St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1880-10-08
Letter from Turkey.
SIYAs. TURKEY. Aug.

Editor Of the CaIedoniGn Ever since
my arrival in Asia Minor, there has
been an earnest desire in my heart to
try to help some of the farmers in Gale
donia county, who thiuk their lot so
hard, to realize how much they have to
be thankful for. 1t is true that you do
not have the most congenial of soils,
that your lands do not reuder the same
crops year after year, and never yielded
you the abundant harvests which richer
regions of country do; but you live
where you have homes and farms that
do not have to be walled around and
watchman to guard them.
If you could see the implements used
here, you would be thankful that you
were born in Christian land. 1t seems
as if the world had gone back thousands
of years, so closely have this people ad-
hered to the implements of their fa-
theirs. The plough in use to-day is the
same as that used in the time of the
patriarchs, represented in the ancient
monuments the shovels, axes and
scythes are equally clumsy and rough
in construction. Not long since an
American plough was taken out to Ain
tab, and it was an object of intense in
terest; those who looked at it said,
"Those English have brains" 1t would
be very difficult in this vicinity to find
a yoke of oxen strong enough to draw a
plough which would go deep enough to
turn up a respectable furrow. The land
is generally ploughed and left over un-
til the next year, then ploughed again,
and the seed put in in the autumn !;
only barley and wheat are raised here
for grain; cereals do not grow readily
in this vicinity, and oats are never seen
here. All of the grain is gathered into
the great threshing floors, which are
hard from centuries of use.
The instrument used for threshing is
drag; the under side of which is full
of small pieces of sharp flint driven into
cuts made in the wood. Two or three
men stand on the drag while it is drawn
over the grain, until it is threshed and
the straw cut in pieces two or three
inches long this lies in great piles on
the threshing floor, which often covers
acres of ground, until some windy day,
when the reaper takes his fan in his
hand, which is clumsy, fourtined
wooden fork, and mounts this pile of
chaff and wheat, and as he raises it on
his fan, the light straw is blown to one
side, but the wheat or barley falls di
rectly to the ground, because of its su-
perior weight. In some of the villages,
the wheat is buried in deep pits which
hold from 40 to so bushels, for they do
not have room in their houses for it,
and the straw is saved for the cattle as
far as they are able to store it, and the
chaff is burned with fire. After the
grain is threshed it must remain in the
threshing floor until the tithingman
has taken out the share which the Gov
ernment always claims, and not unfre
quently the grain waits six weeks or
two months, and if it should rain it is
greatly injured, broad band of green
will. be seen around these great pyra-
mids of grain.
Cracked wheat is much used by the
natives; it is made with two round
stones, foot in diameter and four inch
es thick a hole in one side of the up
per stone allows us to put in stout
stick to turn it, the grain is put in a
round hole in the middle of the upper
stone, and the cracked wheat comes
out in the cloth put under the stones to
catch it as it comes out between them
This is hard work for one, but two oil
three young girls like to keep it going
rapidly around, and sing their merIiest
songs as they work, and the sound ot
= the grinding is not low.
AS you travel in this country, you
pass through vast stretches of unculti-
waited lands, and the continuous peaks
and spurs of mountain ranges are al.
most always barren. You might almos
imagine you were among the White
Mountains of New Hampshire, in the
, month of August, and you ascending OIL
horseback by the bride path ON Mount
Washington, only the horses and roads
are so different. Often the plains be-
tween the mountain systems trend to
fifty miles in extent, and the soil rich,
where the water is turned on from the
rivers good crops are raised lnothing
can be done here without irrigation) as
we do not have rain sometimes for two
or three months, and we have the
scorching sun of the latitude of Phila-
delphia. The composition of the soil is
sometimes such that it recuperates it.
self by disintegration effected by the
heat of the sun in summer and the
frosts in winter. Considerable soil is
brought down from the mountain sides