the fashion of the day, was ornamented with silver bells.... A lay brother, one of those who followed in the train, had for his use on other occasions one of the most handsome Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth and distinction. The saddle and housings[83] of this superb palfrey were covered by a long boat cloth which reached nearly to the ground, and on which were richly embroidered mitres, crosses and other ecclesiastical emblems.’

“From other writings of Sir Walter Scott we find that the knight usually, when not in battle, rode upon an ambler, and a page, riding also upon the same kind of a horse, led the knight’s large war horse, with his armorial trappings. The fact that in the above extract the mule also paced, goes to show how strong must have been the pacing instinct in his dam, being able to overcome entirely the gait of the ass. But to go further into the history of the pacer in England would be foreign to the ends of this brief article.

“We will only add that in spite of the fact that many English breeders assert that not a pacer has been kept in that country for many years, yet we believe that this is not true and that there are many of them there to-day. But to return to our own pacer. It is quite easy to trace his career as he came from the mother colonies, spreading out through Kentucky, Tennessee and the States of the Northwest, under the name of the ‘saddle horse,’ by which name he was held in the highest esteem and filled an humble but most important position in the pioneer work of State making. Before the roads were cut out through the forests, and when only blazed Indian paths were the highways of the country, he was an absolute necessity, and to-day there belongs to him the proud honor of having been the first common carrier of American civilization. He was with Marion and Sumter in their partisan warfare in the Carolinas; he saw, no doubt, with patriotic emotion, the ignoble surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown; he followed the intrepid Boone across the Alleghanies into Kentucky, and came along with the immortal Jackson—the man of destiny—into the ‘basin of middle Tennessee.’ Pulling the plow for an honest living in the rich cornfields during the week, he carried the women and the children on his back to the primitive church on Sunday. As civilization advanced he improved with it, being crossed with thoroughbred blood in rich profusion, until to-day his lines of breeding are thoroughly established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing, and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the grand stand.

“A scrub, indeed! He was here fighting for independence and an honest living when the forefathers of the Wilkes and Almonts—since old imp. Messenger is regarded as the fountain head—were courting the favor of royalty in England ‘that thrift may follow fawning,’ or carrying soup-drinking Britons on their jolting backs to the wharves of Liverpool, to be shipped over here as food for Tennessee rifles at New Orleans. Plebian, did you say? Why, he ought to be pensioned. He is older and more respectable than the Dutch governors of New York and has a greater claim to patriotism than half of the pensioners who never smelled the smoke of battle.

“In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there is no doubt in the world. And that this thorough blood has been as good, if not better, than that in old Messenger himself, is also true. But the astonishing thing about this amalgamation is the very small per cent of pacing blood it required to leaven the thoroughbred loaf. A pacing sire bred to a running mare and that offspring to another running mare, and so on for several generations, will end with the last, as with the first, in getting a ‘saddler.’

“We have always regarded this fact as the strongest evidence of the intensity of the pacing instinct—an instinct that has such a pure and strong fountain-head somewhere that it is able to overcome the running instinct, though crossed and recrossed upon the pure running blood,[84] is abundant evidence of its own purity and prepotency. And the fact that so many fast pacers are continually thrown from the trotting ranks, now commonly called ‘trotting-bred pacers,’ is but another illustration of the same fact. Verily, back somewhere in the past the pacer was a thoroughbred at his way of going. His remote ancestor, whether in the myths of fables, or in the woods of northern Germany, or the vine-clad hills of Spain, or around the frozen lakes of Canada, was an Alexander, a Julius Caesar and a Napoleon Bonaparte, all in one, in the greatness and gameness of his gait. How else could the fact that every great family of trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory? The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait; and we are also led to believe that it often requires but a small portion of pacing fluid to overcome several generations of the diagonal gait in the veins of the trotting-bred horse.

“Take from the trotting ranks those out of mares or descendants of mares by old Pilot, Jr., and other pacers, and the truth of this assertion will be most plainly seen. In fact, every noted family of trotters, such as the Wilkses and the Almonts—wherever there is any pacing blood, even away back in the fourth and fifth generation—have to the credit of that family some pacer who is faster at his way of going than the star trotter of that family is at his. No Hambletonian trotter has ever attained the speed that has been shown by Direct, unless it be Nancy Hanks, who has some pacing blood in her own royal veins and is inclined to pace a bit herself; nor has any Almont trotter ever equalled Flying Jib and hosts of others we might mention. Among the Wilkses they are thicker than the leaves of Valambrosa, until one is forced to believe that the Clay blood, if such it was, in the pedigree of George Wilkes was about as good as any the great horse had in his veins.

“These facts being true, it is evident that the pacer is not a scrub. If he is a scrub, then we are forced to the conclusion that nothing in all the breeding world may be likened to the intensity of his cold-bloodedness. This scrub blood overcomes the hot running blood, though continually diluted for successive generations; and it needs only a little of it to knock out the hopes of the bluest blooded trotter descended from Hambletonian lines. If he is a scrub, then he is the veritable ‘original sire’ of the scrub horse business, which, like that in man, is ever on top. But as this sin of the pacer helps him to the wire first, and has given him the harness records of the world, we trust no trotting moralist will attempt to entirely obliterate it. We don’t need any crucifixions there! To our mind, we believe that if the curtain of the past could ever be unrolled upon the pacers of old we would find that centuries ago he was bred for no other way of going, and bred so long and so purely and so consistently that in him has been planted an instinct that will never be obliterated. To argue that a cold-blooded horse can be thus preponent is to argue against the well-known laws of heredity!

“In the second place, the pacer has undoubtedly come to stay. The American people are nothing if not quick in realizing real merit and honoring it when clearly proven. As they make no pretensions to the shams of royalty, so are they not bound by the iron rules of court custom from ‘hustling’ to horse-racing. They do not care for so much trappy action; nor does the matter of a banged tail cut as much of a figure in their calculations as does the intense patriotism which lies within them for their own almighty dollar. Passing over the generally admitted fact that the pacer is naturally faster than the trotter, comes to his speed more quickly, may be more evenly matched in a race, and is preserved longer by reason of the smoothness[85] of his gait, there is yet another cause why the pacer is destined to become more popular.

“A great English commoner, whose ire had been aroused on one occasion by a member of the House of Lords, in reply, in a speech of burning oratory, spoke of the aforesaid gentleman as being in his titled position merely by reason of the fact that he was ‘the accident of an accident.’ There is no doubt that Hambletonian 10, the present head of the trotting family, was even more of an accident than the English lord was. Bellfounder mares of trotting propensities were rarer than imported Messengers, and if the mating of Abdallah with this mare was not an accident, but the plan of a thoughtful intellect looking to the future, the descendants of the man who thought it out should have risen up and told it last month, that their forefathers might have been honored along with Columbus at the opening of the World’s Fair. Now the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ is quite an accident himself. He is here by reason of the fact that many trotting breeders in their wild vagaries and theories regarding the best way to breed a trotter, ranging all the way, in the theory of breeding, from thoroughblood to jackass, have accidentally honored a few thousand pacing mares with a service to some of their Hambletonians. As a result the ‘trotting-bred’ pacer is with us. As it is quite impossible for the trotting turf to get rid of this rascal if they wished to, and as he has managed to be quite a game and fast money-making machine himself, he has clinched the popularity of the pacer as a pacer and has stuck a peg in the map of popular favor that would be hard to be removed.

“And it is safe to say that by reason of the blood of Pilot, Jr., Clay, Blue Bull, Tom Hal, Pocahontas and many others being so generally distributed in the pedigrees of trotters, the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ will continue to come from such trotting sources in the future in geometrical proportion and to pace in the same ratio. What will be done with them? Each one, with speed, is simply a money-making machine, and his owner will not be long in putting him at the work which nature cut out for him. To destroy him merely because he paces belongs to the dark ages when the pacing gait was one which made no money, but now, since the pacing purses have gotten to be so liberal and getting more so each year, it is only common sense to suppose that owners of pacing horses will begin to take more pains in their development and their breeding. This will improve their speed. As it is now, we do not suppose there is a betting horseman alive who would not give large odds that the pacer will be the first two-minute horse.

“And in this connection another thing must be taken into consideration. The pacer’s gait has itself been greatly improved in the last ten years. He is no longer the rotary-motioned mud-flinger of old, whose forefeet pawed the air in circles parallel with and above his ears, while his hind feet described semicircles over the ground, but he is now a smooth-gaited, straightforward, quick-actioned fellow, with plenty of knee action in front and the stride of a bullfrog behind, and at his highest speed it requires more than a glance for one to say whether he is trotting or pacing. In other words, the pacer has come to be a well-rounded, symmetrical and well-bred horse. His gait is the poetry of harness motion, his courage is unquestioned and his staying qualities, especially with the pacing-bred ones, of whom we are more familiar, are equal to those of any horse that ever stretched his neck in the home stretch. In view of these facts it doesn’t require even the grandson of a prophet to predict he is destined to a still greater career on the light harness race course.

“We can only judge the future by the past and the present, and with that in view from a study of the 2:20 list, which a most exclusive list in the light harness race course, we are startled with the enviable position the despised side-wheeler holds in that charmed circle this season. There can be no sham in the 2:20 list. A horse must be able to trot or pace that enters it. Up to November 15 there were, according to the statistics at my command, 189 new 2:20 performers; and by new performers we mean horses that had no record as good[86] as 2:30 trotting or 2:25 pacing before the opening of this season. Of these 189 new 2:20 performers we find that the pacers constitute 128 of the number, while the trotters are credited with sixty-one. This table includes but seven pacers that have lowered their records from the 2:30 list last year to the 2:20 list this year, and we use it to get at the number of green horses to enter this list, and from it we are able to form a more correct idea of the material coming fresh from both ranks. It cuts off such stars as Kremlin, Stamboul and Nancy Hanks among trotters, as well as Hal Pointer, Mascot, Guy, Direct and Storm among pacers.

“But a still more exclusive list is the 2:15 class, and in order to show your readers what has been accomplished by the new material from the pacing ranks this year as compared with the same material from the trotters, we publish that list in full, and in a spirit of generosity we place the despised pacer on the left in the goat’s place. The fact that it looks something like the last electoral college, with Cleveland on the pacer’s side, need not lead any one to think we are at all partisan in this matter.

“New pacers with records of 2:15 or better:

“New trotters with records of 2:15 or better:

“Total number of pacers not having a record of 2:30 or better in 1891, but now having a record of 2:15 or better, thirty-four; total number of trotters, four. Finally, when we consider the fact that a very much larger number of trotters are trained, or attempted to be trained, than pacers, these figures become still more expressive of the great future possibilities lying within the pacer’s reach at a light harness race horse.”

