Rise at dawn; work till dark; eat--go to bed too tired to read a paper;--and no money in it.
Let these once prosperous farms be given up to Swedish colonies, hard working and industrious, who can do better here than in their own country and have plenty of social life among themselves, or let wealthy men purchase half a dozen of these places to make a park, or two score for a hunting ground--or let unattached women of middle age occupy them and support themselves by raising poultry.

Men are making handsome incomes from this business--women can do the same.

The language of the poultry magazines, by the way, is equally sentimental and efflorescent with that of the speeches at agricultural fairs, sufficiently so to sicken one who has once accepted it as reliable, as for instance: "The individual must be very abnormal in his tastes if they can not be catered to by our feathered tribe." "To their owner they are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Their ways are interesting, their language fascinating, and their lives from the egg to the mature fowl replete with constant surprises."[1] [Footnote 1: This clause is true.] "To simply watch them as they pass from stage to stage of development fills the mind of every sane person with pleasure." One poultry crank insists that each hen must be so carefully studied that she can be understood and managed as an individual, and speaks of his hens having at times an "anxious nervous expression!" "Yes, it is where the hens sing all the day long in the barn-yard that throws off the stiff ways of our modern civilization and makes us feel that we are home and can rest and play and grow young once more.

How many men and women have regained lost health and spirits in keeping hens, in the excitement of finding and gathering eggs!" "It is not the natural laying season when snows lie deep on field and hill, when the frost tingles in sparkling beads from every twig, when the clear streams bear up groups of merry skaters," etc.
After my pathetic experience with chickens, who after a few days of downy content grew ill, and gasped until they gave up the ghost; ducklings, who progressed finely for several weeks, then turned over on their backs and flopped helplessly unto the end; or, surviving that critical period, were found in the drinking trough, "drowned, dead, because they couldn't keep their heads above water"; turkeys who flourished to a certain age, then grew feeble and phantom-like and faded out of life, I weary of gallinaceous rhodomontade, and crave "pointers" for my actual needs.
I still read "Crankin's" circulars with a thrill of enthusiasm because his facts are so cheering.