ture. I feel the
slight all the more keenly because I am a personal acquaintance of
Secretary Morton's, having been introduced to and shaken hands with him
at the quadrennial convention of the Western Academy of Science at
Omaha in 1884. Prompt attention to my letter was due on the score of
old friendship. The Secretary of Agriculture will recognize his error
in offending me if ever he becomes a candidate for the presidency.
Reuben Baker never forgets an affront.

But, though my sunflowers and my tomato vines suffered as I have
narrated, my potatoes were doing finely. The potato patch is located
in the back yard, near the poplar trees; it is in the shape of the Big
Dipper, and I took the precaution to plant the potatoes in the new of
the moon. The first planting never amounted to anything, for the
reason that I peeled them and cut out the eyes before putting them in
their hills. I learned subsequently that this was as fatal a course as
it were possible to pursue. You must never peel potatoes or cut out
their eyes if you want them to grow. I do not know why this is so, but
it is. At any rate, the second crop I planted was a success. Every
day I dug down into the hills to see how the potatoes were progressing,
and I was thus enabled to keep track of the development of the tender
fruit.

My young friend Budd Taylor provided me with a dozen ears of seed
popcorn which I planted in a warm, bright spot and which soon bristled
up in splendid style. I think it likely that, but for the birds, I
should have had a crop of popcorn sufficient to supply the Chicago
market, for I never before saw anything like that corn for luxuriance
and thrift. How the birds ever found out about it will doubtless
remain a mystery.

The birds I refer to proved to be blackbirds, although for a time I
mistook them for young crows. One morning I detected about three dozen
of the poaching rogues stalking through the grass in the direction of
my corn-patch, and, almost before I knew it, the feathered rascals had
played havoc with my promising crop of popcorn. Then I remembered that
I had read and seen pictures in books of scarecrows; so I dressed up a
figure and set it up near the corn patch. It was really a very good
counterfeit of a man, as indeed it ought to have been, for the clothing
I used was far from ragged, and Alice had been intending to send it to
a poor relative of hers in Nebraska.

The night after I had set up this lay fig