Norwich bulletin., 1915-12-11

(Wr1tten Specla1ly TOT 1ne DuIIeIlL'J
 Some years ago, while driving through the village met a team that was strange to me. I asked my com- panion if he knew whose it was.
 "Oh, yes," he answered, that's Hi Labor from the West Part. He bought the old George Adams farm couple of years ago."
 why" said I, that farm was so near run out, last I knew anyth1ng about it, that. the woodchucks couldnI get living on it, and this chap looks as if he were finding enough to eat.
 Well" was the answer, Ill Lalor is one of those men that can make living anywhere. He has already pald off half the mortgage he gave ana IS keeping twelve or thirteen cows and taking a big load of truck to market at least every week But, Lord, man, he'd make money on a farm cut out or the center of the Great American Des- ent He's built that way. Seems as II he just couldn't help it."
 All this made me very curious. l kept on making inquiries. took means to scrape an acquaintance with this Hi Labor and asked him all sorts or questions I made a trip to his place, one day. on pretense of looking for something I knew he didn't have, Just to get a look around and see 1T could discover any trace Of his secret of success.
 By which means I at last discovered it. It eluded me for a long time be- cause it was so simple and so every where manifest. I was hunting for something abstruse and mysterious and hidden. The real secret, on the other hand, wasn't a secret at all. It was not actually sitting on It's tall ana barking at you to attract your atten- tion, to be sure, but it was written very plainly on every fence and build ing and tool and animal about the place.
 ing Care of Things.
 The fences, for example, were not very good The old farm had been run into bankruptcy and abandonment by an incompetent previous owner, who had stripped it of almost every thing and allowed the small remain der to go "alI at loose ends" as the saving is. Fences had gone to pot the f. st thing, and sCant material had been left fer their repair. But the most possible had been made of the o?9 ccniraptjons, and more than I should have thought possible had been r,2je Cf snort bits of board and rusty lengths of wire and poles a-od the like, to mend up the broken places. The fences didn't look very handsome, but LII y were SCIOlI$5 CIlouS1lA eh1ISA AAASAA enough to turn cattle. When the new owner turne dhis herd into a field he was reasonably sure they'd stay in til he took them out.
 And he casually remarked. as he saw me looking rather closely at one bit, that he'd just ordered hundred rods nf wire fencing and hoped to have that piece "lool1in' a little more respectable" soor.
 The buildings, too, were old, and had been neglected so long that it was a wonder they hadn't fallen down in sheer disgust at their former owners slackness. But they, too, had been patched up with anything available till they at least shed water and kept wasn't a board left on the place when Labor bought it, he had discovered an old back-lot born which hadn't been used for some years. The sills and other timbers had mostly routed away, but some of the old boards were still lively enough to hold nails. These he had carefully salvaged and used to repair the home barn. The coming winter he was planning to get out several thousand feet from neigh bor's woods, on shares, and hoped thus to secure fresh lumber enough to put the old barrack into really good shape
 The pastures were pretty poor. But he had spent rather more money than he really wanted to, the first spring he came, in top-dressing some of them with a mixture of nitrate of soda and bone-meal, and, as he apo1ogetically remarked, they were none so bad, now"
 The run out moving lands, too he had op-dressed with all the fine ma nure he could scrape up, a little ad- dition of chemicals and considerable fne- ground lime. Two of them he had irrigated by diverting a small trout stream which ran between them out of it's winding channel onto their surfaces, turning it's flow from day to day by means of a few shrewdIy run furrows so that it overspread the en- tire area about once a fortnight.
 When one met him on his way to market, he wore a good looking driv- ing suit; his horses shone with