Mary Rogers Miller

“ When I see men, women and children poking over the masses of evil-smelling rubbish on the mammoth dump-heaps that deface the landscape near some of our great cities, or going from house to house collecting old iron or rubber or newspapers, or picking over the slag along the railways for chance lumps of coal, I wish that there were some way of getting them away into the woods where firewood is rotting and doing harm besides, a waste that works both ways, you see. ”

“ I opened my eyes and read on in astonishment about a boy who started with no more capital than any boy could get together, and, without sacrificing his school or college plans, built up a bee business which he sold for one thousand dollars. In the meantime his bees had not only paid their own board but his as well. If one boy can make a success like that, other boys can. So can girls, for bee-keeping is a form of outdoor work which seems admirably suited to sensible, nature-loving girls. ”

“ It is quite safe to conclude that the hundreds of trained scientists employed by the government to investigate the problems involving insect life all started their studies by making a collection.
Probably the easiest kind of collection to make is one of plants. Once you see them, their fate is sealed. Escape is impossible. But collecting wild plants about your own door yard and in the woods is tame work compared to insect capturing. Your eye marks a butterfly or a dragon fly for your own, but you have him yet to reckon with and his wings may carry him far beyond your reach. ”

“ American boys and girls who go into chicken raising will want to breed from good pure stock. Nothing is too good for them. Did you ever hear any one show any enthusiasm when passing a flock of mongrels? Contrast this with the delight you and all your friends take in the sight of a hundred fowls all white, all red, all spangled, all black, all piebald, all blue, or all speckled, as alike as peas in a pod! I vote for the pure stock every time. You can keep it pure and strong by exchanging cockerels with other breeders of the same variety and with similar ideals and practices. ”

“ I shall never forget the look of indignation our dear old professor gave an ambitious youth who had uprooted for his paltry collection every plant of a species of rare fern which the professor had been trying for years to re-establish in its old location. After all is said and done, a live plant is better than a dead one. This is all a part of the great spirit of conservation that has so taken possession of our people of late years. Out of these little acts of preserving our resources will grow a more beautiful America and a better appreciation of all things beautiful. ”

“ One blow, yell, jerk, or even a threatening motion will often obliterate all the work you have done. So the animal trainer must not lose his temper, especially with dogs and horses. The more intelligent the animal, the more kindness and gentleness are required. On one farm, you will see the calves trembling when coming for their food, trying to keep one eye out for sudden blows while drinking; the horses jerking timidly up as if expecting their tender mouths to be yanked; the cows kicking the milkers; the colts hard to toll in from pastures; the dog with tail between his legs ”

“ People will go on buying fly paper, fly poison, fly traps, screen doors, and window netting to keep flies out, but the very fly that has visited a typhoid patient to-day may to-morrow leave the imprint of his foul feet on the baby's face, or drown himself, but not his germs, in your gravy.
What does your father have a manure pile for? If he is a frugal farmer he expects to put it on his fields when the other work is out of the way, and plough it in. He knows the value of manure on fields. But does he realize that the best time to carry the manure out is while it is new? ”

“ Good citizenship begins at home. How can you make your own home a more desirable place for your brothers and sisters to live in? Take a look at the house. Is it plain and unadorned and uncomfortable? Are the surroundings bare and ugly? Have you had experience in building, painting, and planting? If you can help build a corn crib, you can make a porch over the front door or a sidewalk connecting the back door with the pump or the milk house. If you can help paint the barn, why not the house? If you can plant trees in the orchard, why not shrubs in the door yard, and vines over the porch? ”

“ When you use the pruning shears on the branches and twigs of a tree or shrub you are, so to speak, cutting its fingernails or hair: but when you go up with a saw you are performing a far more serious operation. Do not forget that the life processes of the tree, the circulation of the blood, the assimilation of the food, the respiration, all go on right under the bark. The "heart" of the tree is a misnomer. That fresh moist layer which is uncovered by the skinning of a tree is the only part of the tree which is really actively alive and at work. ”

“ When she brings in her first load of pollen she fairly swaggers with importance. Mr. Root says, "Her first load of pollen is just what the first pair of pants is to a boy baby."
When a bee is a month old, she is in the prime of life. Three or four months of hard work in summer means old age for the workers, but in the bee colony there is no such thing as an old ladies' home. With their wings worn to stumps, their once velvety backs rubbed shiny, they may be seen creeping away from the hive to die, having given their very lives in willing and faithful service of the commonwealth. ”

