Various

“ One or two fellows with pretty good horses had beat everything and were looking for more worlds to conquer. Just after dinner Jim put on snow goggles, a hayseed hat, the rustiest coat he could borrow, clapped that curby-legged pacer in an old sleigh that looked like it had stood up in a mouldy carriage house for fifty years, with harness to match, put a few bundles of oats, farmer like, in behind to save feed, of course, in town, and jogged on in with a sort of an ain’t-been-to-town-for-ten-years look written all over the whole turnout. ”

“ People North and West, when they buy a Southern magazine, want the South to be in it—its stories, traditions, its sunshine, its fields, its very air. They want to hear of the land which is harvesting and sowing, while they are in the far-off snow, waiting to see the good, glad earth again; the land where the average farmer does not spend all he makes in the summer keeping himself and his stock warm in the winter; the land that is Southern—the great, undeveloped country of the future. Trotwood’s Monthly is trying to do this. In the second place, Southern people are not great readers. ”

“ It is two miles to where the fox intends to go to earth. Fashion is crying the lead not sixty yards behind the quarry. The pack, with flaming tongues, is just behind, giving vent to short, defiant yelps. My horse is intensely excited and determined to outstrip the hunting field.
[156]
Ho! hear that defiant, agonized cry!
It is a sight race!
The hounds see the fox. His requiem is being sounded at every note. The fox is within a few hundred yards of his place of safety. The hounds seem to know it, and are running with an inspiration that means death to the fox. ”

“ There is plenty of brains and progressive spirit yet left among the managers of American trotting associations, and these gentlemen prefer rather to increase than to diminish the interest in the light harness horse. The pacer and the trotter are indissolubly linked together—in interest, destiny and blood. They have, too, much of the same breeding, too many kindred ties. Joined, as they are, by so many common ancestors, united as they are by so many great horses, no number of society asses can now pull them asunder. ”

“ By educating your horse, you give him courage, make him brave, and he becomes almost human, just like Lou Dillon when, in a mighty drive she becomes part and parcel of the greatest educator of animals who ever existed—Millard Sanders. The old familiar quotation, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air,” is exemplified time and again, when we see trainers driving animals with a world of speed, not knowing how to shoe, handle or drive them. Would education spoil these men? ”

“ Winans, I have known of their existence and have repeatedly called attention to the fact that the past history of the pacer demonstrated beyond a doubt that he was a horse of the noblest blood, the war-horse of ancient battles, the companion of ancient kings and princes. The fact that he has been able to do what he has done is convincing proof of a past greatness somewhere in his breeding—a scrub would have died at the wire long ago. If “society” is looking for something that is blue-blooded, with a hoariness that no other blue-blooded can boast of ”

“ These men, who gave their lives for the cause, believing as truly as did their sires of old, that they were fighting for the right of self-government, could they awake to-day would wonder at the turn in the tide of affairs. A nation, the greatest in the world—the leader of thought and action, the champion of the defenseless and the power that stands for the real advancement of humanity ”

“ For several weeks I had seen the wild geese flying over us. I knew where they were going—to the wheat fields—and I knew where they roosted at night—under the shadow of the bluff of the river, sitting like swans on the dark waters. I hold it of guns as I do of sulkies and road carts—any good make is good enough. It all depends on whom you happen to start in with. If built by honest men, out of honest stuff, there is but little difference in the rest of it. ”

“ It is beautifully illustrated, its workmanship is the finest, and is the best edited magazine of its class in the whole country. If you love the horse shows you cannot afford to miss its monthly visits. This is written deliberately and with charity aforethought, and while it may have the flavors of the village sanctum sanctorum, yet when a woman gets into the strenuous fight around her and with her bright mind and pen rises to the very top, there is always growing in Trotwood’s garden a bouquet of sunflowers for her. ”

“ The horse was quite a fancy looking trotter, just pretty enough to catch anybody’s eye that wanted a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ kind of a horse. He had once taken a tincup record of 2:261⁄4 by some hook and crook, and on the road for a quarter of a mile, he could trot a buzz-saw clip, as long as he thought he was beating all creation, and didn’t get another crotch in his head—for he had clock works, with a chimes attachment there, and no mistake. There was plenty of room for Jim to go around and let those young people alone, but he saw too good a chance for fun, and that’s what he was out for. ”

“ The hounds are closing in on the fox, and the splendid red turns toward his frantic pursuers, and rushes into the steel-hinged jaws of Fashion, meeting death as only the courageous die—facing it without a murmur. Prompter is the next hound to catch the fox, and soon his destruction is complete. In the midst of great delight, there is passing regret, for we deplore the fact that a creature so graceful, so noble, so courageous should forfeit his life after the splendid sport he had afforded us on that grand December morning. ”

“ We must go back to first and natural principles again, and by demanding imagination, simplicity, beauty and naturalness, make poetry a vehicle of the pure and the beautiful, and so simple that ordinary minds can read it with pleasure and understand what they read. The story age of Spencer, Shakespeare and Burns should be received and much of Browning’s stuff flung to the dogs, where it belongs. God has given us poetry to be enjoyed, to be understood, to make us wiser and better, to take to our hearts and firesides. ”

“ The American nation, being young and foolish—a fighter, a doer, a seeker of dollars in the strenuous race called living—does not, in this century cherish as it will centuries hence, such a historical pile as the beautiful old chapel. For a sum, right now there are those who pass it dally who would tear it down to build a stolid stable for their asses. ”