What wonderful progress has been the pacer’s since the above was written! If we were to attempt to publish the 2:15 list to-day, it would take the next issue of the Monthly, there being now about five thousand, while the 2:10 list surpasses belief. Three of them have paced miles better than two minutes, and such names as Star Pointer, Joe Patchen, John R. Gentry, Direct, Robert J. and others have made the turf bright with glorious deeds. Truly the pacer’s development surpasses even prophecy!

(To be continued.)

The Past is Yesterday’s present. Remember it as you build to-day.

This pertinent question was suggested by a conversation between a young farmer—a college graduate—and a young man who had just received his diploma from one of the leading agricultural colleges of the country. When questioned by the former as to what vocation he expected to follow, the latter said: “I guess I’ll be a farmer, because farmers don’t have to think.” Was the young man correct? After a day’s journey through the country a very observant and thoughtful man will be forced to acknowledge that a great many farmers do not seem to think. The amount of high-priced machinery allowed to rust and ruin in the fields, the haphazard way in which grain and hay is stacked, the utter indifference displayed in plowing land and laying off rows, the disregard that is paid to the washing away of the soil, soil that was thousands of years in forming, the fertility of which depends upon the actions of the elements for generations; a soil that, when once gone, is gone forever. We are forced to admit that all farmers do not think. When we see farmers burning straw stacks or filling gullies with manure, which will soon rot, float off and carry all accumulated soil with it, we know in that particular they do not think. For when a gully is stopped with manure, it is only a question of time before it will have to be stopped again, and the next time the task will be greater, for there will not be much adjoining soil with which to stop it.

When we see a farmer delving with his whole household from daybreak till dark, denying his children the privilege of a common school education, trusting to luck and brawn to carry them through life, we have another illustration of a farmer who does not think. For if he would but think, he would realize that his sons, after he was dead and gone, would prove easy victims to the oily tongued sharper and his hard-earned dollars would go soon to swell the coffers of another man’s son.

A great many farmers do not think, and to them rightly belongs the disrespectful epithets of “Reuben” and “Hay-seed.”

Admitting the foregoing, we are glad to know that there are a great many farmers who keep abreast the times, are thoughtful and studious men.

With the vast area of fertile soil capable of producing vastly more of any crop than is needed, which fact is almost every year proven, with a herd of middlemen manipulating the crop reports and combining to put and keep prices down; with this country a network of railroads, one and all of them clamoring for freight to haul; with shrewd managers to concoct the “rebate scheme” to counteract the “Interstate Commerce Law” and “Railroad Commission,” put the farmer of any section in direct competition with the whole country. When the above facts are considered, it certainly behooves every farmer to “think” and study so that the thinking will be on sure footing.

No matter what the past has been, the day of haphazard farming for success and competency is gone. Farming to-day is a scientific problem, and a problem that requires all the thought that can be bestowed upon it. Not a thought for to-day or to-morrow, but long-headed thought that studies the supply and demand of the year ahead before planting largely of any one crop or launching into any new enterprise. He must study the supply and price before he can tell whether to hold wheat or longer feed his cattle; must know the needs and study the rotation to get the best results from each crop; must think to be able to properly harvest and care for each crop as it matures; must think how best to become his own financier, and not be controlled by any bank or supply[88] merchant. He must think to live on what he makes and make all that he needs.

The life of a shrewd, thoughtful farmer is the most independent in the world—a life that the followers of all trades and professions yearn for, a life acquired only by thought. So, in answering the question, Do farmers think? we’ll say, If they succeed, they do.

The sexuality of plants has been known from the time of Camerarius, 1691; and yet, what farmer looks to the strains of the seeds he plants? How many farmers buy their seed corn in the ear? The fact that like begets like should never be overlooked.

Nature’s secrets, to a great extent, have been revealed, but if the practical man be not acquainted with the things revealed, to what avail their revelations? Until teacher and practical farmer are congenial in the full sense of the word, the power of the soil will remain unknown.

Plants drink and do not eat: therefore, Nature, although robbed by man of many methods, and now needing man’s assistance, still provides means of converting insoluble elements into drinkable or water-soluble foods. All insoluble foods brought to the surface by plowing are decomposed by freezes, frosts and snows, and are acted upon by carbonic acid, other acids, oxygen and carbonate of lime. Again, if the soil be properly conditioned rains will carry the acids, oxygen and lime down below the surface to accomplish the same end. After the end is accomplished, the soluble foods are brought back to the plants by capillary attraction. Humus should be in the soil to hold the moisture or foods coming from above and below.

System breeds success, neglected details, failure.

Farming needs brains as well as brawn; furthermore, it offers far greater opportunities for brains than do the overcrowded professions of the cities.

Buy for cash, and you will get more and need less.

We are known by our faults and judged by the errors we make.

War Babies.

The most gigantic struggle of modern times was the American Civil War. In no other country but this, with its breadth of conservativeness and its dearth of caste, could the bitterness of such a war have been so quickly forgotten. As it is in a few more decades, if the same spirit of good feeling continues to prevail, and the fanatics be allowed to die a natural death, it will be a question as to which side will have the most respect for the brave men of the other. A striking feature of the great war, to me, has always been the unanimity with which the entire country, with the probable exception of the military leaders themselves, expected the war to speedily terminate. In the South the enlisted men all feared it would end before they had time to get into a rousing good battle, and the same feeling appears to have existed among the Northern volunteers.

As an illustration of this feeling in the South, in talking to an old farmer the other day, and he a gallant cavalryman, who belonged to Forrest’s immortal command, he laughingly remarked, that the greatest number of colts he ever saw at one time was a certain Tennessee cavalry regiment the first year after the war. “You see,” he said, “none of us expected the war to last over three or six months, and never dreamed it would go over a year. Nearly every man in our regiment went in on his pet saddle mare or half thoroughbred, and fully two-thirds of us were horse breeders, on a greater or less scale, while at home. But the war went on, we were ordered here and there, hundreds of miles from home with plenty of fighting and little else to think of. We were kept so busy that many of us, in fact, had forgotten all about the spring breeding, and would have been glad if it had forgotten about itself. But not so; the next spring there came the colts—war babies, to be sure—dropped into a hard world at a cruel and unmotherly time, and before we knew it our regiment had more colts than we knew what to do with. I had to send my mare home and get a fresh mount, and the others traded around, or left dam and colt to shift for themselves in strange and foreign lands. I have often wondered what became of that crop of colts, the first breeding venture of our regiment.”

A Contest in the King’s English.

There is a young darky downtown, at a livery stable, who has been priding himself on his ability, as he expressed it, “ter fling English.” But he takes no pride in it any more. Old Wash cured him, and it happened this way:

“Wheneber I goes down dar arter yo’ mare,” the old darky said, “dis heah young niggah gins ter fling his English ’roun’ scan’lus. I tell you, boss, I’m gittin’ tired ob dat, an’ I’m gwi’ teach ’im how ter talk English sho’ nuff some day. I sw’ar to you, sah,” said the old man, as he mopped his face with his red handkerchief, “It’s so hot I’ve mighty nigh multerplied, an’ I’ve got de commissary rumertism, ter boot; but jes you watch out fur me de naixt time dat nigger ’gins ter fling his jaw-bone ’roun’ whar I’m standin’—jes you watch me riddle ’im wid sintax an’ orfrography an’ sich! Jes you watch!”

For several days after that I noticed the old man studying an old Davies Geometry and an obsolete work on synonyms, which I had sent to the attic long ago—looking, as he expressed it, for “some good cuss-words to fit de ’casion.” But I had forgotten all about it until one evening I drove into the stable with him. A sprightly young darky ran out, took the mare by the bit, and patronizingly remarked:

“Gentermen, condescen’ to disintergrate frum de vehicle, an’ de quadruped shall hab my unqualified solicertashun, wid abundance ob nutrititious ellerments.” And he smirked at the old man as much as to say: “Don’t dat parlyze you, old man?”

“Hold on dar,” exclaimed Old Wash, and[91] his eyes flashed as he rose quickly to the occasion: “Sonny,” he began witheringly, “it is transparent to de interlactual apprehension ob eny disinterested individual dat de gravertashun of special conceits described on de hypotonuse of your simeon-headed eclipse, am entirely too cumbershum fur de horizontal vinculum dat circumscribes de radius ob yo’ cocoanut-shaped trapezium, sah!”

“Wha—wha—what dat you say, Unker Wash?” gasped the young darky as his jaw began to drop.

“I merely riz ter interjec’ de mental reservashun,” remarked the old man indifferently, “dat de interlectual hemmerage of verbosity procedin’ from de vacuum produced by de metermorphosis ob de origonal superstructure of de san’-stones ob yo’ cranium, am entirely incumpatabul wid de consterpastion of ideas generated by de paralysis ob yo’ interlectual acumen, sah!”

“Gord, what is he sayin’?” remarked the young negro sheepishly to the crowd that had gathered to enjoy his discomfiture.

“In udder words,” shot out the old man again, “ter make hit entirely incomprehensibul to de conglommerated hypothesis ob yo’ trapezoidal interlec’, I simply remarked dat de corporeal superfluerty ob yo’ physical insigniferkance am entirely too cumbersome fur de belly-band ob yo’ mental confermashun, sah!”

Here the crowd shouted, the young darky’s eyes looked like moons, his legs shook, and he gasped out: “Wha—wha—what dat old man talkin’ ’bout, man?”

“How long since this nigger wus cotch in the jungles of Africa,” asked Old Wash quietly of the proprietor of the stable, “dat he can’t understan’ de simples’ remark in de plaines’ of English?”

And then the old man tried again. He rolled up his sleeves, and with the air of one who was trying to make himself exceedingly plain he began laying it off on his fingers and palm:

“Sonny, de equilateral altertude of de comprehenserbility ob my former observations wus to de effect dat, if in de course of a cummercial transacshun, I shu’d onexpectedly negotiate fur yo’ habeas-corporosity at its intrinsic invalidity an’ quickly dispose of it at de exaggerated hifolutiness of yo’ own colossal conceitability an’ hipnartic expectashun I’d have sufficient commercial collateral to transpose my present habitation to de perennial localization of de avenue called Easy.”

By this time the young darky was fairly groveling in the dust.

“Do yo’ comprehen’ dat,” yelled the old man, “yo’ po’ benighted parallelergram, distended from de apex of a truncated coon (cone), yo’ bow-legged son of a parallelopipedon—”

But the old man got no further with his geometrical swearing, for amid the shouts of the spectators his opponent had vanished, and as he went up the street to have the old man arrested for swearing in public, he remarked to the policeman as he told his tale: “I didn’t keer, Cap’n, ’bout ’im outgineralin’ me er flingin’ English, an’ outcussin’ me in mo’ kinder newfangled cuss words den eber cum out ob Turkey, but when he ’flected on my mother by callin’ me de bow-legged-son-ob-a-parrot-an-er-pigeon-roost, de nigger don’t lib dat I gwi’ take dat frum!”

It was a week later before Old Wash and I had occasion to drive into the stable again. We were met by the same darky, who took the mare by the bit and meekly remarked: “Light, gentlemen; I’ll take de mair.”

