Various

“ Not so the Kentuckians—they appreciate their bravery to the greatest extent. The Kentucky ladies are very large, but are fair and well featured, and much more polished (excepting the ladies of Nashville) than the ladies of Tennessee; but the latter are better shaped, are very artless and the young women have a sweet simplicity in their looks and countenance. Both men and women are without disguise, nor have they any of that impertinent curiosity common to other States. But the most distinguishing trait of the Tennessean is that he treats all men alike. ”

“ Labor is cheaper in Florence than in Detroit. Fuel is cheaper, water is cheaper, and in fact everything is cheaper. The Florence foundries can make and ship a finished casting to northern points for the same rate the raw material can be shipped, and yet a great deal of the finished product finds its way back to Florence and points further South. There are a thousand arguments in favor of Florence, and none against her. Everything is better and conditions are better in every way. The climate is elegant, scenery sublime, and one of the most healthy locations in the United States. ”

“ Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain into eternity that advances another step! ”

“ Crop Residue and Its Benefit to the Soil By William Dennison, Fargo, N. D.
How varied, great and wonderful are the blessings which a beneficent Creator showers universally upon this cosmos of ours for the benefit of mankind, and is it not strange that a majority of us fail to see these blessings, which are everywhere before our eyes? One of these blessings which the tillers of the soil are the recipients thereof, and which very few of them recognize, is the beneficial results derived therefrom. ”

“ As for me, I am constrained to say that the quiet study of the pedigree of horses has taught me much. I have picked up a few of the great lessons of cause and effect in studying the lower animal that should apply to the higher one. That is the only way. Darwin reached the laws of his evolution by beginning with the lowest form of life.
I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. ”

“ We do not wish to give out the impression that crop residue alone will maintain the fertility of the land, but to convey the idea of the importance of crop residue as a help in delaying the period when land which has been under cultivation for years, without manure (which is the rule in the United States) ceases to be profitable to cultivate.
“It is a fact both of scientific interest and of great practical importance, that the enrichment of a soil with nitrogen is confined to certain limits, which can, with great difficulty, be exceeded. ”

“ With as many men and far better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them. Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton, “on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret retreats of a savage enemy! ”

“ He was only a common, ordinary, hot-blooded, dare-devil, cussin’, fighting Irish boy, lank of form, peaked of face and forehead, with piercing blue eyes, a thin, lofty, religious, idealized, hatchety head, bequeued with bristling, sandy-red hair.
You may think I am foolish to call him religious, but be patient. A man is born religious or not. And if born so, all his wildness and fighting and bloodshed and profanity will not eliminate it. No man had more of it than Jackson. ”

“ I want to do this because I want to see people take as much interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man “falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure, marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk her poodle dog behind. ”

“ It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars. The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most. ”

“ The sergeant looked with open-eyed astonishment from Anderson to Mike, then grasping the latter’s hand with a proud look on his face he said:
“It’s ould Ireland, me lad, that can bate the world. Ye may be a poor rider in your company, but ye can make the best man in the ould Fifth (his regiment) ashamed of himself in the saddle, and by the same token some of’m were rocked, whin babies, in horse troughs for cradles.” ”

“ The addition of organic matter to a soil either as crop or weed residue, or as farmyard manure, at once makes that soil a suitable home for the animal life—the fungi—and the bacteria, whose function it is to reduce organic matter to the condition of inorganic matter. An increase of organic plant residue or manure thus creates some of the conditions favorable to its own destruction. The rate of oxidation in the soil is now no longer what it was ”

“ Captain Gibson, a son of the brave Colonel Gibson, of Tennessee, is one of the most amiable men on earth.
It is unaccountable why such a number of physicians should flock into this country. Every town is flooded with them. They are strung along the roads like so many blacksmith’s shops. You can either walk or ride, but you have a physician on each side, one in front, and one in rear. Here are seven in Florence, seven more went away for want of room. ”

“ Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west, and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.
Since Jackson’s day everything has been possible for her; a century of progress and peace; the great Republic; the Monroe doctrine; the fighting prestige that could originate the cheek of a Venezuela bluff, and the remark the British admiral made to the German admiral at Manila.
The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek ”

