rs for the ostensible purpose of
listening to improving discussions and addresses both instructive and
entertaining. Really, in most cases, the farmers' institutes have been
occasions for the cultivation of relations between a few of the
exceptional farmers and their city friends and with one another. Seldom is
anything done which leads to any better selling methods for the farmers,
any organization looking to cooperative effort, or anything else that an
agricultural economist from Ireland, Germany or Denmark would suggest as
the sort of action which the American farmer must take if he is to make
the most of his life and labor.

The Woodruff District was interested in the institute however, because of
the fact that a rural-school exhibit was one of its features that year,
and that Colonel Woodruff had secured an urgent invitation to the school
to take part in it.

"We've got something new out in our district school," said he to the
president of the institute.

"So I hear," said the president--"mostly a fight, isn't it?"

"Something more," said the colonel. "If you'll persuade our school to make
an exhibit of real rural work in a real rural school, I'll promise you
something worth seeing and discussing."

Such exhibits are now so common that it is not worth while for us to
describe it; but then, the sight of a class of children testing and
weighing milk, examining grains for viability and foul seeds, planning
crop rotations, judging grains and live stock was so new in that county as
to be the real sensation of the institute.

Two persons were a good deal embarrassed by the success of the exhibit.
One was the county superintendent, who was constantly in receipt of
undeserved compliments upon her wisdom in fostering really "practical work
in the schools." The other was Jim Irwin, who was becoming famous, and who
felt he had done nothing to deserve fame. Professor Withers, an extension
lecturer from Ames, took Jim to dinner at the best hotel in the town, for
the purpose of talking over with him the needs of the rural schools. Jim
was in agony. The colored waiter fussed about trying to keep Jim in the
beaten track of hotel manners, restored to him the napkin which Jim failed
to use, and juggled back into place the silverware which Jim
misappropriated to alien and unusual uses. But, when the meal had
progressed to the stage of conversation, the waiter noticed that gradually
the uncouth farmer became master of the situat