And the old man said: “I am so excruciatinly rejoiced, sonny, to recognize de rejuvernated resurrection ob de exhileratin’ perception dat an infinertesermal ray ob common sense has penertrated de comatose condition ob yo’ fibrous misunderstanding’. In other words,” he winked, “I’se saved an ebononic interlec frum er new-bohn grave.”

“The Little Girl.”

Pioneer days in Texas, and the prairies unbroken by the smoke of a single cabin. To the south the Brazos, and to the west the buffalo lands, the herds crawling in the distance, like huge mud-waves on land, toward their fall feeding grounds.

There had been raids by the Comanches, then hot fighting with the troops and every settler west of the Brazos had run into the fort, each with his family, his man-servant and maid-servant, each[92] with his cattle and his asses. For the Comanches are wily devils and born horsemen. One day they are here, and the next they are not. And they go on ponies that are as tough as their riders, and as fast and as fearless, and no man knows when and where they will strike.

Three full companies of troops had gone north on the track of the desperate band who, but a few days before, had surprised the settlers on the upper Brazos and, after killing and scalping and plundering, had fled, as the troops thought, northward. The stricken settlers had been coming in for two days, all plundered, tired, many wounded and some still sobbing with the grief that would never die.

There were little children—motherless, fatherless. There were mothers and fathers who but a day before held loving ones in their arms.

Troop H, 7th Regiment, was holding the fort while the other companies went north to avenge.

The First Lieutenant of Troop H was a beardless youth just from West Point. He had been shot out of West Point into the saddle and to the front. Two months of it had bronzed him and added two years to his looks; but sentiment was still in him and Romance claimed his for her own. He had had enough fighting for any ordinary trooper, but to-day he felt sad that three companies had gone north after the marauders and he—he held the peaceful fort.

The sun was setting across the great plains and shadows had lengthened to their uttermost when a man on a cow-pony galloped in, not from the north, but from the west.

His pony was reeling at the first gate. It was dead in the fort ten minutes later. The man himself carried two Comanche arrows sticking through a shoulder and an arm. A gash was in his head from a glancing arrow and blood ran from another that had cut across his forehead.

He was unconscious before the surgeon could extract the arrows from his body, but he said enough. The Comanches were not north, but west—they had attacked him in his little squatter cabin forty miles west—they had killed all his stock but one pony—he had no family but a little girl—he had escaped on the pony. “An’ the little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out in the side of a hill—a kind of a cellar—where I kept pertatoes an’ sich—then—wal—”

He went to sleep.

“Let him sleep,” said the surgeon, “he is nearly gone as it is—forty miles and blood leakin’ out of him every jump of the pony.”

Ten minutes later the bugler called “boots and saddles,” and when Company H wheeled in the fort’s square, the Captain said:

“Well, men, the boys are on a cold trail. You have heard where the devils are; we can’t all go. Half of us must stay behind to hold the fort. I’ll be fair to all, for I know you all want to go, so count by twos.”

“One,”

“Two.”

“One,”

“Two.”

It went down the line, one hundred strong.

“Numbers Two, ten paces forward, march!”

There was a happy smile on Numbers Two as they spurred forward—they knew what it meant. They were lucky.

“Now, boys, you know I want to lead you,” went on the Captain, “but it isn’t fair. I must take my chances, too, and tote fair with the First Lieutenant. Lieutenant Troup will toss up with me,” he said with a laugh as he tossed a coin from his saddle into the air. It flashed high up in the sunlight.

“Heads for me, Lieutenant, and here’s wishing you—”

“Tails!” said the soldier who picked it up.

The Lieutenant flushed as he spurred forward saluting. Then men cheered again and the Captain wheeled, saying:

“Take them out, Lieutenant Troup—it’s your luck, and maybe—ah, well, you can’t tell how many there are, you know, and half a company is mighty few after sending out three troops. Leave your trinkets, men, and any message you may wish to send home. Yes, it’s a nasty bit of a fight you’ll be having, likely, and I wish it had been my luck to be in it. I have been in service a little longer, you know, perhaps the Lieutenant might—”

[93]

But the Lieutenant only smiled and saluted again.

“I’ll do my best, Captain—war is on and it’s my time, you know.”

The Captain pressed his hand as the Company filed out of the fort.

And all the time the Lieutenant kept thinking of the half-dead man who kept saying even in his delirium: “An’ my little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out—”

The Lieutenant was young—very young—and he was romantic. He could see the little girl—of course she was about sixteen—all settlers called their grown girls little. Perhaps—well—if she hadn’t been killed—

The troup wanted to gallop, but the Lieutenant brought them to a steady trot:

“It’s all right, men, and ten miles an hour is fast enough. We may need our horses for all that’s in them. We’ll be there by midnight as it is.”

The moon arose and drifted higher and higher and still the troopers struck grimly across the plain. The wind brought the howl of wolves—big greys—and the yelp of coyotes, but the troopers turned neither to the right nor left, and the Lieutenant rode at their head, and all the time he was wondering what had become of the pretty girl—helpless—alone. “An’ my little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out!”

It was the first streak of day. The men and horses had been resting for four hours—those not on picket, and some had even slept and were fresh. But the young officer could think of nothing but the little girl, and wonder at her fate.

They had lined in behind a few willows that skirted a small stream and were concealed from the view of the Indians. Then they looked well to rifles and Colts. The light came slowly and as they peered through the mist where the cabin stood only a burnt place blurred the dry grass of the prairie. There were no Indians in sight.

“Thar—look!”

It was an old Indian fighter whose keen eyes saw it first—a thing which looked like a potato-house butting out of a clay bank.

“Thar’s life in thar—see—it’s the little gal, an’ she’s alive yit—see!”

From the protection of small rises on the right three Comanches galloped out encircling the dug-out in a very generous circle. They had slipped on the off-side of their ponies and clung to mane and neck, with one leg and heel thrust over the flank.

The old fighter snarled: “The cowardly coyotes! They seem ter be mighty skeered of a little gal. Say, but they’ve got a whole lot o’ respect for her; she must have a weep’n o’ some sort in thar an’ tort ’em a crackin’ less’n with it, or them dogs ’ud et her up befo’ now; why—thar, by gad—”

He gripped the Lieutenant’s shoulder as a puff of smoke leaped out of the clay bank and the foremost pony stopped so quickly that it went down, Comanche under.

“She’s killed that Indian sho’,” cried the old hunter in a whisper. “No live Comanche was ever cocht under a fallin’ pony. See.”

The pony sprang quickly up—the bullet had creased him; but marvelous the shot!—it had gone to the exact spot where it would bring down a pony creased and a rider with a hole through his head.

“That’s shootin’ some,” cried the old hunter as the young officer gave the quick commands:

“Ready!”

“Mount!”

“Charge!”

“An’ remember the little gal!” they shouted as they broke across the plains.

It was a running fight and the Indians taken by surprise, for they were after the thing in the dug-out. And they paid for it—sixteen dead ones in the first half mile. The others—they had enough to get away from the forty troopers who shot as they rode and shot to kill.

Then the Lieutenant and ten men rode back to the dug-out. They approached it slowly—reverently, and all the time the young officer was thinking of dark eyes[94] and auburn curls and the beauty and bravery of the little girl.

“Hello!” he shouted, his voice trembled in spite of himself. “Hello!—we’re your friends.”

“Hello, yo’self—mighty glad to see you.”

“It’s the little girl, men,” shouted the Lieutenant, boyishly, as he rushed up. “She’s safe! hurrah!” and they gave it with a ring.

At the door he stopped short and looked into the hole under the potato-house.

Then his romance went out as the tide to the sea.

A woman at least thirty-five stood there. Her hair was red, her features hard, her face burned by the sun. Grim, square jaws set off her face. There was a line only to show where her lips met in deadly determination. She wore moccasins and leggins, a short skirt of deer skin and she held in her hand a rifle that had sent a dozen Indians to death in the twelve long hours she had held the little fort. Stuck in her belt were two good pistols. A thousand Comanches with arrows and antiquated guns could not have taken her.

“Oh!” she said, “but I’m glad to see you. Say, but I stood ’em off all right, didn’t I? It was awful—’specially last night, but the moon riz an’ saved me, for a Comanche with an arrow or a old gun is kinder techus ’bout a rifle. Is Pap safe?”

They told her he was.

“I tried to git the old fool to stay. I told him all hell couldn’t git us out o’ this hole, armed as we wus, lessen they come with bilin’ water,” she laughed, “but he got panicky an’ vamoosed on the only pony left. Dad allers was a gal.”

“Good gad,” cried the old hunter bluntly at last, “an’ is you the little gal he kip talkin’ ’bout?”

“Oh, he allers called me that,” she smiled.

“Well, you’re the gamest little gal I ever seed,” and he wrung her hand while the others followed suit. “An’ you’re our little gal now,” went on the old hunter, proudly, “an’ as I ain’t seed one like you since mine died years ago, I’d—I’d—I’d lak to kiss you jes onct for her,” he stammered.

“Oh, you shet up,” she said hotly. “D’ye think I stood off a lot o’ Comanches all night to be rewarded by kissin’ a old grizzly like you? But say,” she added, hesitating, and with a laugh, “I wouldn’t mind kissin’ that pretty little boy thar!”

There was a wild shout from the men, but the young Lieutenant had turned to mount his horse.

“Any way you belong to Company H,” said the old hunter.

A Preface.

At the request of the ladies of a church in Marion, Alabama, Trotwood wrote the following Preface, a few weeks ago for a cook-book which the ladies are publishing with a view of paying off a church debt:

The climate, the soil, the very air play their part in the art of good recipes. The cooking of the North and West is very different from that of the South, for Southern recipes are the products of sunshine and Southlands, of culture, of rest, of the Old South.

And nowhere has the Old South flowered to sweeter perfume than in my native town of Marion. Macaulay’s New Zealander, if placed in Delmonico’s would straightway beckon for cold clam, and good King Edward, if stranded in New Zealand, would soon fish an oyster cocktail out of some unruffled kiss of the sea.

Recipes, indeed, are a test of one’s civilization—one’s religion—one’s mentality. They are the products of the centuries beginning with the primitive clam and ending with the thousand glories of the oyster. They are the literature of the laughter which comes with good eating, the bon mots of jolly stomachs, the sparkle of centuries of good cheer, the morals of mucous membranes, the religion of healthy livers.

Charles Lamb tells us that roast pig, for instance, was accidentally discovered by the primitive man in the burning of his crude stable in which was a litter of pigs. After that, fires were frequent and log stables few. And I doubt not if the history of every good recipe in this splendid[95] collection were traced to its birth, it would show an unbroken line of progress as clearly defined as Magna Charta.

