Chapter X: Front Matter (10)

If you know how to sew you are more fortunate than most of the boys I know, although why should not a boy learn to use a sewing machine? The bag ought to be sewed on the machine. You must first lay the finished edge or selvedge around the wire to make sure that it goes around and has a little extra for the seam. Pin the cloth together where it meets around the wire, then lay it on a table, double. Cut the bag, rounding the bottom neatly. Cheese cloth is the worst stuff to ravel, and if you sew the bag with a single seam you will soon be sorry. Pin the cloth so that the two edges are exactly together and sew a seam about a quarter of an inch wide all the way round. Now turn the bag inside out and fold it so that the seam you just made will be right on the edge. Sew another seam, three eighths of an inch deep this time. The ragged edge of the goods will now be inside of this second seam and can not fray out and make a nuisance of itself. If all this is worse than Dutch to you, take the bag to your sister. She is not so much cleverer than you but the chances are that if you ask her to sew you a French seam, she will make it just as I have described. Sew the finished bag onto the wire with heavy double thread and your net is ready for use.

Materials to make a killing bottle: 1. A wide-mouthed bottle. (I advise every collector to have two bottles, one to carry in the pocket all the time, the other for special trips for large things. For the first a small olive oil bottle, a test tube, or any convenient sized bottle with a mouth nearly or quite as large as the body of the bottle. A fruit jar, pint size, does well for the very large things.)

2. A cork which fits the bottle tightly, and is an inch long. A cork any shorter than this is an aggravation as it is so unhandy.

3. A lump of cyanide of potassium as big as a hickory nut for the small bottle, two or a little more for the big bottle. Yes, cyanide is a deadly poison, and the druggist will not sell it to you and your father will not let you buy it. But if you convince your mother that she can trust you to use a cyanide bottle as it is intended to be used, her objections will melt away. Just as likely as not she and your father, too, and your teacher, and maybe the druggist all made insect collections when they were your age and one or the other will make your cyanide bottles for you following these directions:

4. A teacup full of plaster of Paris.

Handle the cyanide with a couple of sticks or drop the lumps from the paper into the bottles so as not to touch them with your fingers, mix a little of the plaster of Paris and water till it is like a thin paste and pour enough in on the lumps of cyanide to entirely cover them. Put in on top of this all the dry plaster of Paris the water will take up. Let the bottle stand open for an hour or so, then wipe it out with a rag, which may be burned afterward. Put in the cork and your killing bottle is ready to do its share toward making a collection for you. Don't forget to label your bottles "poison," and always be careful not to inhale the fumes. The smell of the breath of the bottle will be enough to remind you.

It was a Japanese student, who, when he found one of his pinned moths had come to life and beaten its wings to pieces in the box, said: "It ought-a be dead. He in cy'ni' bot'l' a' night." I should not wish to be quite so stoical. His bot'l' was probably an old one, which did its work too slowly.

MOUNTING INSECTS

The first insects I ever saw in a collection were a sorry sight. Beautiful as the specimens had been, they were all spoiled by the collector. The moths were all out of shape, wings half folded, the pins used were short common pins, and every specimen was disfigured with masses of verdigris, they were pinned into rough boxes in higgledy-piggledy fashion, and showed every sign of neglect and careless handling. My interest in insect collecting did not date from that hour but from a look I had at a friend's cabinet years later.

The first mistake a beginner makes is to use common pins. Really, before you begin to collect, you ought to send away for a supply of German insect pins. These can be bought from dealers in entomological supplies and a hundred each of Nos. 3 and 5 will cost thirty cents. With them your collection may be salable, and you may exchange your duplicates with other collectors, while if you use common pins your specimens will have no commercial value, and will soon be spoiled, by the corroding of the pins.

The first insect you get will probably be a butterfly, or a moth, for these showy ones are all you are able to see. Later the smaller ones will attract your attention. Therefore you will not be able to mount your first specimen properly without a spreading-board. The drawing of one which appears on this page will tell you more about how to make as well as how to use it than any amount of description. If you can earn seventy-five cents more easily than by making a set of three of these in assorted sizes, you can buy for that amount an adjustable one which will serve you for all winged insects of all sizes.

I will suppose that you have captured your first butterfly. Do get a good sized one first as it will be easier to learn on that than on a small one. An hour in a freshly made cyanide jar is long enough to insure a painless death. If any one calls you a cruel boy at this time, assure the person that butterflies are very short-lived and that this one would have been eaten by a bird within an hour or two anyhow. The cyanide is the least painful form of dying for the butterfly. Its work is probably done, already. You can prove that you do not kill insects for the fun of seeing them die, by putting the bottle back in your pocket where they can die in private, and by never killing any unless you need them for your collection. A few duplicates for exchange is also legitimate. It does not injure a specimen to leave it in the jar over night. If you cannot spread it immediately, do not take it from the jar, as when dried they cannot be spread, as they are very brittle.

