hat 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.

BUSINESS STILL RUNNING.

"My own hens closed out business six weeks ago," not long since said
"Man of the Prairie." He mentioned also, that he had not much faith in
pure bred poultry. Now he severely complains that no eggs can be found
among the farmers nor in village stores. I will not say that pure
strains of poultry are better layers than common, but, when one pays a
good price for poultry, it is an incentive to provide good shelter and
bestow upon them some manifestations of interest which would not be done
with the common fowls. Herein may lay in part the secret of better
returns from pure strains.

Years ago our chickens 'closed out business' for several