Think not lightly, then, of the book, for you have in your hand the concentrated perfection of the culinary ages. The dash of Caesar into Briton, the strength of the Dane, the brilliancy of the Norman, the excellency of Angle and Saxon, the glory of the English and the old Scotch. It is history, religion, progress. It is a novel more interesting than all novels, a poem which made Tennyson possible.

I have not read these recipes. I speak from higher authority. I have tasted them. From my infancy up I have known them. They are part of my life and this article returned to them is a feeble result of their cause. They are interwoven with the memory of my home, in the song of the pine tree, in the opal gleam of the old red hills, in the sweetness, the culture, the religion of Marion. And to-night, should Abou Ben Adhem’s Angel come to me and ask for the name of one blessed beyond his dues, I would answer: “It is I, O Angel, blessed beyond words in the mother I had, in the father; blessed in my birthplace, in the people among whom I grew up, in the moral sweetness of their schools and churches, blessed that I was born in

This has become a well-known name among Jersey cattle breeders of the United States and frequently used in advertising strains of blood by the various owners. This is easily accounted for by the high stand taken by Jersey cows owned, developed and bred in Tennessee. Many years ago the pioneer breeders of this favorite dairy breed of cattle, Major Campbell Brown, Judge Thos. H. Malone, M. C. Campbell, M. M. Gardner, and the writer of this article, W. J. Webster, built their herds on a very solid foundation:

First—Constitution and ability to stand long continued high feed.

Second—Richness of milk as well as quantity, but with the goal always centered on production of butter as ascertained by actual test, without any instrument, calculation or guess work. The churn was adopted as a test system.

Third—Beauty, symmetry and general conformity. We early in our course of breeding determined that beauty of cattle should not be ignored, but was an element certainly in the sale. Therefore, Tennessee Jerseys were bred for all these qualities claimed and I do not think that anywhere in the United States a more uniform or more beautiful set of animals could be found.

The Middle Basin of Tennessee is especially adapted to the breeding, rearing and developing of this cow. We have here the elements of the soil entering into the blood of the animal which I think develops them more highly than in any other portion of the United States. We have lime rock and bone phosphate of lime entering into the water they drink, and the bluegrass and other grasses that they eat, corn, oats and hay consumed by them, and also mingled with enough iron so that the very highest opportunities are available for their growth. This thought applies not alone[96] to the Jersey cow but to the whole animal kingdom as evidenced by the fact that some of the finest race horses in the world, either running or pacing horses, have been developed in this Middle Basin of Tennessee. In point of climate we are exceptionally well located, all things considered, about the same as the Isle of Jersey, the original home of the Jersey cow. No wonder then that with the additional advantages of our soil mentioned above the Jersey has developed wonderfully in Tennessee.

The question is sometimes asked why prices have declined the last twelve or fifteen years. My reply is that prices have not declined all over the United States, but that the old breeders have dropped out in Tennessee and that there are now very few breeders in Tennessee paying any attention to the development of the Jersey cow. Recently Messrs. Overton and Gardner, of Nashville, have begun to pay more attention to it and I predict that if this is continued the prices will again rise for they have not fallen in New York and other centers, but the present year sales are higher than they have ever been at auction, as shown by the general average at the Cooper sale of over six hundred dollars per head, a single animal bringing ten thousand dollars and that in a sale of over a hundred animals. So it is not a declining in the prices of the breed cattle but simply a lack of driving their interests in Tennessee.

The system of testing Jerseys and knowing exactly what they were capable of doing did more to develop them than anything else. The American is always an eminently practical man and wants to know what he is doing instead of guessing. The Tennessee breeders inaugurated this test system, Messrs. Campbell Brown, Thos. H. Malone, M. M. Gardner and W. J. Webster having edited the first compilation of test in the United States as a venture of their own and at their own risk and expense; then turned it over to the Club of American Jersey Cattle Breeders, and the work has been continued by the club since that time. Prior to this time tests were reported to newspapers and frequently tests were claimed for ancestors of cattle that subsequent research showed were either tests for one day multiplied by seven, making it an estimate test, or in some instances that they did not exist at all. It therefore required a large amount of labor to run down by correspondence all this and procure from their owners the actual tests, and these were published with the tabulated pedigree of the cow. This work caused a boom in the Jersey family shown to be prominent, and this has continued all along where they were pushed and developed. Tennessee breeders were fortunate in having laid well their foundation as it was based on such cows as Landseer’s Fancy, Oonan, Duchess of Bloomfield, Beeswax, Kate Gordon and other prominent and beautiful cows and it so happened that the cows named possessed all the requisites, constitution, richness and beauty, and no money was spared in heading the herd with such animals as Imported Tormentor, Signalda, Ida’s Stoke Pogis, Gold Basis, Southern Prince and other noted animals too numerous to mention. From these came what is known as the Tennessee Jerseys, possessing constitution, richness and beauty. As proof of the wonderful development of these cows any person who desires to be informed has only to consult the test books in charge of the American Jersey Cattle Club to find that the richest cattle ever bred, owned and developed were in Tennessee: Bisson’s Belle with the yearly test of 1,028 pounds and fifteen ounces, that held the champion cup, was developed in Tennessee; Landseer’s Fancy tested 936 pounds fourteen and three-quarter ounces in one year, was developed in Tennessee and held the cup. She and her descendants are known for their extreme richness: so marvelously rich that they were compelled to demonstrate their ability to make this test again and again, a number of times by official tests, by disinterested committees and verified by chemical analysis.

I could not in this article undertake to give a list of Jersey cows from Tennessee in the honor roll, but only mention a few of the prominent ones: Ethleel the Second, 30 pounds 15 ounces at two and one-half years old; Landseer’s Fancy, 29[97] pounds one-half ounce; Bisson’s Belle, 28 pounds 10 ounces; Toltec’s Fancy, 27 pounds 5½ ounces—this cow was officially tested by the Alabama experiment station and Major Campbell Brown, and her milk analyzed at Vanderbilt University confirms the test showing butter fat 16.32 per cent, equivalent to one pound of butter to 4.79 of milk; Oonan, 22 pounds 2½ ounces; Duchess of Bloomfield, 20 pounds one-half ounce; Cherokee Rose, 23 pounds 10 ounces. And I might continue even from memory, as this article is dictated from memory (no records being before me), and give a long list. But for the purposes of this article it would be useless and simply a compilation that the people would not read, so I only call attention to the fact that the champion cup, a large silver urn costing five hundred dollars, was held only four times in all; twice in Tennessee against the whole United States. But to prove that the Tennessee Jersey has life in any other hands, scattered far and wide over the United States we have only to look at the work of the last great test at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis to show what their descendants have done.

BISSON’S BELLE.

The American Jersey Cattle Club has published a pamphlet giving the work of the Jersey team of twenty-five selected from all over the United States under a committee appointed by the American Jersey Cattle Club which showed no favoritism, but the cows were judged for entrance into this team by preliminary tests at St. Louis and then the team selected by a committee. It ought to be very gratifying to the old breeders in Tennessee to analyze this pamphlet and find that the cattle bred, owned and developed in Tennessee have, through their descendants, put their mark on thirteen of the twenty-five. It certainly is very pleasant to the writer of this to find that Tormentor, owned by Major Campbell Brown, placed his mark on twelve of the twenty-five; Landseer’s Fancy, owned by the writer, on seven; Oonan, six; Toltec’s Fancy, four. Only one other cow in the United States, of co-temporaneous age, competes with them with six, this cow Erotas.

It is also to be noted that No. 1 of the team of twenty-five champion over own team, the champion cow of all breeds at the World’s Fair, is a descendant from cattle owned, bred and developed by old Tennessee breeders. I do not mean, of course, that she is composed entirely of this blood, but she takes her line directly back from Chemical Test bred in Tennessee, son of Toltec’s Fancy, that in turn was daughter of Landseer’s Fancy. So carrying the blood of Tormentor, Landseer’s Fancy and Oonan.

Then permit an old breeder to make the suggestion that what has been done[98] once could be done now even to greater advantage if taken up and the proper amount of energy, zeal and intelligence bestowed upon it. Prices would again revive and Jersey interests in Tennessee would again develop. Why should young breeders of the country neglect the natural advantages we have, backed by experience and the development of the breed already accomplished? I think if there ever was a time that is exceedingly favorable for this industry it is now.

Commencing with Landseer’s Fancy, then giving about thirty pounds of milk per day, which made under test 14 pounds 6 ounces in one week, I fed and developed her through a long series of years, using more and more concentrated food and less bran, until in the end she was capable of digesting two gallons at a feed, equal parts corn and oats, with one-half gallon of bran (pure wheat bran), and when making her maximum amount of butter—29 pounds one-half ounce—was giving only from twenty to twenty-three pounds of milk per day, and subsequently went as low as seventeen or eighteen pounds of milk per day, holding her own with regard to the butter. So it will be seen that from the commencement she lost in quantity of milk, but under such feed gained in butter. Her milk was so remarkably rich as also her daughter, Toltec’s Fancy’s milk, that, for a long time having the test questioned notwithstanding the fact that she had always proven by repeated official tests all claims made for her, finally resorted to glass jars made of heavy glassware wherein her whole milk was placed after each milking and placed under seal as usual in official tests so that when lifted from the water the line of cream and milk would be seen, and it was demonstrated that it was almost entirely cream, being about three-fourths to seven-eighths cream. This cow was exceptional, or I might say, her whole family was exceptional in such remarkable rich production. But she handed down to her descendants the same tendency to richness in other hands long years afterwards. She has two sons with over seventy daughters in the honor roll of the Jerseys, and five daughters all in the fourteen-pound class and upwards, and it would be hard to give a list of her descendants in the fourteen-pound class. I should say something over two hundred. This cow, with others handled by me, was fed according to the capacity of each cow to digest the corn and oats ground together, with grass, hay and running water at will. On this point I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that Tennessee is better located and supplied with running water than any place I have ever seen. With all the bluegrass and other facilities of Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, they lack running water for the cows to drink and the running water to set the milk in.

I have tried every known experiment in raising the cream on the milk for the best results, but in all I have ever tried I have never found anything equal to the stone spring-house with wire gauze over the windows to keep out all insects, ceiled overhead with plank (not plastered), and set the milk in jars, either stone or glass, when first drawn from the cow warm, in the water about 56 to 59 degrees temperature. The temperature of the milk soon becomes the same temperature as the water and remains stationary until all the cream is raised in the milk. The current of water keeps the air in the spring-house fresh and clean and every facility is given for the production of butter.

In building the various spring-houses that I used on the different farms at different times, I always used what is known as the test-room, about six feet wide across the entire spring-house, a wall of brick or stone cemented inside and out, with only one door and window in the same, both of which could be placed under seal by any committee called to test the cattle at any time, or used by myself and manager in making private tests, so that the milk of the cow under test could be kept absolutely untampered with by any person. And the tests made by me were made in this way and verified by various committees and also by chemical analysis. So that when I went out of breeding Jerseys I know that I had more official tests than any[99] Jersey breeder, and probably at one time as much as all combined.

