message to the doctor; and so on.

How the telephone saved a three million dollar fruit crop in Colorado,
in 1909, is the story that is oftenest told in the West. Until that
year, the frosts in the Spring nipped the buds. No farmer could be sure
of his harvest. But in 1909, the fruit-growers bought smudge-pots--three
hundred thousand or more. These were placed in the orchards, ready to
be lit at a moment's notice. Next, an alliance was made with the United
States Weather Bureau so that whenever the Frost King came down from the
north, a warning could be telephoned to the farmers. Just when Colorado
was pink with apple blossoms, the first warning came. "Get ready to
light up your smudge-pots in half an hour." Then the farmers telephoned
to the nearest towns: "Frost is coming; come and help us in the
orchards." Hundreds of men rushed out into the country on horseback
and in wagons. In half an hour the last warning came: "Light up; the
thermometer registers twenty-nine." The smudge-pot artillery was set
ablaze, and kept blazing until the news came that the icy forces had
retreated. And in this way every Colorado farmer who had a telephone
saved his fruit.

In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running so
high that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the general
theme of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a result of this Telephone
Crusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each
one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient
enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system,
so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the
great cities as they are to their own barns.

What telephones have done to bring in the present era of big crops, is
an interesting story in itself. To compress it into a sentence, we might
say that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement which
started with the McCormick reaper in 1831. It has lifted the farmer
above the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy. The average length
of haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a half
miles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man and
team. Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, the
farmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops.

As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality in
telephone service, as they have in other lines