If you never looked at a butterfly before, you will look at this one. You will note that it has four broad wings attached to a rounded body. The portion of the body to which the wings are fastened is called the thorax. For a medium-sized insect, a No. 3 pin should be taken. The butterfly should be pinned through the thorax, half way between the front wings. Direct the pin so that it will come out in the middle on the under side of the thorax. One fourth of the pin's length should remain above the insect. This may seem a small matter but insects unevenly pinned look badly, and it spoils their salability. You will want some black-headed pins for use on the spreading-board. Common pins hurt the fingers, insect pins are too flexible and expensive. Pin strips of paper on to hold the wings in place. With the picture of butterflies on a spreading-board as a model, you will, after some experience, get so that you can do this well. It is no job for an impatient person, though. Leave the butterfly on the board until it is thoroughly dry, which takes three days. Put the board where the air can have free circulation around it, but not the mice.

The only insects that are not pinned through the middle of the thorax are the beetles, those hard-shelled creatures like June bugs (which ought to be called May beetles), and potato bugs (which are also beetles). If you put a pin through the centre of a beetle's thorax, it spreads the wings out in an unnatural way. So collectors agree to pin them through the right wing-cover.

Your next requirement will be boxes to put the specimens in. Many a fine collection has been begun in ordinary cigar boxes. At first you will probably try to pin the insects right into the bottom of the box. After you have spoiled two or three of your rarest ones, bent a dozen or so expensive pins, you will conclude that the wood is too hard and does not hold the pins well. Be warned in time to save yourself this bother. The boxes should be lined with a thin layer of some material which, though soft enough to push a pin into easily, must at the same time be elastic and firm enough to hold the pins. Cork, linoleum, and slices of pith are all used. You may have noticed, though, if you have been to a large, up-to-date museum, that the specimens of insects are all pinned into solid blocks of wood. Many an hour I have spent pinning specimens into blocks in their permanent places in a great museum collection. It is hard work and has to be done with a tool. When once fastened on a block the insect is supposed to be a fixture; when it moves the block goes along. But the material you use in your boxes ought to be soft enough to make shifting of specimens easy. For example, at first you will get a great assortment. A butterfly to-day, a beetle or two to-morrow, a pair of moths the next day, some crickets, a dragon fly, a cicada, a waterbug, and so on. Take everything unless you already have it. That is the only way to collect. If you say, "Oh, I'll get a better one to-morrow," the chances are that the season will go by and you will not get that variety at all.

CLASSIFICATION

Your first box full will be a varied assortment. When you have all you can conveniently pin into three boxes without crowding, you will want to arrange them. If you have begun to study science you will know what "classify" means. Every school is made up of classes. So with insects. You will know by the looks of the insects that certain ones belong together. A good way to start is to put all the butterflies and moths into one box. You may not know what you have done, but you have simply separated the members of the order _Lepidoptera_ from all the others. Look over those that are left and you will see that some, like the blundering June bug, have their wings so placed that a straight line appears down the middle of the back. These belong together, regardless of their colour, size, shape, habits, or other considerations. They belong to the order _Coleoptera_. Grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets belong to another group and can be pinned together. All the flies have two wings, and belong in a group apart from all the four-winged ones. The dragon flies go together. You will have representatives of other orders, less easy to distinguish, but by the time your collection has grown to this extent you will be ready for some beginner's book on entomology, which will make further classification simple enough. As you shift your specimens from one box to another observe a certain regularity of arrangement. The heads should all point in one direction. When pinning a group all of which are about one size, set the pins all in line, in military fashion. How much better they look! This neat, formal arrangement of the specimens adds greatly to your satisfaction and enjoyment of your collection. Avoid crowding and breakage. A dried specimen is almost everlasting, but at the same time it is the most fragile thing you can imagine.

As your collection grows in size, value, and interest, you will certainly want wooden cases. Perhaps your manual training teacher will be willing to let you build a box under his direction. A cabinet-maker can make them at one dollar or less, apiece, of well-seasoned basswood.