I believe in the theory that especial families of Jerseys are capable of being fed so as to grow richer after long continued feed. Some will not. There is a limit that will be found in nearly all of them.

In testing cattle it was always my purpose to ascertain the maximum of food capable of being digested by any cow under test, and fall slightly below this quantity of feed so as to keep her appetite always whetted.

Another point was that she be fed regularly and preferably, not over twice a day with concentrated foods, and thus giving the stomach all the time to do its work. I have seen many a test disturbed by feeding only a small amount of grain at the dinner time out of order. It disturbs the entire digesting of the animals and will probably throw them off a day or two. When undisturbed, the same cow will come up at night and take her regular feed and not be disturbed in her test at all. It may be thought that this is going into detail too much, but small details sometimes have wonderful influence in handling any animal. A horse may be just on edge for a race and some small circumstance occur that disturbs it. So with the wonderful mechanism of the cow making her four pounds of butter per day, she must be handled very carefully.

But it may be said, what profit is there in all this? My reply is that if Landseer’s Fancy had not been tested as she was and thoroughly developed her descendants might have passed unnoticed and we would have been none the wiser as to the capabilities of this family. I have taken her as an instance because more familiar with her history than others, and because she was the hub around which the herd revolved. I paid $175 for her, and, on calculation of her descendants owned by me and sold to others, she realized nearly $30,000 without any calculation as to her milk and butter. She entered into and formed the web and woof of what was known as The Columbia Jersey Cattle Company’s herd. She was sold subsequently when that corporation was wound up to Messrs. Webster and Morrow and entered the great herd at Nashville.

This Columbia Jersey Cattle Company organized with a capital stock of $20,000, paid a dividend of 14 per cent or over per annum, and the stock was retired at par with all debts paid; one of the most successful of all Jersey cattle enterprises I was ever in. I think the last year, with about thirty working cows and the dairy receipts of thirty-six hundred dollars and over and the sales of calves and cattle from the herd, with the herd products and heifers added, was something over ten thousand dollars.

It was then located at Indian Camp Springs, about three miles from Columbia and an ideal place for a spring-house, the spring being about fifty nine feet above the spring-house and coming to the spring-house through a four inch pipe, but the water had to be cut off so that it would run slowly into the spring-house, and when we wanted to work the butter in the churn it would be turned on into the hose and the butter thoroughly washed.

Young breeders cannot adopt a better formula for feed than the one I have suggested, which is cheap also in the long run, for it is a farm product and it is not necessary to buy on the market, but it can be produced on the farm. Besides this, no cow will stand commercial feed as she will this corn and oats in equal parts. It is nearer suited to nature and she can stand this feed longer without injury than any commercial food. When I say corn and oats in equal parts I mean bushel for bushel mixed and ground together. If any one will think a minute there is nothing deleterious in this food. You can get it absolutely pure, whereas if you go to market to buy bran to feed the cattle on you do not know what you are getting, sometimes the sweeping of the mill floor and any old waste the miller is pleased to throw off. The Jersey breeder ought essentially to be a farmer and raise on his own farm what his herd consumes and thus market the products of the farm.

A PRAIRIE CHICKEN HUNT IN NORTH DAKOTA.

By Trotwood.

Every citizen of this great republic should travel over his own country. He will be amazed at its greatness, and his prejudices and local conceits, if he have any breadth at all, will grow fewer the further he goes, and learns that the world cares nothing for the petty environments and embroilments of his own bailiwick.

The most attractive country in the Northwest is the great prairies of the Dakotas. I thought I had some idea of their immensity, of their greatness, until for one solid day and night I raced across them by fast express, and saw by day the pillar of their cloud of smokestacks—for it was harvest time—on each side, as far as the boundless horizon, and each cloud a thresher from whose funnel poured the wheat of the nation.

There is something in mere land to me—any kind of land—soil, you may call it—dirt—I care not what. But I love it just as I hate brick walls and city pavements. There is something about it, from the rocks and hills to the level, plowed valleys, that is clean and good. It means independence and honesty and clean living. It may not mean shrewdness and polish and that smart education which comes from living by one’s wits in a great walled-in home of wits, but it means independence and the rest that made Shakespeare.

When I saw the Dakotas, I wondered how the white man had stayed away from them as long as he had. Perhaps it were better for the staying, starving, striving quality of our forefathers that this grand garden spot of the Northwest lay hid between the mountains and the sea, instead of stretching up and down the coast. It were better for their children that fathers should toil in sand and flint. It puts flint into the children—steel—gameness—the spirit to do.

One generation of striving poverty makes flint; two, steel; three, well, you have heard of Andrew Jackson, of Lincoln, perhaps. Study the poverty of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.

The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?

And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. They should learn—they must learn—that, as the making of money is the lowest of all human talents—the talent of self first, which is the lowest instinct of all life—so is its talent for getting the lowest, meanest of all talents. “All my life,” says Edison, “I have been trying to keep away from mean people who make money.”

Fargo I found to be a beautiful and prosperous city, and the soil of the country around it, as it had been for two hundred miles, truly a glory and an inspiration. If this land had the climate of the South it could feed the world. As it is, Nature, who adjusts herself to environments, acts quickly here, and I was surprised at the stories of its productiveness in the short season it had. Nay, mine own eye beheld it, for never had I seen such wheat, barley and small grain, such cabbage, beets, turnips, vegetables of all kinds.

There was a greatness and vastness everywhere. As far as the eye could see, even beyond the rim of the horizon, it was vast—vast. And that always affects me peculiarly. After I have seen as far as the eye will reach, I become homesick. I have a sacred, sad longing[101] to see and go farther and uplift the veil.

I rejoiced in the fact that there were no trees, no high hills, nothing to break the great canvas of vastness—a bivouac of eternity dotted with millions of camps of wheat shocks, fringed with the splendor of a vast, pure sky, and framed in the purpling splendor of a horizon of blue and gold. The little ten acre lots of dwarf trees the Government has forced the settlers to plant, I liked them not. They were warts, merely, on the brow of Eternity. The great, rich, boundless, beautiful prairies were there as God had Intended them to be—Nature’s handiwork, with splendid harmony in its whole.

No picture ever painted has equalled it—for Nature never makes a mistake in her pictures. She never sticks a bunch of dwarf trees where the great, grand prairies should roll away.

There is but little difference between the Dakota prairies and the ocean. The difference is that only between the imagination and the fact. And looking over them, standing in them, seeing the ceaseless waves rippling across the seas of wheat or the white caps come spinning from the uplifted heads of them, again and again I caught myself repeating Byron’s lines:

Lisbon is a beautiful little town, and one comes upon it so suddenly it is a surprise. For hours nothing but the grand, great prairies, billowed in wheat waves, smoke-plumed with thresher stacks. Then down you go into a beautiful valley—the valley of the Cheyenne, and nestling on its banks clean, church-spired, sits this up-to-date town.

I landed in good luck there, for I had anticipated the pleasure of meeting old friends and relatives—a cousin whom my mother had reared and who to me had always been a sister—but I had the additional good luck to fall into the hands of Mr. Geo. W. Ferguson, the county treasurer, and the owner of Raymond S. by Montevideo, the handsomest young trotting sire it has been my good fortune to see in any State. And I found the blooded stock interest alive and growing in all that section, and surely no place under the skies has a better license to rear them. In the hands of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. W. B. Stone, the county game-warden, I realized one of the dreams of my life—a prairie chicken shoot. If you have never indulged in one, go a thousand miles to Dakota—and every year will find you wanting to go again. It was a bright, crisp morning in September, and Mr. Stone’s beautiful setter bitch was good and fit. I had been out early to see some threshers at work in the wheat, and a little shower coming up I had gotten wet. This in the South would have meant two hours’ dampness, and a cold, but imagine my surprise, in a short while, to find the ground dry and myself with it, very dry! In the rarefied air of this great country I do not believe one can get wet unless he is foolish enough to drink water.

Mr. Ferguson met me later with his surrey and two spanking red-sorrel trotting mares, as well bred as Raymond S, and away we went across the prairie after the chickens. The ride itself was pleasure enough—forever going through that beautiful black loam, as tempting to the eye of the man who loves the soil as a cobwebbed bottle or a fat capon to the stomach of a priest. For it was bespangled with red berries, ripe heads of flax, golden stubbles of wheat and oats and barley, red grasses finer than ever bluegrass grows to be and richer than all tame blades.

My first covey is pictured forever in my mind. The bitch came to a staunch[102] stand near a low, marshy place, where the grass was blue green and studded with fall flowers. On all sides were shocks of wheat, and away in the distance the interminable smokestacks of busy threshers. I walked up and took it all in—I stamped the picture forever on my mind. I wanted it there that I might always see it—the very clouds, the distant horizon, the golden stubble-blades, the very silence that hangs like a benediction over the land. And all over it and above everything that beautiful Llewellyn bitch, frozen in living marble before me.

“Is it possible,” I thought, “that nothing is between these birds and me but the air?” No pines of Alabama and Mississippi, no thickets on the creeks of Louisiana, no wooded lots and big hills of Tennessee, no barb-wire fence with hideous signs stuck up warning me that some hog lived there on posted land? All my life I had shot quail under those conditions. Now—now—nothing but me and the pure, clear air and the boundless, rolling prairies and that dog of marble waiting for the word, to flush a dozen prairie hens squatting in the stubble ready to rise with a cyclone’s rush on wings of thunder. I stood frozen—like the dog. I could not move. My heart beat like a race-horse in the back stretch, making me take long breaths and swallow hard as I came to the hunter’s attention. Then!—

Never arose before mortal man so thrilling a sight. They sucked me forward like the gust of a passing express, like the roar of a wind storm, like the burst of sun from a cloud, thunder-lined. The earth of stubble quivered to their wings of thunder and the air pulsed like a man-of-war when the big guns bellow to port.

But I did not forget to fire—oh, no! Man is a killing animal by instinct, and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is up and his stomach is at stake. Yes, I fired—once—twice—and I shot to kill. Two beautiful ones I picked with lightning glance from the splendid covey—two glorious ones that fairly split the air in the wild joy of escape, only suddenly to—

Well, “the rest is silence,” as Shakespeare said, when Hamlet died, and it is the same death that will come to you and me—the end will be just as sudden, whether we fall in the mid-day of life or fall to the slow fever of age. They fell but ten feet apart and I walked up and looked down on them—the proud, beautiful creatures now limp and lifeless.

I took them up and fondled them—I wanted to kiss them, they were so quiet now and warm, still splendid in death.

Mr. Stone had killed his brace also, but being more experienced, had shot them farther off.

“You killed yours too close,” he said, as I stood fondling the limp and beautiful birds. “You should have waited up to fifty yards or seventy.”

