in the papers. A man that earns big
wages writing Farm Hints for agricultural papers can make more money
with a soft lead pencil and two or three season-cracked idees like
that'n I can carrying of 'em out on the farm. We used to have a feller
in the drugstore in our town that wrote such good pieces for the _Rural
Vermonter_ and made up such a good condition powder out of his own head,
that two years ago we asked him to write a nessay for the annual meeting
of the Buckwheat Trust, and to use his own judgment about choice of
subject. And what do you s'pose he had selected for a nessay that took
the whole forenoon to read?"

"What subject, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Give it up!"

"Well, he'd wrote out that whole blamed intellectual wad on the subject
of 'The Inhumanity of Dehorning Hydraulic Rams.' How's that?"

"That's pretty fair."

"Well, farmin' is like runnin' a paper in regards to some things. Every
feller in the world will take and turn in and tell you how to do it,
even if he don't know a blame thing about it. There ain't a man in the
United States to-day that don't secretly think he could run airy one if
his other business busted on him, whether he knows the difference
between a new milch cow and a horse hayrake or not. We had one of these
embroidered night-shirt farmers come from town better'n three years ago.
Been a toilet soap man and done well, and so he came out and bought a
farm that had nothing to it but a fancy house and barn, a lot of medder
in the front yard and a southern aspect. The farm was no good. You
couldn't raise a disturbance on it. Well, what does he do? Goes and gits
a passle of slim-tailed, yeller cows from New Jersey and aims to handle
cream and diversified farming. Last year the cuss sent a load of cream
over and tried to sell it at the new creamatory while the funeral and
hollercost was goin' on. I may be a sort of a chump myself, but I read
my paper and don't get left like that."

"What are the prospects for farmers in your State?"

"Well, they are pore. Never was so pore, in fact, sence I've ben there.
Folks wonder why boys leaves the farm. My boys left so as to get
protected, they said, and so they went into a clothing-store, one of
'em, and one went into hardward and one is talking protection in the
Legislature this winter. They said that farmin' was gittin' to be like
fishin' and huntin', well enough for a man that has means and leisure,
but they couldn't make a livin at it, they