Before you have been collecting long, you will have learned by observation quite a lot about insects and their ways. You will know that some localities are very poor collecting ground, that other places yield an abundant variety; that the best time for butterflies is in a sunny forenoon; while moths are abroad in the early twilight and later. You will see that dragon flies are fond of flying about over streams or ponds and you may wonder why as you try in vain to net a fine one without getting your feet wet. Other insects are frankly aquatic and you can get them only by dipping your net in. It is well to have a second net if you expect to do much water collecting as the cloth is hard to smooth out after a wetting. As a majority of insects are vegetarian you will naturally seek among plants for specimens. If the winged forms are not eating the foliage you may discover that they are laying eggs on the leaves of the food plant on which their young must develop. If you live in town you will find it worth while to carry your bottle with you when you go out in the evening. Nocturnal insects of all kinds are attracted to electric lights, many of them to their death, as you will see. A candle in your open window will attract some valuable additions to your collection and also some you will sleep better without. Some collectors care nothing for a specimen unless it is rare. A better way is to regard them all as rare until you secure a specimen for your box, and of equal value towards building up a complete collection.

A LIFE HISTORY COLLECTION

You can not collect insects very long before you begin to see a lot of things you never noticed before. You see leaves cut or eaten in strange forms, or you find a cluster of tiny eggs on a leaf, or several leaves sewed or stuck together with strands of silk. Perhaps you find strange abnormal growths on certain plants, swellings on their stems, leaves transformed into balls, or pod-like or cone-like affairs which do not look natural. These things are sure to arouse your curiosity. Sometimes the answer to your question is right there. Cut open a swollen golden-rod stalk and you will find the culprit which caused the plant to grow that way. But how did the footless, helpless grub get there and when? You break down the mud-dauber wasp's nest from among the rafters of some building. What is that yellowish object that rolls from among the ruined adobe walls? Look! It is a spider. What business has a spider in the wasp's nest, if it is her nest? Spiders have none too good a reputation, but this spider does not act very spry. Seems to be alive, yet not alive.

The secret of the relation between the spiders and the wasps you can read in many a book. You might even guess at it, but there was no guess work about the observer who first studied out this secret. He did not get his knowledge from books. He patiently watched the mud-dauber going about her house building. He knew that her painstaking labour could have but one meaning. She was building not a home for herself, but for her children.

The wasp's children are not little wasps, yet they are none the less young wasps for being footless, colourless, wingless, stingless grubs. They are eggs at first of course, just as all insects are. When the mother wasp has one cell of her apartment house finished she concerns herself immediately with stocking the larder. Knowing the tastes of her yet unborn young, she leaves for a time the mud hole, and visits the haunts of certain spiders. Finding one to her liking, she captures it. Not appreciating the fact that the law forbids the use of preservatives in meats, she injects a drop of some wonder-working fluid into the spider and preserves the creature, not only fresh but alive, though paralyzed. Upon the inert body she places an egg, then seals the cell, well assured in her mind that when the grub hatches it will find the food just as she left it and just enough to nourish the young one to maturity.

Before your first season of collecting is past you will find yourself bringing home as specimens many insects which you will see are not fully grown. Little grasshoppers, scarcely bigger than a fly yet possessed of such strength of leg that they can hurl themselves into the air for a distance equal to twenty times their own length. How do you know that they are young grasshoppers and not fully grown ones of some tiny race? Look at one closely and you will see a look of youth about him that is unmistakable. He is fuzzy, his head is too big for him, his legs out of all proportion to the rest of him. Then, too, he has no wings, just little buds where the wings will be some day. By these tokens you will know him for a baby. You can find them in all sizes and can have a series to show the stages of growth. This is one of the first steps in the making of a "Life History Collection," far more valuable to the naturalist than a collection containing only mature insects.

Generally speaking, all adult insects have wings, and all winged insects are adults. There are exceptions to this, but they will take their places when the time comes. The young of the insects belonging to certain orders resemble their parents enough so as to be placed where they belong at a glance. This is true of the grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets, of the true bugs which include the squash-bugs, the chinch-bug, the stink-bug and others. Of most of the other orders this is not true. The young do not look at all like the adults. In many cases as, for example, the dragon fly and the mosquito, they are fitted in the immature stages to a life in the water. They must, on this account, have organs for swimming, for aquatic breathing, and for getting a living in the water. The forms of these young insects are just as varied as those of the adults, but they do not resemble the winged ones in the least. The life history collection must contain specimens of the immature forms of insect life as well as adults if it is to be most useful and complete.

Some orders of insects, as for example the moths, butterflies, beetles, flies, bees, wasps, ants, and others pass through four distinct changes of form. They always follow the same order. Every generation, beginning with the egg, passes next to the larva (called caterpillar or incorrectly worm, or grub, or maggot), on to the pupa, then to the adult. The egg of an insect is often a most beautiful object. With a hand lens, which every collector will surely need, one can see its delicate colouring, its pearl-like shell, its curiously carved or sculptured surface. To get some idea of the great variety in form, colour, shape, and markings of insects' eggs, ask at your library for a book on butterflies, with coloured plates, and the chances are that you will be surprised.