“Yes,” I said, “you see it is my quail hunting instinct. I had my first lesson in shooting quail in the pine woods of Alabama, and let me tell you, I laughed, it may be wrong, but it’s dead easy killing those big, beautiful hens. Honestly, except for their lightning flight I thought I was shooting at Tennessee guineas.”

Mr. Stone laughed: “You wait and see,” he said.

“Why, if you want to know what real shooting is,” I went on, “you just get up a covey of piny wood quail, where every mother’s chick of them is taught from his pipping moment to place a pine tree between him and a load of shot, and do it in the first twenty feet. You have got to shoot quick.”

We had walked away across the stubble to where they had gone down, scattered. Suddenly—

“There they are,” said my companion. As we came on the bitch frozen again.

“Now, you first,” said Mr. Stone, kindly, “it’s a single bird.”

Up went the bird with his thunder of wings. I don’t know how it happened—I can’t see how it happened to this day. I think I was thinking of Alabama quail or Tennessee “patterges,” as Old Wash calls them, but when I fired and the great game cock went on about his business, I got busy seeing what ailed[103] my gun, and wondering why we always fall down about the time we think we are mounted on as many legs as a centipede. Mr. Stone was too polite to refer to my previous remarks, and I watched the big fellow sail away with more respect for the sport.

A little further on the Llewellyn again stood, and this time it was my companion’s first shot. And here is where I did a shameless thing—but I couldn’t help it, to save my life.

Up went the bird, and I saw the old hunter throw up his gun. I listened for the report, but on sailed the bird, fairly eating space—on—on—fifty—sixty—seventy yards.

My fingers itched, my arms jerked upward, my gun jumped to my shoulder. “Great heavens,” I thought, “the bird is gone! His gun won’t fire”—

The report of my gun and the collapse of the bird came just a second before his.

He looked around astonished. “Pray forgive me,” I said. “I have acted the hog, but I was sure something was the matter with your gun.”

He laughed: “I was just waiting for it to get a little farther away.”

After that I shot them farther off, and by noon we had eleven beauties, filling up the front of our surrey, upon which my eye feasted in delight.

We decided we had enough, and towards evening we drove across the cooling, sweet grasses to a group of pretty little lakes or ponds in the hollow depression of the land. These we found literally covered with Spoonbills, Teal, Mallard and Red-heads, and then we had sport royal and of another kind. They were wary, though, very; and we had to crawl on our stomach for a quarter of a mile to get to them, Mr. Stone on the far side, to fire first and send them over me. And when his gun sounded once, twice, here they came toward me, I lying flat in the grass. I picked two big ones leading the flock, knowing if I didn’t get the kings I’d get the knights and pawns behind them. I didn’t get the king, but down tumbled a Red-head, a Mallard—one—two—three—four! Good heaven! Did I kill all of them? I saw smoke drifting across my left. Mr. Stone had turned his old Winchester repeater on them, also, and so I gave him credit for everything but the redhead, for I shot at him. This was our sport—from one lake to another, until we had shot enough, and the ride home across the starlit prairies and under the cool, bracing air of that boundless, glorious country.

Can you not see how two days of that kind of sport is worth all drunken yacht trips, and all the heart-breaking, dust-killing automobile rides in the world? You feel it bodily and spiritually for years, and remember it with pleasure all your life.

So here’s to the grand Dakotas and their hospitable people and their splendid birds!

The Philosopher reasons and says it cannot be done. The Doer tries and does.

There is no subject which is of more vital interest to the South and to the whole world than successful cotton culture. In spite of the repeated claims to the contrary, in which every now and then it is predicted that certain areas in Africa, India, China and South America will be devoted to cotton, the fact remains that that strip of country lying on the map of the Southern part of the United States is the finest cotton belt in the world, and so far absolutely the only large body of land that has ever produced year in and out any very great amount of the fleece. That it will continue to be the world’s field for cotton for centuries remains clearly proven, not only because of its adaptability but because upon it live an intelligent and industrious branch of the great white race, to guide and direct and work and this race of people have the best labor in the world to assist—the negro.

In the early days this great cotton plantation, as the South might almost be called, suffered greatly from careless and improvident cultivation in which the rich soil lost much that might have been kept in it. The great thing now is to reclaim and build up and at the same time produce cotton for the steadily increasing demand, which is more as each year goes by. With these preliminary remarks, and the further one that I cannot better illustrate my subject than to quote my own personal experience and with apology for the personal tenor of this paper, I shall give to others the benefits of my limited success.

However, in every profession of life, each aspirant strives for golden results, and as I feel that my harvests for the past few years have increased several fold, perhaps the practical farmer may benefit some one.

In 1895 I purchased my farm containing about 200 acres. At that time the natural resources of the soil were almost completely exhausted, the produce from one acre being about one-third of a bale when planted to cotton. I realized there was no money from so small a yield as that so determined first to try to restore the impoverished soil—the soil which for fifty years had been planted in cotton. The clean culture that cotton requires had exhausted the humus from the soil, and it’s almost impossible to make any money on cotton grown on such soil. I decided that rotation of crops was the best and cheapest way of restoring this soil. I divided my land into four fields, fencing each field with wire. No. 1 I used for a permanent pasture. No. 2 I planted in cotton. No. 3 half in corn, the other half in oats, followed by peas. No. 4 I used as a temporary pasture, thereby giving the soil a much needed rest. Don’t be afraid to do this; the cattle and hogs sold from it will pay you some rent, and in the improvement of your land lies the increase of your bank account. Having started this rotation, I have kept it up, letting cotton follow corn and oats, corn and oats follow temporary pasture, and pasture following cotton. Could you see the result you would say with me that rotation is the keynote to successful cotton culture. Occasionally a farmer will have the seasons very favorable and make a good crop on land deficient in humus, but what we are striving for is to make a paying crop every year. This restoration of humus is a wonderful safeguard against excessive wet or dry weather. Stable manure supplies this much-wanted humus, but our supply is very limited; from the number of stock required to work this amount of land we get only enough to cover three or four acres. But we farmers have to acquire patience, anyway. Take your field that has been planted in corn, oats and peas, as soon as the stock has finished up what the mower left (we save all the pea vines we can for feed). Now, turn under all stubble with a two-horse plow. If this is well done, it will decompose before planting time, if you finished with the plowing early enough, thereby adding much humus to the soil, as well as nitrogen stored there by the pea crop. The custom is to break this land flat, but I prefer to lay mine off in beds from the[105] first. My land is now bedded, and it is about time to commence planting. My fertilizer distributor is started about two days ahead of my cotton planter. The fertilizer is put in drill not over three or four inches deep, and is to be followed by a harrow. Now, get the best cotton seed. I use what I consider the best. I won’t tell you of its many good qualities for fear you will think this an advertisement. After the cotton has come up to a good stand, start the plows to barring it off. As soon as you have finished barring put on little sweeps and run close to the plants. This leaves them on a very narrow ridge and a good hand will chop from one to one-half acres more per day than he would on a bar. Push the chopping, and follow immediately, if possible, with plows, dirting the cotton up with sweeps. In ten days’ time, or less, if it rains, go over again with hoes, taking out every other hill and putting it to a stand. These two workings with the hoe will cost very little more than to have put it to a stand at first and the cotton will be in much better shape. Strive to plow over every ten days until you see the first open boll. Guard against plowing too wet. After rains wait until the soil crumbles. In cultivating I use a double foot with two 14-inch sweeps, going twice to the row, until the first of July. After that I use a 28 or 30-inch wing sweep. I generally go over my crop with the hoes twice after it is put to a stand. In dry seasons once is generally sufficient. By all means keep ahead of the grass. It will injure your cotton and cost you more in the end to clean it out. You see my advice is to rotate. Come, walk over my fields with me and see my cotton, in places growing more than a bale per acre, where a few years ago the yield was about one-fourth of a bale, and you will say with me, “Help nature, give her back her natural elements, and she will return you a harvest of gold.”

There have been many definitions of poetry ranging all the way from the well-known Englishman’s definition, “A criticism of human life,” to that given by one of the most original of all poets, Poe, “the rhythmical creation of beauty.” That was merely as these two men saw it, or had the poetic principle developed in them—the first, practically; the second in all the rythmical beauty and sensuousness and indefinable mistiness of the immortal “Raven.”

It is quite plain that no definition can be given of poetry that would apply to all poetry or even to the poetic principle. No more than can be given a definition of love, or the sweet character of the Christ, or of God, or of eternity. Each true poem, like the keys of a piano, may awake a different chord, and every one perfect. To attempt to define the poetic principle would be like attempting to sound the depths of our immortal souls, the very spirit of eternal life, a depth as varied as humanity—in some, as deep as the valleys in the ocean’s bed, in other “ending in shallows and in miseries.” I believe it was Mendelssohn who said there were two things mortal man should not attempt to define—“God Almighty and Thorough-Base-and-Harmony.”

Poetry is the music of the intellect and, therefore, like the musical principle, is indefinable. But what are some of its attributes?

First of all, real poetry is true, and absolutely a part of our souls, our experience, ourselves, our most positive beliefs. At first it may not be readily understood by us—a fact in itself which should warn us not to be too hasty in condemning it, because that very fact may show it has touched on a higher, not a lower plane than the plane we are on, and that we must climb to it, not drag it down to us. Such is the poetry of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley and Browning. And you who say you cannot read poetry, and who have had your taste destroyed for[106] true poetry by newspaper jingle, which lies at one extreme, and magazine poetry, which lies at the other, and both of which are more often false than true, let me ask you before you give up, to read some of the real poetry from each of the authors above before saying again that you cannot love poetry. Read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Tennyson’s “The Princess,” Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” In these, as in all true poetry, though all of it may not be fully grasped at first, there is an indefinable something that touches us and makes us wish to read it again and again until, having tuned our own souls to the key of its beauty we stand elevated, instructed, sweetened, strengthened, blessed!

The true poem, like the true poet, has a mission to perform and should go right to the heart of it—no beating around the bush, no mental pyrotechnics, no flowery words to sweeten and weaken it, no “churning about to get up a foam,” no intellectual mistiness, but the simple laying of the hands on the eyes of the blind! For every poet is also a preacher, and the greatest of all preachers. And if it fails to perform its mission, if it does not sound its chord, and that clearly, but a mere jingling of pretty bells, it is no more a poem than a dancing harem girl, with silver bells, bracelets and anklets on her, is a woman. Every poem that has ever lived lived because it filled a mission; and all those that have died, died because they had none to fill. “The Psalm of Life,” “Highland Mary,” “Evelyn Hope,” “Thanatopsis”—these and hundreds of others, short as they are, came with a mission and, finding it, performed it, and each of the above, with the lesson it teaches, is a statue in the temple of fame and will stand there for all times as clearly and distinctly as Washington, Bruce, Nelson or Jackson.