“ The pickers who live near the woods up there bring berries to town in milk pails. The fruit box may be more elegant, but there is a bountiful sound about the milk pail that takes my fancy. Of course, one gets scratched while berry-picking; but in what a good cause. Is there something wrong about boys and girls who prefer boxed berries and smooth hands to wild fruits and scratches? There are thousands of dollars wasted every year that might be working on some boy's or girl's schooling, just because nature's crop of raspberries isn't half harvested. ”

“ Like maple sirup, wool is a spring cash crop, which is a great convenience. An eight-pound fleece is worth nearly half as much as the sheep it grew on, and the lambs will soon be worth as much as their mothers. So we have a double chance to make good in sheep raising.
Sheep are so hardy, so harmless, and so easily managed that the only wonder is that any farm is without a flock. Men who know say that the farm dog is to blame for this. How about the farm dog, boys and girls? Honestly, now, is your dog worth his keep? No matter how much better he is than the neighbours' dog. ”

“ It takes her about one day to dry her "feathers," adjust herself to her environment, and "get busy." She finds many little open wells of unsealed honey, and as nobody pays any attention to her she drinks her fill. A round of duties await her, and she goes at them without being told how. She must do nursing, comb-building, cell-capping, [306] and general housework, and all without the least training. After about a week of this, the young worker goes out to play, and then to work. She is young, inexperienced, and self-conceited, and tries to call attention to herself like any vain young miss. ”

“ No one can deny or doubt that there is profit in pig raising. Pork "on the hoof" is ten cents a pound even as I write these words, with prospects good for going higher. A profit of one hundred per cent. is recorded by growers when the price is only six cents a pound.
With the one exception of poultry, hogs bring the quickest returns for investment of any live stock. It is poor economy to keep any animal which cannot pay its board, except for sentiment, and few people keep pigs on that account. If I were beginning again I should not trade my pig for a calf but should raise pigs. ”

“ The puff-balls are white and look like fine cream cheese when they first appear. Their business is to ripen their spores, scatter them, and disappear. The brown smoke or dust of the ripe puff-ball is blown about by the wind and finds its way into the earth in time; each tiny spore or grain of dust can start a new mat of threads down underground. When you puff the devil's snuff-box you are doing the plant just the kindness it was waiting for. When a cow steps on a ripe giant puff-ball a great smoke goes up, and the breeze catches the dust. ”

“ There is no progress in simply going out in the fall and taking what nature furnishes. Unaided, the good mother goes on producing the same small nuts, caring just as patiently for the inferior ones and even encouraging the nut weevils to prey upon them. But I wonder if some boy or girl who thinks there isn't any interesting work to be done on the farm, could not make some experiments in hazel-nut culture. ”

“ Children who live in the country part or all of the year do not know how much pleasure they might give if they would gather wild flowers and send them to city children. There is a society which [62] distributes flowers thus collected in New York but maybe there is none in the city near you. The commonest flowers, even the weeds like daisies and dandelions and black-eyed Susans, are eagerly taken home by children who are so poor that they never even saw a park, much less a meadow. In one city school over two hundred children had never seen a dandelion. ”

“ In these days when the revival of old-time industries is so often undertaken, it is well to learn from our aunts or our great-aunts some of the fancy work that employed their elegant leisure when they were girls. The lavender stick is such a sweet and dainty object that I hope for it a renewed popularity. It is one of the always acceptable gifts the Pacific coast can send to the Atlantic where it is so hard to make lavender grow. I might say here that there is good reason to advise the growing of lavender in the light limestone soil of some of our Southern states. ”

“ If fathers and mothers were all like my young friend's parents, they would see that trapping ought to be a part of a boy's training, just like using an axe, or a saw, or a gun.
Trapping everything would be bad business. You would not catch squirrels in a trap any more [480] than you would shoot bluebirds or brown thrashers. One could easily damage his neighbourhood and himself by trapping the wrong things or trapping in the wrong way. A trapper who is a sportsman will see to it that his traps are of the right kind. ”

“ We not only appreciated the crop nature provided for us every year, but were far-sighted enough to realize that the time would come when the march of civilization would tramp out the plum thickets. So we planted them in orchards and gardens, taking those trees that had given us the best crops of the biggest, finest fruit. ”

“ The nectar gathered by bees passes directly into a receptacle, the honey-sack or honey-stomach, which is used for that purpose only. It does not go the same road as the bee's food. The notion that bees swallow the nectar and then unswallow it is as erroneous as it is unappetizing. The flavour, body, and colour of honey depend on the source of the nectar, the age, the amount of chemical change wrought by the bees, and the completeness of the ripening process which goes on in the hive before the cells are capped. Honey is a very wholesome sweet, far more easily digested than cane or grape sugar. ”