The second or larval stage of the insect's life is the eating, growing stage. During this stage the young bee, butterfly, ant, or moth moults several times. In this process the entire old skin is shed, an operation well worth seeing. Under the old coat a new one has formed, which being larger, accommodates itself to the insect's increased size. The larval stage is in the case of many insects the active time when, if they are vegetable feeders, they injure crops.

When the larva has completed its growth it changes into a pupa. Some insects pass this third stage inside of silken cases they spin about themselves, others, after shedding the larval skin, find themselves each clad in a sort of horny coat of mail. We call these chrysalides. Some larvæ creep away into the ground, there to shed their old coats and rest inside of the pupa cases which nature provides. Each one follows the fashion of his own family and is in no danger of being mistaken for any one else.

Out of the pupa, whether it be cocoon, chrysalis, or just plain pupa case, comes the adult. The main business of adult insects is to reproduce their kind. After the eggs are laid there is little excuse for their living. In the case of a great many kinds of insects death follows soon after. There are some noted exceptions to this rule as for instance the wasps which build with so much skill and patience the homes in which to rear their young, the ants and the bees, both social and solitary, which carry on such a complicated home life. Of these highly "civilized" insects only a word can be spoken here. From the chapter on "Bee-Keeping" and from other books you may learn of the wonders they perform. We must return now to our life history collection.

How the subject opens as we add specimens of cocoons and pupa cases to the collection! To get a complete series illustrating the life, let us say, of one of our common butterflies, the monarch or milk-weed butterfly, you should visit the clusters of milk-weed along the roadside or anywhere, in the forenoon of a sunny July or August day. A few butterflies are probably flitting about in rather casual fashion. Watch them light on the leaves, mark the leaf with your eye and hurry to the spot. Search well. The tiny speck of pale yellow may be a drop of milk but if it stands up on the leaf it is likely to be a butterfly's egg. Your lens will tell you. Having made sure of one you will find others.

You may find a young caterpillar lunching on the leaf. If just out of the egg it is a dull lead colour, but when half grown a young monarch is striped with rings of greenish yellow and black. Though handsome as to colour scheme, this caterpillar has manners unbecoming a plain citizen, let alone a monarch. Touch its back with a grass stem and see what happens.

If time permits you should visit your clump of milk-weed daily or better still take home the eggs and the young caterpillars. Keep the food plant fresh in a jar of water and get more when needed. As you want a specimen of the egg-shell for your collection, you must be on the spot when the young caterpillars come out. They sometimes eat the shell the first thing. It is a delicate operation to glue a thing as frail as this shell onto a dried milk-weed leaf, and you may have to content yourself with making a sketch of it on a small square of drawing paper. Pin the leaf or the drawing in the box. It is not easy to keep specimens of caterpillars. There is a method of preparing the inflated skins, but as the process is a difficult as well as a ghastly one, you can wait till you go to college to learn it. For the milk-weed caterpillar I suggest instead, a coloured drawing. When your caterpillars are full-sized they will transform into chrysalides. It is worth sitting up all night to see a sight like this. When a caterpillar spins a little mat of silk and suspends itself by a tail-hook, you will know that the performance is about to begin. The chrysalis is a lovely light green with spots of gold upon it. All this beauty was hidden under the skin of the caterpillar. With an egg, a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and an adult you have all four stages of the monarch's life represented.

INSECT HOMES

Nothing in the insect world interests me more than their homes. The collector sees many of these in his rounds, and begins to consider how he can complete his series by adding samples of them as specimens to his collection. I was lucky enough to find, when on a collecting trip one day, a curious structure made of mud on a weed stem. It was declared by the professor to be an ants' "cow-shed." Knowing that the museum specimen was in a bad state of repair I readily offered my find to replace it. The professor refused the gift, but offered me what he thought it was worth. I accepted and bought a pair of shoes with the money, which shows that these things have a market value.

It is well to press a specimen of the favourite food plant of a species of insect and make it a part of the collection. But dried butterflies, fastened in utterly unnatural attitudes upon dried plants they would scorn to eat in life, framed or put under glass globes on the parlour table do not appeal to the naturalist. They are "fakes" pure and simple.

There will be a few among the many who begin to make collections of various kinds who will keep at it. I know one young man who sold his stamp collection for enough to take him on his first trip abroad. Six hundred dollars was the sum realized, I believe. Those of you who have read Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter's story "The Girl of the Limberlost" remember that "the girl" sold Indian relics and insects enough to send herself to high school and start a college fund. She made up little life history collections to illustrate the talks she gave as special teacher of nature study in the grades in a city school system.