Let us not judge poetry, then, by the two false extremes in which we meet it most often—newspapers and magazines—and the two which have caused so many to form unfavorable opinions of poetry. Forgetting that rhyme is not poetry, and that a poem is the product of life, the newspaper poet tries to jingle one out every day. He might as well try to live his year in a day! Clipped by some thoughtless editor, who uses his shears as recklessly as he does his spleen, and who clips as he writes—to fill space—the newspaper poet mistakes even this for ephemeral fame and like a howling dervish continues to dance around the circle to the monotonous music of his tom-tom; while the magazine fellow, after months of laborious travail, brings forth an intellectual mouse. Posterity will indict the first of these for false pretenses, and hang the other for downright murder. But like the thief and the murderer of old, the punishment of one will not bring back the good opinion of poetry to those from whom he has filched it, nor will the lynching of the other give back to the world the life of Art after the murderer has taken it.

Imagine Robert Burns, having made a reputation with his “Highland Mary,” and filled with the newspaper’s idea of his art, grinding out another poem every few days to the Scotch lassie his genius immortalized. Posterity would hate him. Think of Shelley, for ten dollars a week, “trying his hand again on the ‘Skylark.’” And yet this is what many so-called modern newspaper poets try to do.

The truth is, the true poet, like the mocking bird, never sings twice on the same note, but in that song he exhausts his soul. It is only the jaybird who sings the same thing every day and imagines it is a new song.

I do not mean by the above criticism that real genius may not now and then appear in newspapers. In fact, more of it—much more—appears there than in magazines, being often the bursting of a wild rose in the meadow into full bloom and giving its perfume to the world without pay and without knowledge of its own sweetness. But as the wild rose cannot bloom every day in the year, so have I never yet seen two newspaper gems in one year by the same poet. And those that appear, written quickly, and apparently thoughtlessly, yet are they the product of years of sweet growth of unconscious development, of work, imperceptibly wrought out, but, like the coral castle beneath the sea, as perfect and as beautiful.

But as between the newspaper and the[107] magazine poet, give me the former—for now and then he writes a poem, but the magazine poet—seldom! The first-named is often a true poet, and my only objection to him is that he lowers the standard of his art, he desecrates his high calling by a too often, too feeble, and a too familiar attempt; but the magazine poems, after years of reading them, I am constrained to believe that, with few exceptions, they are utterly devoid of even the poetic principle. Their authors not only would not know a poem if they met one in the road, but they could not read one if an angel of light would write it with a diamond-pointed star on the windows of heaven!

Poetry need not rhyme, it need not be written in verse, even; and the simple test of it all is, does it awaken some chord in you that uplifts?

“Boss,” said Old Wash the other night, “I have got ter hol’ a zamination over in my deestrick for skule teecher, an’ I wisht you’d write out de questions for me.”

I knew that the old man was the moving spirit in educational and religious matters in his end of the county and that he holds an examination now and then among the colored applicants, and none of them may teach or preach unless the old man passes on their papers.

After much work I wrote a list of questions suitable, as I thought, for such an occasion and read them to the examiner.

“Deys all right, boss, ’cept one thing. Jes write de answers dar, too. It’s a po’ teecher dat ain’t got his ansers as well as his questuns. An’ I’d lak for you ter go along, too, jes ter see me squelch dem smart Ike niggers dat think dey kno’s it all.”

On the day appointed there were three applicants. One was a pompous looking darky with a knack of saying things grandly and using big words. I named him Pompey. Number two was a sanctimonious looking fellow who knew it all. He was a newly fledged preacher. Number three was a knowing-looking, sly soon, with less book sense, but more mother wit than the others. He looked like a slick one.

Nothing pleased the old man more than to show off his own learning and he quickly caught on to Pompey’s gait—going him, in fact, one better. Slowly and with great dignity he pulled out his roll of manuscript, adjusted his big, iron-rimmed spectacles, and squelched them all in the beginning with the flow of language:

“Now, I’m gwine ax you all a few supernumerous questions, calk’lated to disembody de fundermentalerties of yore onderstandin’ an’ de posserbilerties of yore interlects for impartin’ informashun. An’ I want you all to chirp right out as peart as jay-birds on a Friday.”

There is a negro superstition to the effect that all jay-birds go to a place unmentionable on Friday and carry sand to his Satanic majesty. I wondered If it was a hint of what the old man had coming for them.

Adjusting his glasses again, the old man said to the preacher:

“Whut is jog’erfy?”

The answer came back glibly and without a flaw:

“Jog’erfy is de science of de earth an’ de art of navergashun.”

This was said in such a matter of fact, positive tone that I almost caught my breath. But I soon learned that all their answers, right or wrong, came with the same assurance and without a quiver. The old man squinted one eye and said:

“Den I s’pose you’d say a coon-dog was de science ob coon-killin’ an’ de art ob barkin’. I turns you down on dat. Nex’!”

“Jog’erfy,” said Pompey, “Jog’erfy! Brer Washington, ain’t dat got sumpin’ to do sorter lak a narrer neck jinin’ two dem-johns of lan’, sorter lak an’ so forth or sumpin lak it?”

“Wal, it may smell ob de jug a leetle,”[108] said the old man, “but it don’t gine de demi-john to de extent ob pullin’ out de cork. Nex’.”

“Jog’erfy,” said the Slick One, “is de art ob joggin’ and de science ob gwine round circles.”

This set the old man to thinking. He scratched his head and inspected the candidate closely. “Ain’t you de nigger dat use ter swipe old Hal P’inter when he went to de races?”

“Yassir.”

“Wal, dat ain’t zactly right, but it’s got mo’ sense in it dan anything dat’s been sed, an’ I’ll give you ten, as you seem to have sum hoss sense in yore make-up.”

Fortunately I was where I could lean back behind the blackboard and save the dignity of the examination. For all this had been said with a dignity and earnestness that was appalling, and not the slightest trace of humor appeared in their voices.

“How am Tennessee bounded?” he asked Pompey.

“She’s bounded by straight lines makin’ a parallellogram inclinin’ in a right angle,” said Pompey, knowingly.

The old man scratched his jaw and passed it to the Preacher. The answer came back glibly:

“Tennessee am bounded on de north by Kaintucky an’ de rory-bory Alice, on de east by de Great Smoky mountains, on the west by Mt. Pelee an’ on de south—”

The old man brought his fist down indignantly. “Ef we’re bounded on all dem sides by de things you say dar ain’t but one thing dat can nachully bind us on de south an’ dat am hell! You may know a whole lot about dat place but you don’t kno’ a little bit about jog’erfy. Lemme see whut you all kno’ ’bout hist’ry.”

He slowly studied out the next question:

“Relate de causes leadin’ to de Riverlushunary war.”

“De circumnavigatin’ cause ob de Riverlushunary war,” said Pompey glibly, “was de extenshun ob de Equater too far into de Gulf stream, endangerin’ de tail ob de British Umpire.”

The old man sadly shook his head and passed it to the Swipe.

“I can’t jes zactly spress it kordin’ to book larnin’,” said the Swipe, “but it was sorter lak dis: We drawed de pole an’ axed for a squar race, but England fouled us on de fus’ turn an’ got us in a pocket on’ de half. We run into her, cut her down an’ won as we pleased.”

“Go head,” said the old man proudly. “Hal P’inter sho’ done lamed you sumpin’.”

This put the Swipe at the head. He scratched his chin, made eyes at the others and licked out his tongue.

“Who was Maj. Andre?” slowly spelled out the old man.

The Preacher thought he was one of the Disciples and Pompey, after much thought, said he was the man who went over Niagara in a barrel. The Swipe wasn’t sure, but after a while his face lit up with a broad smile and he said:

“Unc. Wash, wan’t he a British ringer dat got unkivered an’ ruled off at de West P’int meetin’? ’Twas a close heat an’ he lost by a neck.”

“De very man,” said the old man enthusiastically. “I tell you, sonny, if you keep up dis clip, you’ll break in all de colts in dis deestrick.” The Swipe smiled and sat up higher in the sulky. The old man studied his manuscript carefully and propounded:

“Describe de battle ob Shiloh.”

“Dat’s easy,” said the Preacher smiling. “It was a hard-fit fight in which Shiloh got killed.”

“Oh, he did,” said the old man, wrathfully. “I guess de nex’ thing you’ll be tryin’ to teach de ole man dat at de battle ob de Nelson, de Nile fell offen his hoss. Nex’, whut you say?”

“Dat ar battle wus a dead heat ’twixt Gen. Grant an’ Johnsing, wan’t it, Unc. Wash?”

“Sonny,” said the old man proudly, “I’m beginnin’ to think I orter resign an’ let you ax dese questions. I didn’t kno’ dar was so much hoss sense in hist’ry.”

“What am de princerpal organ ob circulation?” spelled out the old man.

Pompey thought a long time and thought it was the liver. The Preacher threw up his hand and a knowing smile went over his face.

“What am it, den?” asked the teacher.

“De hat,” shouted the candidate.

“Es dat’s de fust time you’ve come[109] nigh it I’ll give you ten on dat,” said the old man, “but I think de P’inter boy can do better yet.”

“De princerpal organ ob circulashun,” said the Swipe, “am de little silver cartwheel dat is stamped wid de eagle.”

“Sunny,” said the old man, “you have sho’ been in de hoss bisness for some good. Now you Preacher man, whut was de greatest trade of England?”

“De trade-wind,” came back promptly.

“Trade yore grandmammy’s black cat,” said the old man, wrathfully. “What wind got to do wid dis deestrick skule? You ’pear to be mighty windy yo’se’f. Nex’.”

“Wan’t dat de Pennsylvania whisky resurrecshun’?” timidly asked Pompey.

The old man glared at him. The Swipe held up his hand, and when the old man nodded, he said:

“De princerpal trade, Unc. Wash? ’Pears to me it was when ole Richard tried to trade his kingdom for a good hoss.”

“Wal,” said the old man, “tain’t down zactly dat way in my book, but I’m gwine give you de certificate, fur it ’pears lak you de only nigger on dat bench dat’s got enny hoss sense an’ dat’s de main thing in skule teachin.”

TROTWOOD.

He was a Pharisee. He was also a scribe—a lawyer. And he stood up to tempt the Master. He would show this throng gathered about the Lord that their alleged prophet was only a cheap schemer—a designing Galilean playing upon their ignorance and credulity.

“Rabbi (patronizingly), what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Let us reason together and come to first principles: What do you make of the primal law? Just the old question of the Pharisee—the classic question of the legalist in every age of the world. There is a double blunder in this age-worn question. They belong to that class of blunders which have just enough truth in their midst to give them a species of eternal life, and self perpetuative power.

The first blunder is an assumption—that in doing alone depends an entrance into the kingdom of heaven. What shall I do—what shall I do? Never what shall I be? It is so much easier to do than to be—that it is not a thing for wonder that our poor warped human nature should prefer to beat out a path of merit and morals to the kingdom rather than submit the will. “Do this and live” is its password and shibboleth—never the “live and do this” of the Master.