“ The men and women who are doing great things now started as boys and girls with work to do. They washed dishes and split kindlings and fed chickens and milked cows and dug potatoes. Now they are tunnelling mountains, building bridges, helping make the world better in all sorts of courageous ways.
Don't you like to hear engineers, miners, sailors, inventors, animal trainers, cowboys, foresters, and other workers talk about their work? The only really happy people are the ones who have found the work they love best. ”

“ After the fourth moult the worms pass into the last age. Five or six days of voracious feeding brings them near that most dramatic event in their lives—the cocoon spinning. For three days, now, instead of eating steadily they wander aimlessly about, as if seeking they know not what; they wag their heads; they behave in an altogether restless and uncertain way. ”

“ Americans like to be "hail, fellow, well met" with all their live stock, and although even the best tempered bee might resent a cordial slap on the flank, there are bee-lovers who tell of stroking their little winged friends with a grass stem. It requires real sympathy to succeed with bees just as it does with chickens or cows. No one can work long with them without becoming intensely interested. Most people learn to love them and find absorbing occupation in studying their ways.
Two races of hive bees are common here, though none are native: German, or black, and Italian. ”

“ The sanitary home has never a carpet these days, but rugs on bare floors. These rugs, if small enough to handle every week, make the semi-annual old bugbear of house-cleaning a thing of the past. What could be more dreary than to come home from school some afternoon and find the floors littered with flattened old straw, so gray with dust as to be scarcely recognizable? ”

“ In his book on "Forestry" Professor Gifford says: "Collection of tree seeds should yield good returns if properly conducted." That is good news, for if ever a crop was allowed to go to waste it is this crop of tree seeds. Any one who has seen a forest of young maples cut down by lawn mowers in the helplessness of their seed-leaf stage realizes that with any sort of forethought those seeds might have been made a source of income. ”

“ There are times when rabbits get too numerous, and times when they are needed to eat, and times when you want to try your hand at taming a wild one. Under these circumstances it is legitimate sport to hunt or trap them. If damage is being done to crops in the spring we shall be forced to wage war against them in self-defence during their breeding season. Otherwise no sportsman would do it. If there is so little legitimate rabbit food in winter that they are driven to destroy fruit trees to get a little bark, then the inference is that there are too many rabbits. ”

“ A good skating pond can be made by boys with a little ingenuity, which in this case means engineering ability, by damming a brook until it floods a naturally flat area above its own level. Or by damming the outlet of a pond before dry weather comes on and holding the water at a higher level than it would naturally have. It is perfectly astonishing what a small dam will do, if cleverly placed. Study the work of beavers if you know of any. You can get pointers from mill-dams built by your great-grandsires, if there are any in your vicinity. ”

“ An untrained dog is a nuisance, however well bred he may be.
To start a small kennel does not require any more room than to start in the chicken business in a small way. Just now the prices are so absurdly high on high-bred dogs of popular varieties that few but fanciers can afford to own the best stock. Why is it not better to raise some first-rate but not fashionable breed, and not enter into competition with men whose living depends on the number of blue ribbons they can win at dog shows? Buy a young female dog, teach her, and train her. ”

“ Wind is worse for bees than too much sun. Bless the pioneers of the windy country if, by reason of their forethought, you have a real evergreen windbreak on your place. If you have not this ideal windbreak, a building will serve, or your hedge or high board fence should be on the windy side.
If you start, as many have, with one or two colonies let them face the south or east and leave space enough between the hives to run a lawn mower. As your number increases, your original plan may be changed, but it always pays to make the plan. ”

“ MARKETING MILK
There are lots of boys delivering milk in towns and cities. Most of them do their part well. But I believe they would like to do it better. Driving from one house to another is pretty dull business for a live boy and unless he has something to think about his mind wanders. Why not put some thought on the very business he is engaged in? Does he know what milk is? That children's lives depend upon the care he gives it? Does he know that dirt in ice and dust from streets may be deadly if they get into milk? ”

“ If you go into the hardware store and find the man who knows all about lawn mowers, he will be only too glad to show you how to run the machine so that it will do its work and last. It is to his interest to have you recommend his machine. Make yourself familiar with a machine in perfect working order. Your ears and your eyes ought to tell you when it is going wrong.
It is, above all, of greatest importance to know how to adjust a lawn mower. A wrench, a screw-driver, and an oil can should be your constant companions. ”