The Limberlost girl had an offer of three hundred dollars for a complete collection of the butterflies and moths of the United States. She had a wonderful collecting ground in and about the big swamp, and she had enough duplicates to exchange with other collectors for things she could not get at home. In order to have perfect specimens, both male and female, she made breeding cages and reared the moths and butterflies. She dug in the earth about the tree roots and other "likely" places for pupæ, she searched the shrubs and vines and trees for hanging cocoons, she brought in innumerable eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalides and the story of her successes and failures fills many delightful pages. It all rings so true that you can't help hoping that you may see her insect collection some day, and hear her tell how she brought this butterfly up "by hand," how she had to wait a year to get a male to complete one series, how narrowly she escaped the quicksands in a wild chase she had for another, and other details of her occupation.

REARING INSECTS

Breeding insects is easy. Look at the home-made breeding-cage illustrated on this page. Materials needed: One round or oval hat box, a strip of wire screen, two and a half feet wide or so and long enough to fit around the inside of the box and lap three inches. Either sew the screen together in the form of a cylinder or fasten it every six inches with paper fasteners. (Any way to keep it together good and tight.) Push the screen down inside the box till it touches the bottom, put the lid on and you are ready for business. If the screen is too wide you will have trouble in reaching to the bottom of the box which you will have to do sometimes, for one reason or another. Into breeding-cages made on this general plan you can put all sorts of material while waiting developments, and get many additions to your collection that you would otherwise miss entirely.

Some surprising facts are often discovered by accident. A breeding-cage containing a female _Cecropia_, one of our largest and most beautiful moths, was accidentally left near an open window over night. The next morning between twenty and thirty moths of that species were found fluttering about the cage. They had evidently been attracted from some distance, but found their way to their imprisoned sister unerringly.

Collectors have many ways of capturing night flying moths. One way is known as "sugaring." This consists of daubing a sticky, sweet preparation on the trunks of trees and visiting the baits later in the evening with cyanide jars and capturing the specimens which are attracted by the odour to the feast set for them. It is unsportsmanlike and entirely unnecessary to put any poisonous substance in the bait and this practice should be darkly frowned upon.

The best places for sugaring are these: a strip of woodland edging a stream, the rim of the woods adjoining an open field or pasture, old roadways through woods of beech, oak, chestnut, or any mixed growth, wooded slopes in city parks where there is some protecting undergrowth, anywhere about the old groves surrounding country homes. Windy or wet nights are not the best for sugaring, neither are moonlight nights. The ideal night for this is the evening after a hot, sticky day in late summer, the sky overcast and dark but not foggy. You will need a lantern to work by. Keep calm. Quick, nervous movements frighten away more moths than the light.

The following is the unspeakable concoction recommended by one collector as "the best ever" for baiting moths:

Four pounds darkest sugar.

One quart New Orleans molasses.

One pint stale beer or ale. (This should have been allowed to stand uncorked in a warm place for a week, before using it.)

Mix all together and heat gradually. Boil till about as thick as varnish, which takes about five minutes. When cool add four ounces of Jamaica rum. Cork loosely and keep in a cool place. The strong odour of this mixture pervades the air for a long distance, and proves attractive to the olfactories of moths though none of us would care to have it about.

A good evening's work at sugaring ought to furnish moths enough to keep you busy spreading all the next forenoon. A night in the cyanide jar will do them no injury. It is well to have a pair of light pincers to take specimens out with. If all are emptied out at once some will dry too much before you are ready to spread them. Every time they are handled they lose part of the scales and become slightly defective. If practical, put the very large specimens into the jar hinder end first. This will make it easier to get them out head first.

It is almost inevitable that the inveterate collector of insects shall become a naturalist. By constant watching, he discovers how insects live, and how they affect plants. He will witness many a tragedy. He will find that there are among them thieves and robbers, pirates, cannibals, assassins, scavengers, and disease carriers. He will witness many acts of heroic self-denial, some feats of strength, endurance tests, and acrobatic turns. He will admire the ingenious architecture and wonder at the never ending variety of forms, colours, and markings they exhibit. Many questions will come up in the course of his studies. He may seek the books in vain for information on some of the commonest insects of the garden. Entomology is a new science. Boys and girls who begin the study by collecting their first insect to-day may, before they stop, discover some important fact to add to the sum of human knowledge and make the world a better place to live in.

X

ODD JOBS

KINDLING WOOD

Cutting kindling wood was ever a boy's job. Most set tasks have little to them but drudgery. But cutting kindling used to be interesting. What is there about it? The struggle to master a stubborn stick, the danger that a slip may bring the axe down elsewhere than on the stick, or that a careless blow may cause the stick to rebound, leap into the air, and give the chopper a whack on the head? Scarcely a boy but can show a hatchet's scar on the foot and I know a girl who will always carry one in the place where most people carry a corn.