“ Trotwood loves to throw a bouquet—he believes they are more easily gathered in the sunshine around us and leave a more pleasant memory than some other things which might be cast, such, for instance, as bricks and stones. Especially does he love to throw them when they are intended for a lovely woman. And we have known her long—Miss Minnie McIntyre, editor of the new horse show paper, The Bit and Spur, of Chicago, and so we know whereof we speak when we say that in her class she is simply an “only,” and her monthly, The Bit and Spur, is a gem of its kind, and an inspiration. ”

“ The land, while producing greater amounts of foods, is to become steadily richer and more fertile. This great discovery of these chemists at the national convention, is that it is atmosphere, and not the soil, mainly, that produces the crops. Take all the hay or wheat or corn that is yielded on an acre of land and burn it, stalks and all. It will all disappear save about two per cent of the total weight. This two per cent of ash represents what the soil has furnished in the shape of mineral matter. The farmer of the future must look above for his nitrogen. ”

“ Men seem to be animals which would not only betray other men, but their own children, if there was no higher power to prevent. One of the curses of the South is child labor—another form of slavery and race suicide. In the new era dawning in the South, this curse has come in with the spindle and the money behind it has been so great that in some Southern States, like South Carolina and Georgia, the friends of the child and of humanity have been unable to pass child labor laws. The legislators are bought by the money of the corporations. ”

“ There is no place among us now for the poet and the scholar, the musician, the dreamer, the preacher. But the time is fast coming when all this will be changed—when to be unread is to be unbred—to be rich is to be rotten. In that day this quaint, epoch-making, history-shingled chapel, this pile of soul-nobleness, this monument to right on the battlefield of might, will outshine all the gilded domes which vulgar wealth has erected as a monument to vanity in the plains of plenty. ”

“ The sight of a flock of geese on the water at night is the most beautiful and thrilling sight I ever saw. In the air they are long-necked, awkward things, but in the water they are the personification of grace and beauty. They ride the waves like a swan, their necks grandly arched and the big band of white under their tails is raised and spread like a white banner in the light. ”

“ Dear Trotwood:
The first and second number of the Monthly have come and, to tell you how much we have enjoyed them, I must use a big word and say immensely. The farmer who will follow their counsel will soon have to pull down his barns and build greater, while he will have treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it is the only magazine I know of giving advice about this world and the next.
So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his namesake of old fell at the same place.
I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse. ”

“ But one day the air grows sweet and balmy; they look below them at a landscape, which, at their altitude, looks like a mighty lake whose waves are fields of green wheat, broken by islands of dark green hills. It is the Basin of Tennessee. ”

“ There are too many chances to get out of doors—any time and all the time. Like the petted children of indulgent parents, kind Nature does so much for them—they do little for themselves. And a child will never leave the joyous out-doors for the study, the schoolroom or the work shop. In literature the great South is but a child. But last and chiefest, no magazine [168] has ever been launched in the South to supply a practical demand, instead of creating a supply. ”

“ What is a thought—an idea? The most valuable asset in the brain of man. Not common, ordinary thinking, but a new thought—a thought which no one else ever originated. There is such a thought in the letter below, and I am publishing it, taken from many other letters to Trotwood, because of that particular thought and not on account of the nice things the author is kind enough to say. ”

“ And so the old man has signs, too—that he is ready to go a heat in an old time yarn—and one is when the sun gets low and the bugs high—when a watermelon is waiting in the spring trough and the sheep on the hill begin to come out from the shaded woods for their evening meal in the meadow—now cooling with the condensing shadows of a setting sun. ”

“ Concerning Southern magazines, it is the fact that none has ever been able to live in the South. We appreciated that fact with all its force when we launched Trotwood’s Monthly. But we think we have studied the situations thoroughly enough to know the reason of this: First, they have all been feeble imitations of Northern magazines—a field so well and ably filled already. Every section of our country has its own character, its own atmosphere, its own earmarks. ”

“ The chief beauty of these hunts, to me, had always been in the fact that I had only to throw a saddle on this mare, after getting to camp, and I had an easy seat all day in our rides over the hills and fields in pursuit of that most delightful of all Southern game—quail. It knocks the sport out of things when you have to take one horse to drive and another to ride, and another to do this, and another that. ”

“ And sentiment meets an acid every little while. Trotwood’s Monthly is supplying practical demand, not trying to create a supply, dependent on local sentiment. It is weaving the Southern atmosphere around a practical subject—a subject in demand all over the world, as our subscription list, which now has reached a goodly number in every State in the Union, in Canada, even to faraway Nova Scotia, in South Africa, Honolulu and Australia. Around this practical subject for which there is a positive demand, we will weave the Southern literature and life, and in that way do we hope to live. ”

“ White child slavery in the cotton mills of the country to-day is worse than negro slavery ever was. After many fruitless efforts, Alabama, which has rapidly taken first rank among all the Southern States, succeeded two years ago in passing a child labor law, the age limit being twelve years. On the day this law went into effect, one hundred and twenty-five children, all white, walked out of one mill at Lannett, Ala. The most of the children, perhaps, had never been to school in their lives and never would have had the opportunity. ”

“ The world seems vibrant with the music of the cascades of glorious enthusiasm, and hunters are oblivious to all save the inspiration of the matchless moment. We are now within easy view of the running pack, that dashed high into the air the melting frost which descended like a shower of diamond sparks, while Alice—game little hound, her wild-goose notes pealing out far above the unbroken cry—led the pack at a killing pace. ”