“ But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have been so busy picking up [399] dollars that they have neglected to look up, even at the stars. This story is to show them the star. ”

“ The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships, sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies, treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England, and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. ”

“ Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives, as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has been the cheapest commodity of the human race. ”

“ Will people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft? Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are born? ”

“ Now, for the first time, she beheld Grannan with his back turned toward the track and searching with an anxious gaze the balcony upon which she was seated.
He raised his glasses to his eyes and began slowly to sweep the crowd. As he did this her head sank involuntarily upon her breast. The blood rushed to her face. She was abashed—painfully so. What had she done? Could she stop Thomas? Would that she had seen him before she had sent Thomas. Yet he had placed a large sum on Empress. Thomas had said so. What if he should lose? The thought chilled her. She shuddered violently. ”

“ Poor soils, deficient in humus, cold, puddled clays, are literally “dead” soils and speak sadly of a dying civilization and decaying people.
Alfalfa, then, revels in a deep, rich, sweet soil. How are we to provide it in the South?
First, there are many river bottoms that are admirably adapted to alfalfa, being made up of rich alluvial loams, pervious to air and moisture, and not holding a surplus of moisture. On these soils alfalfa usually thrives splendidly.
Next, there are new lands freshly cleared where robber crops have not yet had time to take out the fertility. ”

“ Florence is an ideal place for a home. It is much easier to tell what they have not got, than to tell of the many advantages. There is an abundance of pure water, an ideal climate, good schools, good society, an abundance of the most beautiful scenery to be found anywhere and if there is any disadvantages around Florence from the standpoint of its being a desirable place to live, we failed to discover it. ”

“ One of the longest buildings I ever saw is in Florence. It was built by a company of gentlemen, and is said to have cost ninety thousand dollars, and is not yet finished. The proprietors, being of this place, are men of immense wealth, and are pushing their capital with great foresight and activity. For industry and activity, Florence outstrips all the northern towns in the State. More people travel this road than all our western roads put together. ”

“ And as important as anything, perhaps most important of all, it puts “life” into the soil. Soils with humus in them are really alive, for the decaying vegetable matter attracts bacteria of many sorts that in their life and death and decay form many compounds that the plants can absorb and thus directly increase fertility and make plants grow.
Good soils are truly “live” soils, filled with legions of microscopic forms of life, most of it beneficial to the higher orders of growing plants useful to men. ”

“ I am not afraid of you, General Jackson—I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to ask for myself. Kill me if you wish. I come to plead for the women and children starving in the woods. Their fields are destroyed, their homes gone, their cribs empty. They have nothing to eat. Send out your men and bring them in. I did all I could to stop the massacre at Ft. Mims. I am done fighting. My warriors all are killed. ”

“ The quarrel resembles one between a gentleman and a chimney sweeper—the former may beat the low scoundrel to his heart’s contentment, but there is no honor in the exploit, and he is sure to be covered with the soil and dirt of his ignominious antagonist. But necessity will sometimes compel us to descend from our station to chastise a vagabond, and endure the disgrace of a contest in order to repress, by wholesome correction, the presumptuous insolence and mischievous designs of the basest assailant. ”

“ The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s, and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. ”

“ The greatest crop I have found here to build up the land is peas—the Southern pea. It is equal to clover as a nitrogen producing crop, enriching the land, and as a money-maker it beats anything in the North. I sow peas in my corn every third row and run round it a few times. It is laid by with the corn. I can make ten dollars worth of pork per acre in peas and leave the land better than it was. I can raise all stock cheaper here, even turkeys, on account of the peas and grasshoppers. There are nine months of pasture, year in and year out. ”

“ Let us take up the essentials of alfalfa growing: first, that the soil must be sweet.
It is a new thought to Southern farmers, perhaps, that soils are some times sour. They may be sour upon limestone land, but are more apt to be sour away from the lime.
If they are water-logged during part of the year, they are most apt to be sour. This acidity comes probably from the decay within the soil of vegetable matter, though some soils very deficient in humus are acid. An evidence of acidity is seen when clovers fail to thrive, and certain weeds appear in the meadows. ”