The problem of a source of kindling supply on the farm is never one to be reckoned with. There are always old fences going to pieces, old buildings being torn down, and the problem is rather how to store the supply where it can be had when needed. In town things are different. The fences, if any, are iron, the buildings are few and kept in repair because they cost so much to build. There are practically no loose boards lying around and kindling has to be bought outright. The ex-farmer always resents this as an uncalled-for expense. But kindling is a necessity wherever fires are to be made. No patent article quite fills the bill.

Why should grown men monopolize the kindling business? Because there is good money in it? But any boy can go into this business, if he has any spunk. The capital required is very small. If your credit is good you can borrow a hatchet. The chances are that spunk will supply the wood. It may be rotting in somebody's wood lot waiting till the right boy comes along.

Boys in the South are lucky. They can get fat pine which is in great demand both North and South. Some say the supply has given out, but who believes such tales? The demand for this will never be less than now and there is no substitute for fat pine.

Collecting driftwood is another occupation for boys, sea-coast boys, this time. A kind of substitute for this is being sold. It is a mixture of chemicals and does very well for toy fireplaces in city apartments. But the real thing will always bring a fancy price.

It is the common practice of American lumbermen to regard no part of the tree as valuable, but the trunk. All the rest is rubbish and the expense of trimming off the branches reduces the amount of profit on every log. Some day when our young foresters get enough experience to see all round the great subject they are working at, they will think out ways of disposing economically of the tops and branches of the cut trees. This is one of the big problems of forestry for these reasons: (1) The huge amount of this refuse wood chokes out the young growth and the forest cannot renew itself as it would naturally. (2) The brush dries quickly and whenever a small fire gets started there is fresh food for it everywhere. (3) The brush prevents the fighters from making their way to the threatened district. They have to fight the brush piles before they get to the fire.

This refuse wood might be put to a number of uses, e. g., for pulp wood, thus saving the trunks for lumber; for fuel, nothing makes better fires than the smaller limbs; for kindling, the branches which are too small to use for stove wood make splendid kindling, particularly for fireplaces.

Some of us think gathering faggots too slow and laborious. But we needn't make work of it. 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.

There is no excuse for the poor people of a village near woods suffering for fuel. They needn't steal. Let them get permission from the owner to clean up his wood lot. It will be good for the wood lot and the owner knows it if he is an intelligent man. The boys and girls are much safer gathering faggots in the woods than coal along the tracks.

Faggots for kindlings bring a fair price, too, and I recommend it as a way of earning money out of your father's wood lot if he has one. In some villages in Germany the people have the right to break off in the forest all the branches that they can reach when standing on the ground. In those forests there is never any loss of life, nor lumber, by fires, no choking out of young growth by brush piles. You could walk through the forest there and see in every direction miles and miles of clean trunked trees of varying ages, but no underbrush, no rubbish, no decaying logs, no diseased wood.

Maybe those thrifty German people made mistakes when their country was as young as ours. But they found out the way to take care of their forests hundreds of years ago and we can learn how from them.

CLEANING A CARRIAGE

If you get home late at night after a drive in the mud the chances are that you will not clean the carriage till the next day. But if thin mud is allowed to dry on a varnished surface it will be sure to leave spots.

Water is the "first aid to the injured" in cleaning highly polished vehicles. Plenty of it should be flushed onto the varnish, the mud washed off by the force of the water rather than being rubbed off or scraped off. Keep your buggy out of the bright sunlight when not in use, especially when it is wet. Slow drying is better for the varnish.

A coarse sponge is a good thing to wash a carriage with; this should be thoroughly rinsed after each rub to free it from grit. Never use soap on varnish. It may be used on the metal parts of the carriage. Prepared chalk is the best for polishing the ornamental parts. For glass, clean water and a cloth or chamois skin are all you need.

WORK IN THE ORCHARD

Many are the light jobs in the orchard or fruit plantation, which fall to the boys. I know a boy who at thirteen was his father's expert budder. There are high school boys in localities where nurseries and orchards are plentiful who follow this as a trade, making good wages at it. It is a wonderful thing to do, a very neat job in handicraft, and while a book might tell how it is done, nobody could learn how to bud or graft without seeing it done and then trying, till the trick is learned. Boys also follow the grafter and tie in the bud or wax the graft.

Boys are often employed in vineyards to follow the pruners and tie the vines to the trellis or wire with rags or raffia. They become very expert and tie an incredible number in a day. In fact many of the light jobs grow pretty heavy after eight or nine hours.

