Let me see—it was sometime during the month of December that the "Man of the Prairie" went wandering all over the village, and even scoured the country round about the village in search of an extra dozen eggs, and went home mad, and, man fashion, threatened to kill off every hen on the place if they didn't proceed to do their duty like hens and fellow citizens. It was also during that same December that the fifty Plymouth Rock hens that we are wintering in the barn cellar, laid, regardless of the weather, 736 eggs—an average of nearly fifteen eggs apiece.

"Is it a fact that the corn is too poor for manufacture into eggs?"

I don't know anything about the corn in your locality, but I do know that our Plymouth Rocks had whole corn for supper exactly thirty-one nights during the month of December—not Western corn, but sound, well-ripened, Northern corn, that sells in our market for twenty cents more per bushel than Western corn. I also know that hens fed through the winter on corn alone will not lay enough to pay for the corn, but in our climate the poultry-raiser may feed corn profitably fully one-half the time. When the morning feed consists of cooked vegetable and bran or shorts, and the noon meal of oats or buckwheat, the supper may be of corn. I believe the analytical fellows tell us that corn won't make eggs, and I am sure I don't know whether it will or not, and I don't much care; but I know that hens will eat corn, when they can get it, in preference to any other grain, and I know that it "stands by" better than anything else, and that it is a heat-producing grain, and consequently just the thing to feed when the days are short and the nights long, and the mercury fooling around 30 degrees below zero. Hens need something besides egg material; they must have food to keep up the body heat, and the poultry-raiser who feeds no corn in winter blunders just as badly as the one who feeds all corn.

Talking about corn for fowls reminds me that the agricultural papers are full of wails from farmers who were taken in last season on seed corn. If they had followed the plan of an old farmer of my acquaintance they would not now be obliged to mourn a corn crop cut off by frost. When this old chap went to farming forty years ago he bought a peck of seed corn of the Northern yellow flint variety, and as he "don't believe in running after all the new seeds that are advertised in the papers," he is still raising the same variety—only it ripens some three weeks earlier than it did then. Every fall he does through his field and selects his seed corn from the best of the earliest ripened ears; when these ears are husked one or two husks are left on each ear, and then the husks, with the ears attached, are braided together until there are fifteen or twenty ears in a string. These strings of seed corn are hung up in the sun for a fortnight or so, and then hung from the rafters in a cool, dry loft over the wood-shed; there it remains till seed time comes again, and it never fails to grow.

Fanny Field.