“Ye must be born again” is something alike repulsive to the pride of reason and the pride of life. And yet there is nothing more certain than this—no one of us shall ever see the kingdom of God without such a radical birth change in our heart of hearts as shall give all our doing a new meaning and color. Is it not a strange blunder for man to make when it appears in the very question itself? We cannot do things to inherit—we must be sons to inherit.

The second blunder is an assumption also. It appears in the tone of the questioner. The tone implies, Rabbi, am I not doing enough already? Am I not doing all that is necessary. I give alms of all that I possess. I fast twice in the week. My life is clean in the sight of the law—“Thank God, I am not as other men are”—as that disciple of yours there, for instance. What further shall I do or can I do to inherit eternal life? What lack I yet or the existing church of God? In so far as you are teaching anything new it must be false, and anything old is it not unnecessary? Why then all this stir you are making throughout the land?

The Master’s reply is very simple. He takes this self-sufficient sinner on his own ground: “How readest thou the law?” Since this is your trust and hope, what do you make of it? The lawyer replies glibly enough: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,[110] with all thy soul, with all thy might and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thy self.” The Saviour replies: “Thou hast answered right; do this and thou shalt live.” But there is such an emphasis upon the “do” this that a dead silence falls. The lawyer grows uncomfortable, and begins to hedge. Had he this “done?” But it is evident that the less said upon the first table of the law the better. There is more hope of the second. So says the record: “And willing to justify himself, he asks,” “And who is my neighbor?” Do you not see that this is a broken sentence? It is preceded by a bit of very hurried thinking. I have been good to my family—to those about me—my next of kin—my set. It all depends upon this “who is my neighbor.” “And who is my neighbor?”

The answer is only a parable, but a parable whose meaning when once caught and practiced shall change our world beyond the recognition of even the angels of heaven. It will make this poor, weary, burdened earth to blossom as the rose; shall make all our desert like the garden of the Lord. It shall become the universal solvent for all problems arising from man’s relation to man. It will stop every war before noon to-morrow.

Then shall the lion of capital and the lamb of labor lie down together, and neither shall be afraid, neither shall there be any more strikes, nor walking delegates; no more epidemics of hate; no more vipers to hiss their slander or trail their slime. “Then shall every battle flag be furled in the parliament of nations, the federation of the world.”

Wherever there lies the wounded and helpless by the wayside of life, wheresoe’er in the world there shall spring to the rescue some strong son of God armed to the teeth with wine and oil for the wound and the sword of the Lord and of Gideon for the assassin, our right worshipful dollar shall change its meaning and its face—its eagle shall have the olive branch in its mouth. It shall become a health certificate for the sick, a help certificate for the needy, even though they be not our next of kin.

This parable has wrapt up in it the one remedy for the race with which to work out its salvation from man’s inhumanity to man.

Oh, this is a dream, the over statement of an enthusiast’s heated fancy. If it be so, then farewell to our hope of civilization. Its permanence will depend upon its obedience to this, its supreme law. It is no dream. Everywhere before your very eyes is it unfolding—unfolding an asylum for the helpless, hospitals for the sick, charitable institutions of every type are reaching out their arms all over the world for earth’s stricken ones—its motherless and helpless. You pessimists do not believe in humanity, nor do I, but I believe in humanity’s Christ, and I know He is breathing into His own utterance the law that is to redeem the whole earth. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And who is my neighbor? We have been saying all the time with this narrow Jewish lawyer, He is my fellow-Jew; he is akin to me—a man of my nation, and my neighborliness, diminishing with the square of the distance, vanishing altogether when he is out of sight.

Well, I tell you, this is not the Master’s, although very similar. His definition has just two definite terms, and two only—a certain man, and, to die unless someone helps him. A nameless man of a nameless land, and wholly desperate. All else is indefinite—a certain man. Was he a Jew? No answer. Was he stranger from the Perean hills beyond Jordan? No answer. Was he a merchantman from the isles of the sea returning with his Damascus purchases via Jerusalem and Joppa? No answer. Was he a good man? No answer. A man of means, or poor, with a dependent family? No answer. Was it not wrong of him to venture through so dangerous a region, and alone? No answer. Was it not foolhardy of him not to yield his goods and without a struggle? No answer.

All that enters into the Saviour’s definition is the fact that he was a man, a helpless, wounded man, and to die[111] unless someone comes to him and ministers to his desperate need.

Now, here is the definition and the picture of our neighbor, a picture whose lights and shadows shall never vary while the world shall last. This is the man whom Jehovah solemnly committed to his people in every age of His church. O land of Pharisees, O scribe and lawyer, ever since the days of Abel this man has been your charge and ward. How sayest thou, I have loved my neighbor as myself? How sayest thou, I have kept the commandment of God, when thou has walled thyself off in national barriers and hath built walls of caste and prejudice between thyself and him? How sayest thou, I have loved my neighbor as myself, when thou hast stopped thine ears and shut thine eyes and stalked on by all those who are lying by the wayside of the Kingdom, dying through all these years of your history and theirs?

This is our neighbor, where are his? We have found him, where shall he find his neighbor? The story of the Good Samaritan is the eternal answer.

Prejudice is the ball and chain of Achievement.

[112]

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.

TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn. Office 161 Fourth Ave. North.

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE,
Editor-in-Chief.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: One Year, $1 00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
Advertising Rates on application.

NASHVILLE, TENN., NOVEMBER, 1905.

THE YELLOW EDITOR.

(After Rudyard Kipling, for Trotwood’s Monthly.)

(A yellow editor has complained to the governor of Minnesota that the warden of the Stillwater penitentiary has refused to allow one of his convicts to subscribe for a certain saffron journal.—News Item.)

Here is a letter from a young man in Wisconsin, one whom I have never met except in that way in which kindred spirits so often meet—by mail. Stricken ere his manhood had scarcely begun, blind, he has never given up, and is making a living and doing good to all around him—one of the best and most useful citizens of his town.

Trotwood believes in this whole country, North and South. He does not believe that either section has all the good or all the bad, but that in both there is far more good than evil and that the[113] only reason why people do not like each other is because they do not know each other. Transportation, the cable, the telegraph, wireless telegraphy and the telephone have changed the face of the world and corralled mankind with wires of steel. Japan is nearer Washington to-day than Boston was fifty years ago. You have more neighbors in Europe than your grandfather had in the county adjoining him. I am publishing this letter hoping my blind friend may find the kind surgeon, and also to show the spirit of our reunited country for which my pen has always and will ever work to cement:

It is time that the flamboyant and flowery, the unreal, was cut out of our oratory and literature. Kill it. Talk straight, think straight, live straight. The flamboyant, the flowery is the product of slavery, of idleness, of high living and no thinking. It is a relic of the past, of feudalism, a mixture of chivalry and unclear thinking. The great poet, the great writer, the great orator is he who talks the greatest good sense. Anything else is the badge of mediocrity. The tendency of everything these strenuous days, from literature to life insurance, is expressed in the phrase: “Get there.” How amusing the efforts of a Tennessee statesman in a recent great occasion, majestically sweeping the heavens with his hands and solemnly proclaiming that “Tennessee had set more stars in the galaxy of glory than all the other States.” Bosh! Tennessee[114] has as many fools to the acre as any other State, and what she should do just now is to set more hens and fewer stars!

People who live with nature soon learn a great deal. The best way to study nature is to get in harmony with the laws of nature. The best advice ever given on longevity was from the cheerful old gentleman who said: “To live long, live naturally, eat what you want and walk on the sunny side of the street.” Children think that some great man made up the horrid rules of grammar, and then all the world learned them and went to talking. They do not know that the world talked first and the rules of grammar were deduced from the talking. From the facts of life we draw our rules.

And Nature is the Great Fact.

I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many thousands—but I noticed it is a fact that the man who works the soil is a natural-born optimist. Let the farmer fail year after year and he still plants, hoping. Let the merchant fail one year and he is badly shaken—one more—another, maybe—and he is done. That is the Fact. Now for the rule: God intended man to love, to cultivate, to cling to the soil. In other words, is not farming man’s natural vocation, since neither drought nor flood nor failure can shut out from his heart that instinct of hoping which has come down to him through centuries of farming fathers?

We—and that means England and America—have used the Jap to fight our battles for us. The issue has been the stopping of the tide of Moscovites across Asia, the killing of their influence in the East, the grasping from covetous hands the yellow empire, richer than mints of yellow gold to the nation that shall supply their wants. That means the open door until Japan decides to close it for the world and that the Muscovite must forever be bound between the Baltic and the North Sea and the ice zone of the Pacific, all of which was necessary. Arrogant and ignorant Russia needed this chastisement. But is it not time to stop? We are chuckling now, but the greatest problem lies before us. Sixteenth century Russia has met twentieth century Japan, and walked from the woods of barbarity into the daylight of a Mauser-swept, mine-entangled, smokeless-plowed field of death. The harvest has been as certain as when the Gauls came out of the woods to meet the steel-sheathed legions of Caesar.

History does not stop at one page. One was made at Port Arthur and the Straits of Japan, now—

“Let China alone,” said Napoleon, “she is a sleeping giant.” The fight has been for China, and the wily Jap, playing on the unfailing cupidity and conquering, grabbing instinct of the Anglo-Saxon, has won. Hereafter China belongs to Japan. Give her just a century to vitalize the nation which, if the world were stood in a line, would count every fourth fighter as hers, and the white race will face the problem of its existence. At Portsmouth recently, when the Sabbath came, the Russian went to church. The Jap only laughed, and voted to work on. Shintoism knows no Sunday, no soul, no to-morrow, no eternity. Shintoism is blind chance pitched against the barb-wire of blind unbelief.

It is time to see clearly—to turn. We have conquered our own kin with a soulless, smiling, ghost-born being who is far-sighted and will yet make our children wonder why we gave him a Mauser for posterity. As for us, we will always be for the white man and the Christian.

Trotwood’s Monthly has installed a new feature in magazine management. We call him Jonah. He is a bright boy who does things around the editorial room. They are not always done right, but when he finishes with them we are willing to aver that they are always done. One of his duties is to read all of the poetry submitted—and it is coming in with a rush—condemn the bad and pass the good up to Trotwood for final judgment. Here are his comments on an execrable batch of it sent in under the title of “Piping Lays” by a good, sweet,[115] but sadly misguided being, whose name begins with Tillie:

But Jonah is equally as hard on Trotwood, as the following unique note came to me in a batch of proof:

The following compliment from an old friend, Judge John L. Miller, of Corsicana, Texas, is highly appreciated. When we say “old” friend it carries a double meaning, for in addition to having been our friend for many years, this grand old gentleman has nearly reached his ninetieth milestone, and is still enjoying good health. He writes:

We want a good live agent in every town in the United States for “Trotwood’s Monthly.” Write for terms to agents. Address Trotwood Publishing Company, Nashville, Tenn.