MAKING RUSTIC FURNITURE

Collecting material for making rustic furniture is a pastime that is suggested by walks in the woods. Sometimes a bit of twisted branch may look like the arm of a settee or the leg of a tea-table. Procuring the first part suggests the quest for the other pieces and the fitting them together to make a natural looking, balanced, artistic piece. Rustic furniture to be good, should appear to have grown that way. There is too much of the kind that looks as if it were made to sell. The truth is that the more truly artistic it is the better price it will bring in the right market. Laurel wood is particularly adapted for rustic furniture.

SELECTING SEED CORN

By a careful study of what experts have to say about the best corn for seed, and of the photographs of ears of prize corn, any young man of intelligence may learn to select from his father's field the best corn for seed. It may be that your father buys his seed corn from a seedsman. My experience is that seed corn bought in bulk contains a large number of poor grains. They probably shell the whole ear. The best farmers never plant grains from tips or butts of ears, since it costs just as much to plant and cultivate and harvest a runty corn stalk bearing a nubbin as it does a lusty, towering stalk with two good ears of corn on it.

Find out what a good ear of corn looks like. Make note of all the points to be encouraged. The habit of producing two good ears of corn is a good one to establish. Go through the field when the corn is ripe, before the huskers, and select the best ears, with all the points you have learned in mind. Take off the outer husks and draw the rest back, exposing the entire ear. When you have ten or a dozen ears braid the husks together, starting with three ears, adding one after another to the braid till all are secure. Fasten with strong twine and make a loop to hang the bunch by. Seed corn should hang for a few weeks in the open to cure, but should be taken inside before snow. You will have to use a good deal of ingenuity to keep chickens, rats, squirrels, and other thieves away from your seed corn.

When spring comes the corn should be shelled, and every imperfect grain should be discarded. By selecting the seed in this way, demanding of each ear that it shall be perfect, you find the crop will improve, if cultivation is good, the soil well enriched, and the season normal. Every time a farmer boy uses his mind first in connection with any kind of work, the quality of work improves and his interest in his work increases. Selecting seed not only gives better corn but it helps make a better farmer.

MAKING CIDER VINEGAR

Every good apple year there are thousands of bushels of apples that go to waste. It doesn't pay to pick and put them into barrels when the price of barrels is more than you can get for the apples. The farmer is the last man to learn how to make use of what ordinarily goes to waste. Nature is lavish always, but wastes nothing. The farmer has learned to be lavish and wasteful too. They say that every part of the pig is utilized in the packing house except the squeal. That is the principle which the farmer will have to live by if he would succeed. What can be done with those wasting apples? Let the boys have them to make into pure cider vinegar. Every one knows how vinegar has been adulterated, and now the law-makers have put their veto on the practice and a penalty to match the crime.

There is nothing very difficult about the physical part of vinegar making. Nature does the hard work but we can aid nature by providing the ideal conditions for making the product we want.

The best apples for making pure cider vinegar are clean, ripe apples. If you use green, dirty, decayed, or over-ripe apples, your vinegar will probably not meet the lawful tests and your time and work will be wasted. Green apples have not enough sugar in them. The same is true of over-ripe apples. "But there isn't much sugar in cider vinegar," you say. No, that is true, but without sugar in the cider you wouldn't get any vinegar. If you were a chemist you could find out just how much sugar was contained in the juice of your apples. Unless the cider has 85 per cent. of sugar it will not make vinegar good enough to satisfy the requirements of the law. However, plenty is found in cider made from sound, ripe apples, and he who makes cider out of anything else deserves to fail.

Expose any fruit juice to the air and it will change. We say, "Oh, that is fermented," and throw it away. But what is this ferment? Set a glass of fresh apple juice in the sun and watch it. In a few days you can actually see that some change is taking place. It is "working," as they say. The sugar is changing to alcohol; so the chemists tell us. What makes it do this? The chemists must answer again. They say that there are yeast plants in the apple juice. How did they get there? We did not put yeast in the apple juice. No, but the air is full of the spores of wild yeast plants so the juice does not have to wait till we put in domesticated yeast from a little "silver" wrapper. As these yeast plants grow they cause the sugar in the juice to change to alcohol. There are lots of other wild spores in the air and in the dirt which collects on the apples if they are left out very long. Some of these spores may be of a kind that would delay the fermentation. For this, if for no better reason, we should wash our cider apples.

In a glass of cider set out in the sun it does not take long for the yeast plants to convert all the sugar to alcohol, because warmth hastens the work. In the barrel set in a cool cellar it takes longer, about six months.

But you have no vinegar yet. You have nothing but "hard" cider which isn't fit for anything. But in the barrel along with the yeast plants are lots of other bacteria, to be seen under the microscope. Among them is a kind that causes alcohol to change to acetic acid. Did you ever pour off the vinegar from a jug and find a mass of jelly-like substance stopping the mouth of the jug? They called it "mother" didn't they? This mother contains great numbers of acetic acid makers and if placed in your barrels will hasten the changes that fit the hard cider for use on the table.

The making of cider vinegar is almost all profit for there is very little outlay for materials and very little work is required. It does take some knowledge of what to do and when. A little study and experience makes success almost certain. A bulletin of the New York State Experiment Station at Geneva gives the following directions, somewhat abbreviated here, for making good cider vinegar at home:

"Use sound ripe apples, picked before they have become dirty or crushed. Observe ordinary precautions to secure cleanliness in grinding and pressing, and use no water. Let the juice stand a few days to settle, then draw off the clear liquid into barrels that have been cleansed and treated with steam or boiling water. Do not fill more than three fourths full. Put a loose plug of cotton into the bung hole. If kept at a temperature of fifty to forty-five degrees Fahr. the alcoholic fermentation will be complete in about six months. This time can be shortened to three months by keeping a temperature of sixty-five to seventy degrees in the storage room and by adding one cake of Fleischmann's compressed yeast dissolved in a little water, to every five gallons of juice. When the cider stops 'working' you will know that the sugar has all been changed to alcohol. The clear liquid should now be drawn off, the barrels rinsed and filled again. To each barrel should now be added from two to four quarts of good vinegar containing some 'mother.' If kept at a temperature of sixty-five to seventy degrees Fahr. the vinegar may be ready for use in six months. If kept very cool it may be two years. When sour enough to be 'just right' the barrels should be filled as full as possible and tightly corked or the sourness may disappear."

MAKING GRAPE JUICE

Any girl with a little experience in canning fruit can make for home use and for sale a harmless and delectable beverage out of the surplus grapes. Every good grape year on the farm there comes the question of what to do with the grapes. A little jelly is made when the grapes are green but most people prefer currant jelly or blackberry or crab apple. Canned grapes are pronounced "no good" by all the family, and grape marmalade is full of "splinters of glass," though how they got there who can say?

The housekeeping magazines give receipts for preserving grapes but cold storage alone gives good results and few farms have cold storage plants. Those grapes hang there by the bushel and try as you may you do not get them all eaten fresh.

Grape juice is not wine. If you should try to make wine you would probably fail. But unfermented grape juice is easier to make than jelly and as it needs no sugar your investment is small. Grape juice has food value, as it contains more solid matter than milk, and is recommended as a drink for children and for invalids. In many European countries "grape cures" have long been popular. In the pure, unadulterated, unfermented juice of the grape we have a palatable, nourishing food and a refreshing drink in one. It is highly recommended as a preventive of some diseases, a cure for others, and as a restorative of general health.

So much for the product. Now how is it made? It is possible to make grape juice from start to finish in the open air. If the grapes grow on an arbour what more delightful occupation can you imagine than spending a day or two converting the perfect fruit into nectar? Idling in a hammock may appeal to some, but a row of shining fruit jars worth seventy-five cents apiece looks better to an enterprising girl than a finished novel.

You will need a table, a rocking chair, a large basket and scissors, granite pans and double boiler, an oil or gasolene stove, clean jelly bag and flannel filter, jars or bottles, corks, rubbers, etc.

When the grapes are just right to eat out of hand they are right for grape juice. Green or over-ripe grapes are not worth working over. Discard all unsound fruit, wash, and crush. Put into a freshly washed bag of coarse, strong muslin, tie securely and twist and squeeze it until the juice is all out. Two people can work to advantage at this job.

The juice should now be put into a stone jar set in a pan of water or heated in a double boiler. It is just at this point that most people make a mistake and destroy the fine flavour of the grape by boiling the juice. _It should never boil._ If you have a thermometer use it now. The object of heating this juice is to destroy the yeast spores and other organisms which have alighted on the grapes as they hung in the arbour and which are so small that they came right through the mesh of the muslin bag. A temperature of one hundred and eighty degrees to two hundred degrees Fahr. is high enough. Take the juice from the fire when the two hundred Fahr. is reached. A thermometer is not absolutely necessary. When the juice begins to steam it is getting close up to two hundred and twelve degrees Fahr., the boiling point, which you must avoid.

Making prime quality unfermented grape juice requires two forenoons. If you want your jars to be clear from top to bottom instead of muddy with sediment you will set the juice away in an enamelled or glass vessel until morning, when you will see why this precaution is necessary. With greatest care dip the clear liquid off and filter it. A flannel bag made in the shape of a cone with a stiff wire or wooden ring at the top to hold it open, is the best filter. Several thicknesses of flannel or felt are better than one. All the tiny particles of sediment will be caught in the woollen meshes and the juice will be pure. The last traces of settlings, will be removed and the liquid will be clear. The colour and flavour will depend on the kind of grape used.